15 Celebrities With Shockingly Tragic Pasts

2. Jack Nicholson

On April 22, 1937 in Neptune, New Jersey, a woman called June Nicholson, an aspiring 19 year old actress, brought a young boy to this world and named him Jack.

Today we all know this baby as the famous Jack Nicholson. But what was so shocking and possibly tragic about Jack’s childhood?

Well, up until he was 37 years old, Jack was raised to think June was his sister.

Unmarried and unsure of who the father of her bundle of joy was, and since she wanted to make it in the movie business, June let her parents (Jack’s grandparents, obviously) take care of him and raise him like their own son.

June died of cancer in 1963, when Jack Nicholson was 26 years old and more than a decade after her death, back in 1974, the TIME magazine reporter, researching a cover story on the legendary actor, discovered this shocking information.

Nicholson, however, stated that, even though he found this news quite shocking, he wasn’t traumatized by this discovery. In fact, he felt relieved.

“I’d say it was a pretty dramatic event, but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatizing. After all, by the time I found out who my mother was, I was pretty well psychologically formed. As a matter of fact, it made quite a few things clearer to me. If anything, I felt grateful.”