Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte
Byline: SEAN O’BRIEN NICK NOLTE admits he wanted to take some of the Picasso copies used in his film The Good Thief. But French cops thwarted him by making sure they were all burnt. 3
Landing a breakthrough role in the legendary television series Rich Man, Poor Man marked only the beginning for Nolte, launching him into international fame. Following its success, he made his feature film starring debut in THE DEEP, opposite Jacqueline Bisset. Nolte has since never looked back. 6
His production company Kingsgate, currently has in development WHITE JAZZ, James Ellroy’s script based on his best selling film noir novel and THE LAST MAGIC SUMMER, an adaptation of the Peter Gent novel of the same name. Upcoming on Nolte’s and Kingsgate’s schedule is BEST OF ENEMIES, a film based on a true story set in South Carolina in the early 60s dealing with the relationship between a Klansman and a militant African-American woman. 4
The 61-year-old actor was stopped Sept. 11 near his Malibu home by police who said his Mercedes was weaving into oncoming traffic. A police spokesperson said at the time that the actor ‘’seemed completely out of it. He was drooling, [with] droopy eyes.” Last week, prosecutors filed formal charges of driving under the influence and being under the influence of GHB, a drug known in nightclubs for causing a euphoric high. But outside the courtroom on Monday, Nolte’s lawyer, Mark Werksman, said of his client, ”He was not under the influence of a date-rape drug. Nick Nolte is not out there popping illicit or narcotic drugs.” 2
Nick Nolte is like Clark Gable with an anguished soul. Writing about him in 1982, when he’d been playing movie leads for about half a decade, the critic Pauline Kael called him “an ideal screen actor — believable, and with a much larger range than McQueen or Wayne.” Like Steve McQueen and John Wayne in their best roles, it’s his physical actions that often articulate what’s going on under the surface; like Gable and Mitchum, he’s magically relaxed on screen and projects an outsize, sprawling likability. But his real lineage is agonized men’s men like William Holden and Dana Andrews and Robert Ryan, and later Paul Newman — actors whose sensitivity complicates their macho credentials. 8
There were two ways of looking at the ending of “Broadcast News,” the witty, rueful, amazingly perceptive 1987 romantic comedy by James L. Brooks that has made Mr. Brooks’s next film so well worth waiting for. In “Broadcast News,” you may recall, a high-strung television producer named Jane found herself falling in love with an unreasonably successful newscaster named Tom, who represented everything Jane found troubling about her profession. Tom was bad news — quite literally. 7
This time, Nolte risks life, limb and career as he obsessively tries to bring an elusive master criminal known as “The Iceman” to justice. Eddie Murphy, who stole the show in the first 48 Hrs. The adversarial relationship between Nolte and Murphy, supposedly dissipated by the end of the first film, is revivified in the sequel via a couple of plot devices. Still, Murphy rallies to the occasion, in the process saving Nolte from being thrown off the force. Though not as successful as the first film, Another 48 Hrs. 9
Nick Nolte is a complex man and, no doubt, a versatile actor. Through interviews and clips, Pacific Street paints a portrait of the man that film critic Pauline Kael once called a “Clark Gable with an anguished soul. ” But whatever character Nolte decides to tackle, he certainly approaches it with devastatingly serious intent, and for that reason, he’s certainly become one of Hollywood’s “larger than life” celebrities. 5
