Jack Nicholson’s man fans

He has a reputation as a Hollywood womaniser, but Jack Nicholson gets more attention from men according to his former lover Anjelica Huston.

The Addams Family star said that men were “worse than women” in their efforts to approach Nicholson, whom she dated on and off for 16 years.

Huston said men would mob him with cries of “Jack! Jack! Jack!” in the same manner as besotted teenage girls.

Her claims will be surprising for many, as Nicholson is seen as having a largely female fan base.

But it also gives an insight into how a legendary Lothario was seen as such a catch that members of his own sex wanted to be with him too.

Huston, 63, met Nicholson, 77, in 1973 at a party at his house in Los Angeles, an event which she described as “love at first sight for me”. Their affair lasted until 1989, even though he repeatedly cheated on her, but the final straw came when he had a child with actress Rebecca Broussard. In a US TV interview, Huston said that it was hard work keeping Nicholson focused on her with all the admirers around him.

She said: “He was the centre of attention and very much the centre of female attention — and male attention, by the way.

“Men are worse than women. Men are: ‘Jack! Jack! Jack!’”

Scrunching up her face, Huston said that her reaction to this was: “What?” The couple starred alongside each other in the 1982 Italian mob drama Prizzi’s Honour, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Of the public scrutiny of their relationship, she said: “It’s a real pain to always have this kind of is she or isn’t she going to be pregnant, it was a lot of pressure on a girl. I did want to have a child and worked very hard at it.”

She spoke candidly about the end of their affair, saying: “All of a sudden he was as absent as he’d been present in my life, and that was really hard to take.”

Huston, who went on to marry sculptor Robert Graham until his death in 2008, will write about her relationship with Nicholson in the second part of her autobiography, which is out next year.

She told US network CBS: “Just so long as I don’t drag him through the thistles I think we’ll be fine.”