Jack Nicholson’s long list of Hollywood’s leading ladies that have left him scared of dying alone.

As the Hollywood star and his well-connected girlfriend strolled through the chic French resort they looked every inch the devoted couple. But when a pretty young local girl pulled up on a motorbike and invited him to join her, Jack Nicholson hopped on and vanished into the night without a backward glance at his stricken girlfriend.

For Anjelica Huston, who went on to star in The Addams Family and won an Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, the crushing humiliation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 was just one in a long string of infidelities by “Jack the Jumper”.

In her autobiography she said: “Pretty French girls would come up on motorbikes and say, ‘Oh, Jack, you want to ride on my bike with me?’ He’d get on and leave me standing on the pavement. I would just retire to our hotel room in tears.”

But 40 years later, after cutting a romantic swathe through the world’s most beautiful women – 2,000 of them at his own estimation – reality has finally set in for the ageing Lothario. At the age of 77, Jack Nicholson, star of Chinatown, The Shining, As Good As It Gets and A Few Good Men, admits he is lonely and is facing death alone because, surprise surprise, women don’t trust him.

With blunt honesty, he told a US magazine: “I would love that one last romance but I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning.

“I’m definitely still wild at heart, but I’ve struck biogravity. I can’t hit on women in public any more. I didn’t decide this – it just doesn’t feel right at my age.

“I have had everything a man could ask for but no one could say I’m successful with affairs of the heart.

“I don’t think relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don’t always do the right thing, say the right thing and behave the way we always want to behave. No woman has ever recognised what I say as being legitimate. They don’t trust me. They think of my reputation – Jack the Jumper. I’m damned by what women think.”

Instead of all-night parties with a beauty on each arm, Jack’s days are far more sedate. He sleeps till 1pm when he has a glass of milk to soothe his stomach. Afternoons are spent playing golf or visiting his art collection in a mansion next door to his own in Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles.

In the same interview he spoke of his regrets about his treatment of Anjelica, the most significant of his lovers. He says their split was the “toughest period of my life”.

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