Jack Nicholson grew up thinking his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his sister. He was an illegitimate child, and his mother was 18 years old when she gave birth.  Nicholson’s mother, Jane Frances Nicholson, was a showgirl who married an Italian-American man before knowing he was already married. It is believed that her agent may have been Nicholson’s father, though that is not sure. As she was unmarried and uncertain of the father’s identity, her parents brought Nicholson up as their own son and claimed his mother and her sister were his two elder sisters. He didn’t find out the truth until he was 37 when in 1974 researchers from Time magazine uncovered the truth and informed him about it. By that time, both his mother and grandmother had died. He later said that hearing the news was: “a pretty dramatic event, but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatizing…I was pretty well psychologically formed.”