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Nick Nolte interview: 'I just grabbed Donald Trump's hair and said, 'You’ve got a bristle brush…''
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 making movies and playing the title role in a successful television series.
It is the latest in a series of comebacks for the grizzled actor, whose escapades have so far involved three wives, a series of 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 to tell of his turbulent life and career: the movies he has made, the actors and directors he has worked with. But the problem for an interviewer is the anecdotes tend to run into each other as each one reminds him of another.
Some have no beginning, others no ending; sometimes he veers off in the middle to another subject altogether. But listening to him dredge up memories of long gone incidents and tell of past triumphs and transgressions in equal measure in a voice that is part wheeze and part growl is nevertheless hugely entertaining.
Take his one and only 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 traveling all over the world, they get bored with that, carrying luggage around.
"I had long blonde hair, I don’t know what film it was for, but Trump thought that 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's the filming his role of Bruce Banner's father in Ang Lee's Hulk. "It was a a four-day shoot for the final scene between the father and the son and I knew it was important and we needed to reach a high level of emotional intensity so we might win part of the ending in a way that was the mountain between father and son.
"I remember 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).
"With Ang Lee there’s always mysterious things. He would have us go in a room and feel textures. And you didn’t know what you were feeling. Anything to put the actor into some kind of mood, and get us fixated on the story."
Nolte begins to tell a story about making a film with James Woods but veers off onto another subject, saying: "Now I’m going into senility, this happens when you’re almost 80." (He is 76).
A burly, bear-like man, Nolte has left his longtime Malibu compound to talk about his TV series Graves, in which he plays a former US President who, 20 years after leaving office, has the epiphany that some of his policies have brought damage to the country. So he embarks on a quest to right the wrongs.
It is his third television series, following Rich Man, Poor Man in 1975 and the short-lived Luck in 2012. Rich Man, Poor Man was originally three two-hour movies but the-then NBC boss Fred Silverman wanted to cut it into half hour shows and call it a mini-series. "I said why are you telling me this?" recalls Nolte. "'I have no power to say no. I don't think it's a great idea but if you want to do it, more power to you.' Which is what they did and now most of the formats are hour or half hour shows and more actors are turning to television. There are so many outlets and so few limitations. We can tell adult stories. The cinemas have turned to comic books and there's maybe half the cinemas left. I still refer to it as film even though it's digital now."
Nolte has made some 80 movies since making his acting debut on stage after being expelled from school for drinking during football practice. For 14 years he appeared in regional stage productions until he was summoned to Los Angeles by playwright William Inge to appear in his play The Last Pad. On the evening of the first performance Inge committed suicide; the real-life tragedy resulted in 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. He turned down an offer to play Superman, was turned down for Apocalypse Now and starred in The Deep with Jacqueline Bissett. "She comes back in this year," he says when Bissett'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."
He went on to star in Who'll Stop the Rain, North Dallas Forty, Heartbeat, portraying beat-era legend Neal Cassidy, and 48 Hours. Nolte had recurring problems with narcotics and alcohol. He would go to his local liquor store in the morning in pajamas and dressing gown.
His drunken tendencies were no secret and his decline was reprimanded by Katherine Hepburn, his co-star in 1985's The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley. She commented: "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, blonde, tanned and boyish-looking as "the sexiest man alive", describing him as "Strong, sensitive and squared-away. 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 can 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 GBH after police saw him in his Mercedes swerving across lanes on Pacific Coast Highway. He reportedly said: "I've been taking GBH for four years and 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 and reduced him to being the butt of jokes. He checked into a rehab facility shortly afterwards. At one point, on the advice of his doctor, he began spending hours in a hyperbaric chamber - normally used by divers suffering from the bends - in order 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 adrenaline rushes with booze and drugs."
His 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.
When asked about his favourite movies, Nolte says he particularly enjoyed filming in Borneo. He doesn't remember the name of the movie (it was Farewell to the King) but, he says: "I didn’t want to come out after five months in that jungle. The people were simple, life was simple. I didn’t have to worry about insurance or my third wife. It was just don’t get bitten by a snake. And hookworm was lovely, I lost 20 pounds like that. And working with these tribes, they learned film real fast. They knew where to be to be seen."
He has a 31-year-old son named Brawley from his third wife, Becky Linger, and a nine-year-old daughter by his longtime girlfriend Clytie Lane. 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 be 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 died." He pauses for a moment. "But it wasn’t a direct result of anything I did."