‘I caught an STD from Miss New York on a trampoline’

In the decades Nick Nolte spent fabricating a public persona, one thing he didn’t lie about was his age: the rugged, blond former model voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1992 turns 75 today.

Actor Nick Nolte.

In the couple of decades actor Nick Nolte spent fabricating a public persona, one thing he didn’t lie about was his age: the rugged, blond former model voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1992 celebrates his 75th birthday today.

In a 40-year movie career that earned him three Academy Award nominations, Nolte’s roles have ranged from a street bum in Down And Out in Beverly Hills (1986), to washed-up cop Wade Whitehouse in Affliction (1997).

Just last year he appeared in four releases, including western comedy The Ridiculous 6, thriller Return to Sender and A Walk In The Woods with Robert Redford, based on author Bill Bryson’s attempt to hike the 3500km Appalachian Trail.

In a hard-boozing lifestyle that cost him three marriages, Nolte was arrested in Malibu in 2002 for driving under the influence of date-rape drug GHB. After commenting he had “been taking it for four years and I’ve never been raped”, Nolte was given three years probation. His lawyer explained he unwittingly ingested the drug in a “weightlifting concoction”.

Nolte was born on February 8, 1941, in Omaha, Nebraska, and his father Frank, a farmer’s son who ran away from home and later played football at Iowa State University, was serving in the Philippines. His mother Helen worked as a department store buyer while raising Nolte and his sister Nancy, who became an executive with the Red Cross. His father returned in 1944 to become an irrigation equipment salesman, moving the family around the US midwest.

Nick Nolte in a scene from the 1986 film ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills’.

At Westside High School in Omaha, Nolte was kicker for the football team. He also attended Benson High, where he was reputedly expelled for fighting and hiding beer to drink during football practice. At 20, an arrest in Omaha for selling phony draft cards to under-age drinkers earned a five-year suspended sentence and eliminated him from Vietnam War drafts.

Around this time, Nolte later told journalists, he spent a “lost semester” furthering his education with prostitutes at a brothel in Nogales, Mexico, where he “ate eggs and drank beer”. When the women tired of him, they sent him off with a pillowcase full of beer.

“I was a roaming gypsy from the time I went on the road,” he claimed. He insisted he caught no sexually transmitted diseases in Mexico, but caught a venereal disease after sex on a trampoline with a former Miss New York.

Nolte’s wilder claims also included misplacing his father’s artificial leg during a drinking binge, and being illiterate until his late teens.

While working as a labourer in California in the early 1960s, Nolte had a friend audition for a role in Peyton Place. Nolte also auditioned, then joined the Pasadena Playhouse while training at the Stella Adler Academy. Working the regional theatre circuit, he moved to Phoenix where at 22 he married actor Sheila Page, then 32, the “most beautiful woman in Phoenix”, who he later claimed was a trapeze artist.

In Pheonix he also studied with photographer Allen Dutton, later describing regular trips into the Arizona desert to experiment with LSD and explore photographic “equivalency” with objects.

Nick Nolte doing the promo rounds for ‘A Walk In The Woods’ at Sundance Film Festival in January 2015. Pictture: Getty Images

As a model with Eleanor Moore’s Minneapolis agency he made an antifreeze commercial and in 1972, when he won his first film role as a gang leader in Dirty Little Billy, appeared in an advertisement with Sigourney Weaver.

Back in Los Angeles in 1973, Nolte won acclaim for his role in William Inge’s play The Last Pad, which coincided with Inge’s death. His first credited big-screen appearance in Return to Macon County (1975), led to his breakthrough role as down-and-out boxer Tom Jordache in TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976.

Nolte’s marriage to Page ended in 1970. In 1978 he wed dancer Sharyn Haddad, divorcing again in 1983. In a 10-year marriage to surgeon’s daughter Rebecca Linger from 1984, they had a stillborn daughter and a son, Brawley. Also linked with his Cannery Row co-star Debra Winger, and actor Vicki Lewis, in 2007 his girlfriend Clytie Lane gave birth to their daughter Sophie.

Discussing struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, Nolte explained: “From the get-go, I looked up at a world ... that was violent, aggressive, hostile, competitive. It’s a scary world. I rebelled. I got angry.”