Hollywood Heartbreak Revealed: Jack Nicholson Never Met His Real Dad

In a real-life Hollywood heartbreak, Jack Nicholson never met his father. RadarOnline.com has learned that the 79-year-old Chinatown star grew up believing his grandparents were his parents — but Nicholson's real father was an illegal immigrant forced to hide the fact he got a young girl pregnant.

That girl was Nicholson's teenage mom, June Nicholson — and in a bizarre twist, he was brought up to believe June was his sister!

"It wasn't until Jack was 40 that he learned the young girl he grew up with was really his mother," said a Hollywood insider.

Joseph "Jack" Nicholson Jr. was born April 22, 1937. His official birth records list his parents as John and Ethel May Nicholson.

But the big-screen icon's true father actually was Latvian-born bandleader Eddie King , who came to America to manage young dancers, including June Frances Nicholson.

"His real name, as it turned out, was Eddie Kirschfeld. He entered the United States as a musician on the SS Estonia in 1925," according to the book Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson.

The two fell for each other, and June became pregnant at just 17, but she was already involved with another dancer, Donald Furcillo-Rose. To protect Eddie from possible deportation, June told Furcillo-Rose the baby was his.

They married and moved in with June's parents in Neptune, N.J. But her mom, Ethel May, disliked Furcillo-Rose, and ran him out of their lives.

That's when she and June decided to pretend Nicholson was June's sister. June died of cancer in 1963 at 44, leaving Nicholson to believe he had lost his sister.

After learning the bizarre truth, Nicholson reached out to Furcillo-Rose. But he quickly wrote him out of his life, and refused his deathbed plea to reconnect in 1996.