Five Easy Pieces of four: The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels 20 years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity... The movie is joyously alive to
William Challee the 1970 film "Five Easy Pieces", whose illness brings "son" Jack Nicholson home to the family estate. In 1984 he married his long-time partner Joan Wheeler Ankrum. Together, in 1960, they opened the Ankrum Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Challee was buried in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto. William Challee William John Challee (April 6, 1904 – March 11, 1989) was an American actor. William Challee appeared on Broadway by 1926 and by 1931 in early Group Theatre productions. He married actress Ruth Nelson in 1931; they later divorced. The two appeared in the 1947