Lorraine Nicholson was almost predestined to be a fabulous party host. The 35-year-old writer grew up in Los Angeles with “hyper-social” parents—the actors Rebecca Broussard and Jack Nicholson. “I would watch them disappear into the night and look forward to the time when I, too, would get to disappear into the night,” she says. Hers was a very Hollywood childhood. “When we walked down the street and ran into paparazzi, my parents would say, ‘No pictures of the baby!’ and cover my face,” she says. “Later, when I went to elementary school, there would be a yearbook photographer taking pictures of kids playing, and I would say, ‘No pictures of the baby!’ I didn’t totally understand what a normal life was.”
After attending college on the East Coast and a brief stint in New York, Nicholson returned to Hollywood to pursue writing and filmmaking—and to throw the best parties in town. Her gatherings are, naturally, starry—everyone from Alex Consani and Dakota Johnson to Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone has attended—but they’re about far more than celebrities hobnobbing. “So much of the reason why I started entertaining was because I felt, especially after the pandemic, that the people around me were suffering from such loneliness,” she says. The “cross-generational hangouts” she’s known for have themes designed to make people “feel sexy and happy.” Her invitations always specify: “Explosively charismatic plus-ones only. Please bring a positive mental attitude and a bottle of your choice.”
Nicholson threw her first bashes as a teenager, together with her younger brother, Ray. “To this day, I’ll meet people in their 30s who are like, ‘I would come to your house when I was 17,’ ” says Nicholson. “Sometimes they would get so out of control that I would call the cops on my own parties.” She’s pictured celebrating her 21st birthday at Brown University, which she attended from 2008 to 2012. She and her friends would “throw parties in rooms that were 150 square feet, so everyone would be packed in like sardines, dancing until dawn, pouring sweat.”
As a child, Nicholson often hung out with Marston and Cooper Hefner, the children of Hugh Hefner. Their friendship started thanks to Nicholson’s nanny, Cis, who had previously worked as a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Rams and as Hefner’s social secretary. Here, Nicholson (second from left) is celebrating her birthday in the mid-1990s with her brother, Ray (left); Marston and Cooper (third and fourth from left); Hefner; and his then wife, Kimberley. For Nicholson, the Playboy mansion “was such a place of innocence, paradoxically. I was regularly swimming in the grotto. I didn’t know that the place had this other side by night.”
Nicholson, age 13, with (from left) her father, the actor Elizabeth Hurley, and then Dior designer John Galliano at the 2003 Christian Dior Couture show in Paris. At the time, Jack was in Paris filming the comedy Something’s Gotta Give. “I’m fully wearing Zara in the Dior front row,” says Nicholson. It was her first fashion show, and “I just remember being very enchanted.”
Nicholson in the arms of her mother, the actor and model Rebecca Broussard, at a carnival in 1991. With them is Shelley Duvall, Jack’s costar in The Shining. “There were really interesting, freethinking, original females around me all the time, my mother included,” says Nicholson. “Part of my mom’s seductiveness came from the fact that she was a complete tomboy. She’s from Louisiana, and would get in fistfights in the park when she was a kid. She had this laid-back toughness.”
Nicholson with her parents before the 1998 Oscars, where her father was awarded best actor for As Good as It Gets. “I would very wistfully watch my parents take off to their glamorous celebrations. My mom and dad really wanted us to have a childhood, so we weren’t going to adult parties,” she explains. “You can see from the way that my brother and I are cuddling with my mom that we were so attached and in awe of her.”
“I spent a lot of winters in Colorado when I was a kid,” says Nicholson. “Hunter S. Thompson would come over every New Year’s and almost blow his fucking face off with fireworks.” Nicholson (left) rings in 2000 with Will Smith and Lara Flynn Boyle, Smith’s Men in Black II costar, at his New Year’s Eve party in Aspen. (Starting in 1999, a few years after Nicholson’s parents broke up, Jack dated Boyle for several years.) “I couldn’t care less about my dad and his generation of artists. But when I was invited to Will Smith’s, I was psyched.” Nicholson was very close with Boyle and often borrowed her clothes. “It made me feel like I had this powerful armor.”
Nicholson (in pink) celebrating her 13th birthday in 2003, with (from right) Jessica Iovine, the daughter of music and media mogul Jimmy Iovine; Hailey Gates, who is now an actor; and Andrew Riley, a childhood friend. The party was held “at a members club called On the Rox, which was very dark and had stripper poles at every table. I cried when my friends drank virgin cosmopolitans, because I felt we were growing up too fast.”
Nicholson and her brother visiting their dad on the set of Anger Management (2003), posing with Jack’s costars Adam Sandler (back left) and Allen Covert. Nicholson was “used to being on sets that were very serious—my dad’s a very serious artist,” so this particular shoot felt “generous of spirit and free.” Her favorite part was “craft services with unlimited snacks.”
Jack Nicholson has been a Los Angeles Lakers season ticket holder since 1970, and “there are photos of me literally wandering out and onto the court as a 2-year-old,” Nicholson says. Father and daughter are courtside in 2010. Now her brother, Ray, and her nephew Duke Nicholson (the son of Jennifer Nicholson, one of her half-siblings) usually “take the tickets because they are rabid fans.”
When Nicholson was 13, “Nancy Meyers let me be an extra in Something’s Gotta Give because I wanted to be an actor. But my parents wouldn’t let me pursue acting until I went to college, which was smart, because I then realized I didn’t actually want that.”
Above: Nicholson at Brown in 2011. One of her friends wrote a thesis about “‘happenings in spaces,’ which just meant he threw really ornate parties. He was doing a Warhol-inspired thing.”
Nicholson in 2017 with the actor Stephen Dorff, celebrating the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Life Boat, a short film she wrote and directed. Dorff, who acted in the film, “took a huge risk on me, because I didn’t really have that much experience.” The premiere celebration was at the nightclub Acme. It was “a totally oversize party—it was, after all, just a short film.”
When planning a get-together, Nicholson is “very controlling about the guest list, but there are a few people who I trust to expand the community. Part of the reason why we go out is to meet new people.” She poses with the writer and director Sam Levinson (center left); his wife, Ashley Levinson; and the artist Henry Taylor at her 34th birthday party. Last New Year’s Eve, “Ashley and Sam asked me if I had a boyfriend. When I said no, they introduced me to my partner, [filmmaker] Jason Reitman, five days later.”
In 2007, Nicholson was Miss Golden Globe, the young woman who helps escort celebrities on and off the stage and hand out trophies at the awards show. “My dad wouldn’t let me be a debutante at the Crillon Ball—this was as close as I got,” says Nicholson, pictured posing with Jack before the event.
To her dismay, the person who introduced her during the rehearsal mentioned she was 16. “I was completely crushed because I was like, ‘Now none of the men will flirt with me because they know that I’m underage!’ ” Nicholson is pictured with Reese Witherspoon while Sacha Baron Cohen accepts his award for Borat.
Nicholson with (from left) director Augusta Dayton, actor AnnaSophia Robb, producer Russell Kahn, and actor Anna Baryshnikov ahead of a Vanity Fair party in 2024. “I invited all the ladies to come over and get ready together, which, of course, ended up being the most fun part of the evening, as it always is.”
Nicholson learned hosting tricks from Helena Kallianiotes (right), an 87-year-old actor and belly dancer, and the founder of Los Angeles’s first members-only club, Helena’s. “She lived on my dad’s property in her own house for 27 years. She was the connector between him and Marlon Brando, who was our neighbor,” Nicholson explains. Kallianiotes’s party signature is “intentionally inviting people who are enemies, with the hopes that they will make up over the course of the night.” This past fall, Nicholson threw a bash in Kallianiotes’s honor, inviting a belly dancer as the main attraction. “Helena brought in all of these iconic old-timers, and I brought the younger generation.” Guests included (left, from back left) actor Alia Shawkat; director Sebastián Silva; writer Bruce Wagner; and Wagner’s partner, the actor Jamie Rose. In the front, at left, “Joni Mitchell joyously stomps her cane along as this exotic dancer [left, center] performs with candles on her head and then whips out these giant fans.”
Around Halloween 2024, “my brother was on billboards across L.A., mimicking my dad’s sneer in The Shining for the film Smile 2. I decided to embrace it and throw a party with The Shining as the theme for Halloween,” says Nicholson. “All the characters were there, except my dad’s character and Shelley’s character.” The model and makeup artist Matisse (left) poses with the photographer Nadia Lee Cohen.
Nicholson, with the actor Harvey Keitel and the director Jane Campion, celebrating Campion’s win for best director at the 2022 Oscars for The Power of the Dog. “We became friends when Jane was promoting the film,” explains Nicholson. “I had a much older boyfriend at the time, and she had a younger boyfriend; her boyfriend and I bonded because we both suffer from night terrors.” Campion “became such a wonderful mentor and friend.”
“My brother always gives me birthday cakes that are highly conceptual and also philosophically scarring. My Sisyphean boulder is my daddy issues—the second I think I have completed therapy around my daddy issues, the boulder rolls down the hill,” says Nicholson. “I have a very successful father, but there’s no part of him that’s sitting at the dinner table saying, ‘You need to be successful too.’ He says, ‘You need to find your happiness.’ ” The Sisyphus-inspired cake was served at her 35th birthday, in Los Angeles.
To ring in 2025, Nicholson came up with a silver jubilee theme. She poses with the influencer Devon Lee Carlson (in pink); the Haim sisters—Este (with glasses), Alana (center front), and Danielle (right)—who DJ’ed; and writer Kiwi Smith. (Other attendees included Kim Petras, Francis Ford Coppola, and Anjelica Huston.) Nicholson always invites “my nephew Duke; Devon [who is Duke’s girlfriend]; and her sister, Sydney Carlson. They’re family. Another really essential guest is one of my best friends, who was also my first-grade teacher. Her name is Cindy.”
In February 2025, Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary with a three-hour live special. The show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, is “a very close friend of ours, and it was important to him that my dad made it to this event. But my dad also has a lot of hesitation about appearing in public now, so it was a real battle.” Getting her father, who is now 88, to the event required so much planning that an SNL producer said “the only people who did more advance work than I did was Kamala Harris’s Secret Service team.”
