Jack Nicholson set to come out of retirement for Toni Erdmann remake

After seven years out of the spotlight, Jack Nicholson is reportedly set to return to the big screen to star in a Hollywood remake of the Oscar-nominated German comedy Toni Erdmann.

The 79-year-old is expected to star opposite Kristen Wiig, playing the lead role of a music teacher who creates an elaborate alter ego – the titular Toni Erdmann – in order to become his daughter’s life coach, according to Variety.

It would be Nicholson’s first major film role in more than a decade, when he appeared alongside Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd in the 2010 romantic comedy drama How Do You Know.

With 66 films to his name, a record 12 Oscar nominations and three wins (for best actor in 1976’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and 1998’s As Good As It Gets, and for best supporting actor in 1984’s Terms of Endearment) – Nicholson’s Hollywood career is almost unparalleled.

However, his decision to slip out of the limelight in 2010, and a reported refusal to read any film scripts, fuelled rumours that he had decided to quietly retire.

In 2011, he was said to have been preparing to appear alongside Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty in a film about a band of retired superheroes, but it never got off the ground.

He also turned down the lead role in 2013 film Nebraska. The role of an ageing man who travels to Montana with his son to claim a million dollar prize went to Bruce Dern instead, and earned him the best actor prize at Cannes film festival and an Oscar nomination.

Nicholson said in 2011 that he disliked being treated like “Medusa or the Lincoln Memorial” when he was on set.

“I’m not going to work until the day I die, that’s not why I started this. I mean, I’m not driven,” he later told the Sun. “You get older, you change. I mean, I’m not a loner, I’m not a recluse, but I don’t need all that any more. I don’t enjoy it, simple as that.”

However, reports also emerged that he was retiring becaue he struggled to learn his lines now he was in his 70s.

“There is a simple reason behind his decision – it’s memory loss,” a source told Radar in 2013. “Quite frankly, at 76, Jack has memory issues and can no longer remember the lines being asked of him.”

Nicholson later rejected the reports, saying he still had a “mathematician’s mind”.

The rumours of Nicholson’s retirement resurfaced again just last month after his long-time friend and Easy Rider co-star Peter Fonda said: “I think he is ­basically retired. I don’t want to speak for him, but he has done a lot of work and he has done very well as a person financially.”

However, Fonda also suggested that the right role could be enough to entice Nicholson back in front of the camera.

That role now appears to be in a remake of Toni Erdmann, which is one of the favourites to win the Oscar in the best foreign language category at the ceremony on 26 February.

The news also represents a turnaround for the director of Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade, who told the Observer earlier this year that she wasn’t interested in remaking the film for a US audience. “I’m afraid that here it’s very, very far away from the way I’m working,” she said in January, referring to Hollywood. She also joked any Hollywood remake would have to cut an hour off the film’s notoriously long 162-minute run time.

Ade will be an executive producer on the film, which will also feature The Big Short director Adam McKay as a producer.