IN THE NICK OF TIME
Some 60 films and three Oscar nominations later, Nick Nolte finds a new leading lady close to home and near to his heart: his daughter, Sophie
TO the long list of Nick Nolte’s co-stars — Robert Redford, Robert De Niro and Barbra Streisand among them — add another: Sophie Lane Nolte.
And if their first film together is any indication, Nolte’s 11-year-old daughter has quite a career ahead of her.
In Til Schweiger’s “Head Full of Honey,” out Friday, she plays Matilda, granddaughter of Nolte’s character, the recently widowed Amadeus. Even before he relieves himself in his son’s refrigerator and nearly burns down the house, it’s clear that Amadeus is in the grip of Alzheimer’s. Plucky, precocious Matilda tries to shore up what’s left of his memory by taking him on a trip from the family home in the English countryside to Venice, Italy, where he and his late wife first met.
The on-screen rapport between real-life father and daughter is the best part of the film.
And yet, the 77-year-old Nolte tells The Post, Sophie had never acted before. Nor was it his idea to cast her.
Over the phone from Italy, where he’s shooting another film, Nolte says he and the German actordirector became friends nearly 20 years ago, while making a movie together. About a year ago, Schweiger sent him a script and a film. The script was in English; the film, written by and starring Schweiger and his real-life daughter, was in German. For “Head Full of Honey” to be released internationally, Schweiger told him, it had to be remade in English.
Nolte invited him to his home in Malibu, Calif., to discuss it.
“I’d shown my daughter some of the movie the
night before,” he says. “When she answered the door, she said, ‘You must be Til Schweiger. You made a pretty good movie’ — and ran off.” It was Halloween, he adds, and Sophie was dressed as a vampire. “Whowas that vampire girl?” a shaken Schweiger asked. Nolte told him, and the director asked if she’d play Matilda.
“You’re gonna have to talk to the mother, and it’s going to be a twohour conversation,” Nolte told him.
In fact, it took Schweiger four hours to persuade the actor’s wife, former actress Clytie Lane, to let their daughter play Nolte’s granddaughter. It wasn’t much of a stretch, Nolte says: “She calls me Grandpa, anyway. I asked her why and she said, ‘Because you’re twice the age of most of my friends’ parents!’”
Sophie isn’t the first Nolte child to share the screen with him. Her half brother, Brawley, Nolte’s son with third wife Rebecca Linger, had several small roles in his father’s films before starring as the kidnapped child in “Ransom.” (“That was a tough film,” Nolte says.)
Brawley was next offered a role in “Frosty the Snow Man,” then starring George Clooney. But the filmmakers were worried, because Brawley didn’t seem terribly excited. Did he want to make the movie or not?
“You’re in luck,” Nolte told them. “He’s sitting right here.” Holding the phone out, he told his son the filming would take three months, and that he’d still have to go to school. Was he game? Not really, Brawley said. Now32, he’s rarely acted since.
Performing was actually Nolte’s second passion: Football was first. “I was in love with athletics,” he says. “How fast you could run, how quick you could react. And then I realized I was in a world of elite athletes who were about a quarter of a second faster than I was.” His mother always told him that imagination was the most important thing in life, and he found himself drawn to storytelling. He spent 20 years in the theater before making a single film.
Although some may wonder if years of hard drinking and drug use made his voice sound like a bad patch of broken road, Nolte believes it was all that speaking onstage that thickened his vocal cords and made him so hoarse. “It’s kind of a growl,” he says.
He believes in preparing for every role. To ready himself for Amadeus, he spoke with Schweiger, whose mother had Alzheimer’s.
Nolte’s grandmother had it too. She lived with his family in her final years, entertaining imaginary guests in their living room.
“My parents decided they couldn’t afford to keep a housekeeper day and night to watch her, and were afraid she’d wander away,” he says. “They put her in a nursing home, where she died within seven days. She was so mad, she wouldn’t talk to any of us. You can’t pull that magical world out from under people.”
The film he’s shooting now in Italy, “Last Words,” with Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård, is about climate change. While Nolte was away, his Malibu home burned to the ground. It’s the second house he’s lost to wildfires.
“You feel helpless,” he says. “I lost all my scripts, the preparation, the clothes from every film I’d ever done. But everybody’s safe. You just have to start over.”
Even now, approaching 80, he has no plans to stop acting. “I don’t understand retirement. I just don’t know what I’d do with myself,” he says. “I’ll just keep at it until it doesn’t make any sense anymore.”
Besides, he adds, “learning lines and getting into new situations — I think that’s what keeps my brain moving.”