So it turns out that Jack Nicholson might un-retire himself and return to the big screen with a US remake of the recent German hit Toni Erdmann. Before he stopped working in 2010 – after the toothless James Brooks flop How Do You Know – Jack was offering one interesting performance per decade, down from a tally of about one every nine months in the 1970s. But perhaps Erdmann – an eccentric weirdo who creates a bewigged alter ego to try to reconnect with his daughter – is a meaty enough role to rescue his acting talent, now long marooned in lukewarm romantic dramas.



The Nicholson news raises the question of who else should be due out of retirement – if they can find the films to fit? I’d welcome Sean Connery back to work at the age of 86, but only if he forswore whatever motives he used to select his movies in the last 20 years of his career – like The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the 2003 laughing stock that pushed him into retirement in the first place. I’d like to see him, the longtime backer of Scottish independence, do something he hardly ever did: play an actual Scotsman, perhaps a terrifying Glasgow crime boss, with the accent of his youth restored. That, or he comes back to play James Bond as an angry pensioner, still swilling martinis.

Age gap ... Warren Beatty as Howard Hughes in Rules Don’t Apply. Photograph: Fox

Gene Hackman, one of Jack’s peers among the great character-players elevated to stardom in the 1970s, made his last movie, mirthless comedy Welcome To Mooseport, in 2004. Our screens have been all the poorer for the absence ever since of his drill sergeant’s bark, his robust physicality and snake eyes. How might Gene look, then, in a remake of Michael Haneke’s Amour?

The women of Jack’s generation – Sissy Spacek, Sally Field, Meryl Streep, et al – have mostly worked steadily since the 70s and don’t need rehabilitating in an arthouse film. Others, however, could have benefited from a break. What if the likes of Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, James Caan and Al Pacino had retired themselves instead of their inspiration? If they were all returning to the fray after a decade-long sabbatical with batteries recharged instead of a gross-out comedy or three, I might welcome them all back with open arms.

Meanwhile, the leading womaniser of his generation, Warren Beatty, takes so long to get his movies made it just seems as if he’s returning from retirement every eight years. But time will catch up with any 78-year-old who tries playing the 58-year-old Howard Hughes, as Warren did last year in Rules Don’t Apply. For Warren, just as for Jack Nicholson, the rules of time and gravity do indeed apply.