Jack Nicholson Was Married Once at the Height of His Fame: Meet the Actor’s Ex-Wife Sandra Knight

For more than 50 years, Jack Nicholson dominated blockbuster films in Hollywood and earned countless awards in the process. He was married once during his bustling career to actress Sandra Knight. The pair walked down the aisle in 1962 and were divorced in 1968. 

Sandra, born in 1939, grew up singing and dancing and knew that she wanted to become an actress in college. She was cast in the 1958 film, Thunder Road. It wasn’t until 1963’s The Terror that she would share the screen with Jack. The pair had actually met a few years earlier when they were just starting out in the entertainment industry. 

“I met Jack when I was 14 when my father worked for MGM. I worked for a summer as a messenger girl and he was a messenger boy,” the Frankenstein’s Daughter actress said in a June 2010 interview with Alan Mercer. “He and his friends were a little older, and they were always laughing and having fun, so I thought they were really cool. Then, I met Jack five years later at Martin Landau’s acting class. We rehearsed a scene from Tennessee Williams’ play Summer and Smoke, and the fire began.”

A year after getting married, the couple welcomed their daughter, Jennifer Nicholson. Like her parents, Jennifer did pursue acting, landing minor roles in films like Hoff and Inevitable Grace. She later followed her passion for clothing design. When Sandra and Jack’s relationship ended, the actress moved to Hawaii with her daughter. Though her marriage to the Academy Award winner did not work out, Sandra still valued the time they spent together. 

“The real Jack is a loving, caring, giving person,” she told Closer exclusively in June 2016. “We had a very beautiful, sweet marriage.” 

After her high-profile marriage was over, Sandra left acting to focus on being a mom. She took classes at the Otis Art Institute and developed an interest in painting. Eventually, the State Trooper actress took classes to become a life coach, which eventually led her to cross paths with her second husband, John Stephenson. 

“We met at a spiritual seminar,” she said. “John is a writer and an artist and is a teacher of spiritual principles and gives seminars all around the world. We travel a lot to Australia, New Zealand and all around Europe and England.”

After tying the knot in the ‘80s, Sandra and John formed their own production company called Synergy Production. The Pennsylvania native went on to serve on the Board of Directors of the Hawaii International Film Festival and wrote several screenplays. Sandra became a grandmother in 1996 when Jennifer gave birth to her first son, Sean, with her ex-husband, Mark Norfleet. The pair welcomed their second son, Duke, in 1999, and he has since followed in his grandparent’s footsteps to pursue an acting career.