‘Fame is a lonelier kind of life than anonymity’
Formerly one of Hollywood’s most notorious hell-raisers, Nick Nolte is now enjoying a TV comeback. He talks to John Hiscock
Considering the amount of alcohol and drugs he admits to having ingested over the years, it is surprising that Nick Nolte not only looks well, but is still working and getting great reviews.
His eponymous turn in the eerily timely US TV series Graves, as a disillusioned former Republican president wondering, from the abyss of retirement, whether his term in office has been a catastrophic mistake, has been widely acclaimed by critics. “Nolte… plumbs Graves’ deep and even bottomless remorse,” said Variety. “Nolte’s voice is the star of Graves,” said the Hollywood
Reporter. “If cigarettes, whiskey and regret could make a sound, they would be the sound of Nolte speaking.” The show returns for a second series in October.
It is the latest in a series of comebacks for the grizzled actor, whose escapades have so far involved four wives, many girlfriends, the odd feud with a co-star, a couple of arrests and a stint in rehab.
He has a seemingly endless fund of stories from his turbulent life and career: the movies he has made, the people he has worked with. But the problem for an interviewer is the anecdotes tend to run into each other.
Some have no beginning, others no ending; sometimes he veers off in the middle to another subject altogether. But listening to him dredge up long-gone incidents, past triumphs and transgressions in a voice that is part-wheeze and part-growl is nevertheless hugely entertaining.
Take an encounter with Donald Trump. “I met him once in New York City when he just got married to Marla Maples. He was walking in the park and she was a beautiful woman. I was with my third wife. I had great relationships with all my wives but I couldn’t figure out how to pass that 10-year mark. I don’t blame them. You’re travelling all over the world, they get bored with that, carrying luggage around. I had long blond hair, I don’t know what film it was for, but Trump thought it was pretty amazing. He said, ‘Boy, you got great hair.’ Then he reached up and he touched it and he goes, ‘Oh that’s horrible. It’s baby-fine hair.’ I just grabbed his head and said, ‘Well you’ve got a bristle brush.’ We wrangled for 20 minutes over hair.” He wheezes with laughter. “I don’t know why.”
And then there was the filming of his role of Bruce Banner’s father in Ang Lee’s Hulk. “I started so high that I couldn’t remember a line for the first 10 days. And Ang came up and said, ‘Do you think it’s time we string two words together?’ And I said, ‘Just about.’ And then the next day the actor that was playing Hulk, his name was the character’s name, Bruce Banner, right…? It was Bruce Banner who was playing the Hulk, which was a coincidence, or maybe not, who knows?” (The actor was Eric Bana.)
Nolte has made some 80 movies since making his stage acting debut after being expelled from school for drinking during football practice. For 14 years he appeared in regional stage productions until he was summoned, in 1973, to Los Angeles by playwright William Inge to appear in his play The
Last Pad. Days before the production opened, Inge committed suicide; the real-life tragedy resulted in a macabre interest in the play, significantly raising Nolte’s profile. His role called for him to vomit on stage every night, something he handled with ease because, he says, “I had a trick which I had learned to get out of school with: I would take a can of vegetable soup, swallow half of it, hold it in the upper stomach and then walk down the hallway and throw up. So that was my first action in this play. I would throw up and splatter the audience. So it really went over well.”
He spent the next three years in small television roles before catching his big break with Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976. He turned down an offer to play Superman, was turned down for Apocalypse Now and starred in The Deep with Jacqueline Bisset. “She comes back in this year,” he says when Bisset’s name comes up, and it takes a moment to realise he is talking about her recurring role in Graves. “She comes back as my first wife. And she’s an activist. And I meet with her because I love her, I’ve always loved her.”
Nolte’s recurring problems with narcotics and alcohol are legendary. He used to go to his local liquor store in the morning in pyjamas and dressing-gown. Katharine Hepburn,
his co-star in 1985’s The Ultimate
Solution of Grace Quigley, told him: “I hear you’ve been dead drunk in every gutter in town and it has to stop.” Nolte’s reported response: “I can’t stop. I’ve got a few more to go.” Nevertheless, in 1992, People
Magazine put him on the cover, blond, tanned and boyish-looking, as “the sexiest man alive”, describing him as “Strong, sensitive and squaredaway: he’s a man’s man that women can’t resist.”
He and Julia Roberts feuded throughout the making of 1994’s
I Love Trouble; they reportedly had to film their scenes separately and used stand-ins because they couldn’t stand each other. Roberts later slammed him in the New York Times, saying he could be “charming and nice, he’s also completely disgusting”. Nolte responded: “It’s not nice to call someone ‘disgusting’ but she’s not a nice person. Everyone knows that.”
In 2002 he was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and the “date rape” drug GHB after police saw him in his Mercedes swerving across lanes on the Pacific Coast Highway. He reportedly said: “I’ve been taking it [GHB] for four years and I’ve never been raped.”
His mug shot, showing the actor with rumpled shirt, wild hair and vacant eyes staring out from a deeply crevassed face, went around the world. He checked into a rehab facility shortly afterwards.
At one point, on the advice of his doctor, Nolte began spending hours in a hyperbaric chamber – normally used by divers suffering from the bends – to restore the damage done to his brain by drugs and alcohol.
He says he drank “on and off ” until a couple of years ago and then stopped: “Now I can have a drink and stop, but I used to fill the gaps between adrenalin rushes with booze and drugs.”
Nolte’s last major film was A Walk
in the Woods with Robert Redford two years ago, and he is currently filming the crime drama The Padre, with Tim Roth.
He has a 31-year-old son named Brawley from his third wife, Rebecca Linger, and a nine-year-old daughter by his long-term partner Clytie Lane (they married in 2016). He’d rather the details of his personal life weren’t known to the public, but recognises that it’s a hazard of the job.
“Fame is a parenthesis you live in and when you die they close those parentheses,” he says. “Then you get a real definition of who you were. It’s living under the spotlight. Your mistakes are going to be seen and then they’ll be glorified in not a positive way. It’s a lonelier kind of life than I think anonymity is.
“It also teaches you how much privacy is valued and how much it is really what the citizens of the world would prefer to have rather than constantly being scrutinised by cameras and questions.”
Nonetheless, he claims he has few regrets about the way he’s lived his life. “I don’t have a whole lot I would change. A few people died, I wish they hadn’t.” He pauses. “But it wasn’t a direct result of anything I did.”
The second series of Graves starts on Epix on Oct 22.