Nick Nolte

Nick Nolte (born February 8, 1941, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.) is an American actor known for playing dysfunctional leading roles, often cast as characters with tough exteriors and secret complex sensitivities.

Nolte spent much of his childhood moving from town to town with his family. Eventually they settled back in his native Omaha, Nebraska, where he was active in high-school sports. He subsequently attended Arizona State University on a football scholarship but flunked out after one semester. Nolte went on to attend several different colleges, though he never earned a degree. In the early 1960s he landed in California and took a manual-labour job in Los Angeles. It was about this time that he first became interested in theatre, and he began his stage career at the Pasadena Playhouse. In 1963 he joined a theatre group in Phoenix. For the next decade Nolte performed with repertory companies, traveling throughout the United States.

In 1973 Nolte returned to Los Angeles with playwright William Inge’s The Last Pad after finishing a successful run of the play in Phoenix. The production garnered great acclaim, and Nolte was soon offered roles on-screen. After a string of small parts in television series and made-for-TV movies, he made his first credited big-screen appearance in Return to Macon County (1975), a film about drag racing that was the sequel to Macon County Line (1974). While the movie was generally panned by critics, Nolte earned some praise for his acting skills. He got his next big break in 1976, when he starred as rebel Tom Jordache in the TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. Nolte’s soulful portrayal of the down-and-out boxer won him critical acclaim and thrust him into the spotlight.

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Nolte continued to appear regularly on film thereafter, despite a growing battle with alcoholism. Notable roles included football player Phillip Elliott in North Dallas Forty (1979), policeman Jack Cates opposite comedian Eddie Murphy’s jailbird in 48 Hrs. (1982; he reprised the role in the film’s sequel, Another 48 Hrs. [1990]), hopeless homeless man Jerry in Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) alongside Bette Midler and Richard Dreyfuss, and prisoner-playwright Lee Umstetter in Weeds (1987). In the late 1980s he sought help for his alcohol addiction and subsequently starred in several highly praised films, including Sidney Lumet’s Q & A (1990), Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides (1991), the latter of which earned him his first Academy Award nomination, for his portrayal of a man with a troubled past who falls in love with his sister’s psychiatrist while recounting his family history to her. He then appeared in a series of films that were less well-received, but he earned a second Oscar nomination in 1998, for his role as a tormented small-town sheriff in Affliction (1997).

In 2002 Nolte was arrested for driving under the influence, and he subsequently spent time in a rehabilitation clinic. He gradually worked his way back to his former acclaim, appearing in smaller roles in Ang Lee’s comic book adaptation Hulk (2003); the heart-wrenching Hotel Rwanda (2004), about the Rwanda genocide of 1994; and Ben Stiller’s action comedy Tropic Thunder (2008). By the second decade of the 21st century, he had earned another Academy Award nomination, this time for his role as the recovering alcoholic father of two mixed-martial-arts fighters in Warrior (2011), and had won further critical acclaim as part of the cast of the HBO horse-racing drama series Luck (2011–12). Later credits include the political thriller The Company You Keep (2012); the historical crime drama Gangster Squad (2013), in which he played William H. Parker, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in the mid-20th century; and the family drama Hateship Loveship (2013). Nolte also appeared in the television miniseries Gracepoint (2014), a drama about the murder of a child in a small town. In 2015 he starred opposite Robert Redford in the buddy comedy A Walk in the Woods, based on writer Bill Bryson’s 1998 memoir. He later starred as a former U.S. president in the satiric TV series Graves (2016–17), and in 2019 he voiced a character in the Star Wars-based show The Mandalorian.