Nolte, Living Down His Reputation

Getting stood up by Nick Nolte just seems so fitting. After all, this is the actor famous for his wild-haired 2002 mug shot, a scolding from Katharine Hepburn for drinking too much and his selection, at 51, as People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1992. And in his latest movie, James Ponsoldt's "Off the Black," Nolte plays a loose-cannon high school umpire. (See review on Page 29.)

When he finally calls, a day late -- saying something about Montreal, London and a fax machine -- he talks for more than an hour, revealing an unexpected mix of dark humor, sentimentality and New Age spirituality, all with that crackly, marble-mouthed voice.

In "Off the Black," Nolte plays Ray Cook, a cancer patient who befriends a teenage boy (Trevor Morgan) and eventually asks him to pose as his son at Cook's 40th high school reunion. The gruff, fatalistic Cook appealed to Nolte, in part, because he identifies with the man's problems: They're "the problems I'm dealing with," the actor says. "Not that I'm dying of cancer at this moment, but I'm aging, and I think it was in that realm of consciousness that I wanted to play in."

He is asked if maybe, just maybe, playing a man prone to alcoholic rages seems an odd choice for a man with his reputation. But Nolte doesn't get mad or hang up. Instead he talks gamely about his Hawaiian-shirted, electrified-hair mug shot, which he has posted on his Web site's home page, http://www.nicknolte.com. (He also has one from 1961, when he was arrested for selling fake draft cards.) After his 2002 arrest on charges of driving under the influence, he sought drug treatment. But the question remains: Will he ever live down that picture?

"Well, that's why I put both mug shots up," he says. "I think as time goes on we'll see more mug shots of celebrities." He adds, "I think the onus is off me now, and it's more on Mel," Mel being Mel Gibson, who was arrested in July on suspicion of drunken driving and whose anti-Semitic rants caught the attention of the worldwide media. (Gibson has said he combed his hair before getting his picture taken so he wouldn't look like Nolte.)

Nolte has been friends with other celebrity bad boys, among them Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who committed suicide in February 2005.

"He chose to take his own life," Nolte explains. "What he wrote, his last poem was, 'I don't have any fun anymore, I can't get out of bed, I'm grumpy all the time, nobody likes me, I yell all the time, it's no fun anymore.' . . . Then he said, 'This won't hurt much,' and, boom! He shot himself."

Nolte's friendship with Thompson was forged through late-night phone calls, not unlike his friendship with Marlon Brando, who died in 2004. "Between Marlon and Hunter, they would always phone at 4 o'clock in the morning, or 5 . . . so if the phone rang at that time, you knew it was either Hunter or Marlon. And I kinda miss that. They're both gone now. The phone doesn't ring anymore."

Despite those losses, Nolte brightens when he talks about his son, the 20-year-old Brawley, whose mom, Rebecca Linger, he divorced 12 years ago. It is clear that Nolte drew on his fatherhood experiences for "Off the Black." Brawley studies acting in London, and Nolte is hoping to do a play with him and tour the United States and Europe together.

The Nebraska-born actor thinks audiences would go see him onstage "out of curiosity alone, to see the mug shot." He seems fine with using that to get people in the door, and he relates a story from his return to the stage in 2000 in San Francisco, where he starred with Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson in Sam Shepard's "The Late Henry Moss."

"When we did Sam Shepard's play, I had the first line. It was just me and Sean onstage. Sam had said to me, 'Nick, just start when you feel it's right to start.'

"I would wait, and the audience would be saying things like . . . 'See that bottle up there, he's drunk already.' It was all about the movie things. So I'd let that pass and finally they'd stop that. Then I'd wait till they got really uncomfortable, wondering what I was going to do, [only] then would I start the play. It wasn't till we got through all that other junk could we start.

"Sean said afterwards on opening night, 'Why did you wait so long?' And I said, 'Didn't you hear what they were saying out there? . . . I was waiting for that to get done.' "