Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte
Fascinating on-set interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Nick Nolte that reveals quite a few insights into the main character and the story. Commentary track by director Keith Gordon and screenwriter Robert Weide delves deeply into the layers of meaning and symbolism in the film, the way Gordon shot it (colors, camera angles, music and mood) and especially Nick Nolte’s performance and the character’s ego, his mistakes and his choices. Yet the track is also refreshingly sparse. They don’t talk over every minute. 3
Nick Nolte, who plays a heroin-addicted robber in his upcoming movie, ”The Good Thief,” was arrested Wednesday for suspicion of driving under the influence when a California Highway Patrol officer spotted the actor swerving in his Mercedes on a highway near his Malibu home. He failed a field sobriety test and was taken into custody, then released around 8:30 p.m. 6
Nick Nolte’s arraignment on two misdemeanor drug charges was scheduled for Monday, but a Los Angeles superior court judge agreed to postpone the proceedings until Dec. 5 so that the defense can do its own blood test, the Associated Press reports. Outside the Malibu courthouse, the actor’s lawyer denied the prosecution’s charge that Nolte was under the influence of gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, when he was arrested on the Pacific Coast Highway last month. 4
Nolte is considered by many of his colleagues to be an actor with integrity. It’s an apt description. And it’s vital to understanding him. But there are many other words just as important and equally apt. Words like obsessive, generous, demanding, funny, volatile, intelligent, tireless, artistic, sensitive, argumentative, gracious, extreme, likable and reclusive. And this is how he’s presented - not in black and white, but in all his shades of gray. The bottom line is: Nick Nolte is simply 100% actor. 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
Nick Nolte and Debra Winger star in this mystery set in a New England town. While investigating a murder case that has sent an innocent man to jail, a down-and-out detective falls in love with the unstable woman who has hired him for the case. 9
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.” 5
