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"I work from emotion," he reminds his acting coach, Mel Weiser, who wrote about the process of working with him in "Nick Nolte: Caught in the Act." "I have to know why I'm feeling what I'm feeling. What's behind it? How is it expressed? What's its source?" And when you think back on great moments in Nolte performances, generally what come to mind are the ones where the tough-guy hero is strung up by the depth of his own feelings. You may recall the scene in the Nicaragua-set "Under Fire," when his character, the prize-winning photojournalist Russel Price, recognizes that the photos he snapped of the Sandinistas, whose revolution he's fallen in love with, have been used to hunt them down and kill them. Or the moment in "Who'll Stop the Rain" when he realizes he's going to sacrifice himself for his best friend, a hapless drug runner, and for the woman he loves.

Or perhaps the image in "Life Lessons" (the Martin Scorsese segment of "New York Stories") of Lionel Dobie, his face and bare chest smeared with the paint from his latest canvas, sunk in a chair like a Francis Bacon figure, looking up with absurdly grandiose romantic longing at the room where his much younger assistant (Rosanna Arquette), who has rejected him sexually, is making love to someone her own age. And most certainly the climactic scene in "The Prince of Tides" where Tom Wingo's confession that he was raped at 13 seems to burn out of his eyes -- those eyes that have, throughout the movie, been like tunnels sucking down the painful memories the psychiatrist (Barbra Streisand) who's treating his damaged sister keeps prodding.

Nolte was born in Omaha, Neb., in 1941 and spent 14 years acting in regional theaters, including the Actors Inner Circle in Phoenix, where he got to sink his teeth into Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as try his hand at Anouilh, Durrenmatt, Frisch. That's where he met both Weiser, the company's co-founder, and Nolte's first wife, Sheila Page, who co-starred with him in a production of "The Rainmaker." He's been married three times in all; his third wife, Rebecca Linger, is the mother of his only son, Brawley, who displayed his legacy in his only movie role -- he was terrific as Mel Gibson's kidnapped boy in "Ransom." Nolte currently lives with the actress Vicki Lewis, whom he met on the set of "I'll Do Anything."

Nolte appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows in the early '70s, but his breakthrough came in 1976, when he played Tom Jordache in the miniseries "Rich Man, Poor Man." Nolte was already 35, but he carried off Jordache's 17 -- deftly enough to earn an Emmy nomination and the romantic lead in a moronic Peter Yates adventure called "The Deep," which came out the following year and initiated a remarkably prolific Hollywood career. ("Simpatico," due out this Christmas, marks his 35th movie role since "Rich Man, Poor Man" made him a hot property.)

It's clear he was cast in "The Deep," opposite Jacqueline Bisset, for his sexy-hip '70s look: He sports a thick ginger moustache and a mop of gold-dusted hair, and when he's not diving (the film is set in Bermuda) he wears the neo-Renaissance outfits that were just coming out of fashion -- ruffled shirt, white bells. He doesn't look 17 but he could pass for, say, 25, and he's certainly handsome enough in this pin-up role to be the hero of a Hollywood action picture. Yates probably cast him without caring whether he could act, and the only thing he's got going for him is a kind of renegade energy -- though at this juncture, for all we know it could be beach-bum vibes we're picking up, not talent.

But in "Who'll Stop the Rain," his next picture, you know you're watching an actor. I hadn't seen Nolte on TV and he had barely registered with me in "The Deep," so I recall being startled when "Who'll Stop the Rain" came out: Here was this imaginative, fully formed movie actor giving a highly complex performance in a major role, and where the hell had he come from? As Ray Hicks, whose Marine buddy (Michael Moriarty) gives him a stash of heroin to transport, he has a life-scarred look and a soldier of fortune persona -- though that's not the whole story. Ray, who also spent some time on a Southern California commune, has had to struggle to put his personality together, and when Moriarty hands him the dope, we see the terror in Ray's eyes and his shaky determination to keep himself balanced. He goes through with the escapade out of loyalty to his friend, but he knows it's bad karma -- that it puts him out of touch with who he thinks he is.

In the source novel, "Dog Soldiers," Robert Stone used the heroin as a metaphor for the way Vietnam had corrupted America, and that may have been what the director, Karel Reisz, intended in his version. But when you watch the movie you get caught up in the details of a drug deal gone sour, and the metaphor pretty much vanishes. Still, the movie clings to you like the scalding memory of an ugly high, and Nolte's exploration of this character's efforts to stay grounded in a world that's lost its moral compass forms its impassioned core.

Nolte had been a '60s wild man himself, and he looked it. Both "Who'll Stop the Rain" and (in a less obvious way) "North Dallas Forty," which came out the following year, 1979, chronicled the moment when the excesses of the '60s began to occupy a drastically altered moral landscape. Ray Hicks sticks to an ethic that Vietnam has effectively obliterated, and Phil Elliot, the football hero of "North Dallas Forty," wants to play solely for love of the game, while his bosses operate out of a heartless corporate vision to which the players are inevitably sacrificed. Both these movies are built around the tension between Nolte's characters and the world they move in; both these men are scrupulously honest, honest in ways that punish them.

And for both of them, the proof of that honesty is physical -- it's the capacity to continue to march toward a rendezvous even after you've been badly shot up, or the satisfaction of working through the pain to reach the limit of what your body can achieve. In the memorably funny opening scene of "North Dallas Forty," Nolte's Phil pulls himself out of bed, every muscle clearly aching; he staggers across the floor, holding his stomach and his wrist, barely able to move his feet; he washes down a pain killer with stale beer; he sinks into a warm bath, hauling on a joint as if he were inhaling oxygen; and he grins happily as he recalls a heroic play from yesterday's game. And that's Phil Elliot in a nutshell: He proves himself to himself by offering up his body, and God, it feels good.

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