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You learn much of what you need to know about the men he plays by reading the body code -- the bruised fighter's stance he takes, as Tom Wingo in "The Prince of Tides," when he faces off his mother (Kate Nelligan); his restlessness in "I'll Do Anything," where he plays an actor striving not to show how desperate he is for a part; the way he plunges at his canvases in "Life Lessons," a rock-and-rolling action painter who brings a sexual energy to his work, while Bob Dylan and Procol Harum provide his personal soundtrack; the shift in his tempo in "Under Fire" when Russel Price is transformed from a cynical observer to a revolutionary.

In "Weeds," he plays a convict who finds, in writing and directing plays, a way out of his despair and, eventually, a way out of prison. For this role Nolte adopts an ambling walk, what I'd call a Steinbeck walk -- acutely conscious, close to the earth, with a tense swing because he's accustomed to meeting obstacles but he's damned if they're going to stop him from covering ground.

When Lee Umstetter (the role is based loosely on Rick Cluchey, the San Francisco ex-con actor-director) strips down to make love to his girlfriend on his first night of freedom, he reveals a demon tattoo on his chest. It's the ineradicable mark of what he used to be, but it's at odds with the wonderment in his eyes -- what, in the movie's view, he's become.

Later in the film, the troupe he's assembled from his ex-con buddies runs into financial trouble, so as a last resort he slips off to rob a convenience store. But he can't do it -- sitting in his car with a stocking mask distorting his face, Nolte still manages to convey what this reversion means to him, and how much it means to him to fight against it.

This physical expressiveness is as much a Nolte trademark as the beery husk of a voice, the hushed vocal intensity. He rarely makes the choice to shout a big scene; that would be too obvious and, as he tells Mel Weiser, he hates doing the obvious. Besides, you get so much more color in a quiet, held-perilously-in-check moment than you do in a loud one.

Then there's that rough-hewn, all-American face, which can look battered and sensitive at the same time (as it does for his cop's role in "48 Hrs."), or can take on a slightly dissipated Southerner's charm (in "The Prince of Tides") or a conscious Yankee ruggedness (as the crusading private eye in "Everybody Wins").

In "Affliction," which won him both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards last year, his face looks distinctly '50s -- it's the sort of face you might see in an old photograph and be haunted by, the face of a man who fights a losing battle to keep himself from falling off the end of the world. And certain scenes in "Affliction" bring out a boyish sweetness and vulnerability that is also, I'd say, a Nolte characteristic.

His other trademark is professional: his celebrated abhorrence of the mainstream. Yes, he's made some standard Hollywood crap -- like "I Love Trouble" with Julia Roberts, and "Three Fugitives," not to mention the sequel to "48 Hrs." -- but it takes up only a fraction of his résumé, and he's well known for turning down projects that promise him lucrative salaries if he doesn't respect the director or find the material interesting. He's drawn to writers and directors he believes behave like artists, and his instincts aren't always sure. He should have stayed away from Oliver Stone; he shouldn't have played Thomas Jefferson for James Ivory. He shouldn't have done Scorsese's feverous remake of "Cape Fear" or tried to play a bespectacled Italian in a grand operatic style in "Lorenzo's Oil."

But his instincts have also netted him more sensational roles than most movie stars have had. And even his bad movies tend to be bad in unusual ways -- John Milius' "Farewell to the King," "Mother Night" (a Kurt Vonnegut adaptation), the new "Simpatico" (based on a Sam Shepard play), even the repugnant "Q & A" aren't like the lousy projects Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis may choose. There's a fearless recklessness about an actor who elects to play a champion "equal opportunity hater" like the corrupt police lieutenant Mike Brennan in "Q & A," who bullies a gay hustler into bending over for him and then garottes him. I hated seeing Nolte in this role, because playing a man with a rotted soul reduces him, and you don't believe him anyway -- he can't erase the sensitivity in the pockets of his face.

But to get to the heart of Nick Nolte, you have to see that the daring and unconventionality that lead him to a misbegotten project like "Q & A" also land him on a terrific project like "Weeds" or "Under Fire" or Paul Mazursky's "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," where Nolte plays a homeless man wandering the streets of Beverly Hills who's adopted by a wealthy family after he tries to drown himself in their pool.

The quality of Nolte's performances in two high-profile 1998 Christmas releases, "Affliction" and "The Thin Red Line," rallied the critics behind him, and he's probably more highly respected now than he's ever been. Through the years, however, he hasn't always been taken seriously by the press. Perhaps that's because he used to like to appear for interviews in pajamas and spin elaborate tall tales. He told Cosmopolitan, for instance, that his first wife was a trapeze artist, and several publications recorded his claim that he once lived in a Mexican whorehouse. His behavior in interview situations has often betrayed his contempt for the publicity process, as well as a holdover hipster rambunctiousness that used to surface regularly when he drank or took drugs. (He's made no secret of being a recovering alcoholic.)

On the other hand, you don't see him on talk shows after a movie of his has fizzled at the box office, groveling to apologize to his fans -- obeying the Hollywood reflex to distance yourself from a bomb. Weiser, in an oddly ungenerous reading of Nolte's defense of the critical and financial fiasco "I'll Do Anything," claims that the actor has "a remarkable capacity for self-delusion. It's as if he's incapable of admitting an association with failure, as if such an admission diminishes him, personally, not his talent, but his very being."

Next page | Nolte lived among the homeless for a while before shooting