The legacy of Jack Nicholson's Joker has taken a bit of a beating as of late. For so long his gangster-cum-theatric psychopath from Tim Burton's Batman was viewed as the definitive take on the iconic Batman villain, but then in 2008 The Dark Knight brought something excitingly new to the table. Heath Ledger's Oscar winning performance totally overshadows Nicholson's version of the character and while it is objectively the weaker of the two, there's still a lot to enjoy in what Jack did. Giving the Joker an origin story (something that hadn't been attempted on screen before) and implicating him in the murder of Batman's parents, Tim Burton's take on the character is in many ways unconventional, but Nicholson off-set that with something more typically over-the-top and dramatic, making some of the more blatant meddling with the mythos more palatable. The Joker proved so popular that, despite being killed at the end of the first film, a proposed sequel to Batman And Robin was going to have resurrected the character. Just think of the toy potential. Today we're going to continue our look at the performances of iconic Batman characters by turning our eye away from the Nolan series (in the past we've covered Heath Ledger's Joker, Tom Hardy's Bane, Anne Hathaway's Catwoman and Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne) and focusing on how Jack Nicholson became the Joker.
