Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines

by Nick Nolte

Overview

The legendary icon tells his story—a tale of art, passion, commitment, addiction, as intense and hypnotic as the man himself.

In a career spanning five decades, Nick Nolte has endured the rites of Hollywood celebrity. Rising from obscurity to leading roles and Oscar nominations, he has been both celebrated and vilified in the media; survived marriages, divorces, and a string of romances; was named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine; and suffered public humiliation over his drug and alcohol issues, including a drug-fueled trip down a “long road of nothingness” that ended in arrest.

Despite these ups and downs, Nolte has remained true to the craft he loves, portraying a diverse range of characters with his trademark physicality and indelible gravelly voice. Already 35 when his performance in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man launched him to stardom, Nolte never learned to play by Hollywood’s rules. A rebel who defies expectations, an obsessive method actor who will go to extremes for a role (he lived among the homeless to prepare for Down and Out in Beverly Hills), Nolte is motivated more by edgier, more personal projects than by box office success. Today he is clean yet still driven, juggling a number of upcoming works and raising his young daughter.

A man who refuses to hide his mistakes, Nolte now delivers his most revealing performance yet. His revealing memoir, filled with sixteen pages of color photos, offers a candid, unvarnished close-up look at the man, the career, the loves, and the life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062219596
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	268
Sales rank:	887,982
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nick Nolte is a Golden Globe–winning and Academy Award–nominated actor who has been active in Hollywood for more than forty years. He has starred in such notable films as 48 Hrs. (1982), Cape Fear (1991), Affliction (1997), The Thin Red Line (1998), and Warrior (2011), and currently stars in the title role in the Epix television series Graves. He lives in Malibu, California.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Chapter 1 Younger Brother 5

Chapter 2 A Date with Humble Pie 9

Chapter 3 Zero Point 23

Chapter 4 Corn-fed 31

Chapter 5 Football 51

Chapter 6 Little Theatre 73

Chapter 7 Rich Man 105

Chapter 8 A Quiet Place 125

Chapter 9 Something to See 129

Chapter 10 Under Fire 157

Chapter 11 Down and Out 189

Chapter 12 Family 209

Chapter 13 Turning of the Tide 225

Chapter 14 Against Type 237

Chapter 15 Fathers and Mothers 257

Chapter 16 H, GHB, and the PCH 283

Chapter 17 Sophie 305

Chapter 18 Graves Condition 317

Afterword 349

Acknowledgments 351

Editorial Reviews

And now we have “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines,” playing at a bookstore near you. Touching, funny in parts, full of the excesses postwar America readily supplied, and, hopefully, truthful. Pick it up.” — Washington Post

“The noted film actor and notorious bad boy hunkers down and tells a few tales of his life...Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

And now we have “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines,” playing at a bookstore near you. Touching, funny in parts, full of the excesses postwar America readily supplied, and, hopefully, truthful. Pick it up.

Washington Post

And now we have “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines,” playing at a bookstore near you. Touching, funny in parts, full of the excesses postwar America readily supplied, and, hopefully, truthful. Pick it up.

Washington Post

2017-12-24
The noted film actor and notorious bad boy hunkers down and tells a few tales of his life, some of which just may be true."Let me tell you about my testicle tuck," writes Nolte by way of an opening gambit. There are plenty of other bodily points of interest, as well: for one thing, the author had a well-developed habit of smacking his head against hard objects, like the sides of cars, "to relieve a little stress." Fortunately, he survived, having finally learned that "running my head into cars was signaling…I needed help." As his memoir unwinds, it's clear where some of the stress and self-destruction came from. Back in Iowa, life presented its own hardships in the form of a war-scarred father and a mother who fed Dexedrine to young Nick, who recalls that the so-called vitamin "would have me bouncing off the walls in no time, eager as hell to get to school and wreak whatever havoc I could." Havoc is a useful keyword, for there are plenty of opportunities to watch it in play as Nolte stumbles into an acting career and finds that he's good at it, even if his early work was dismissed as lunk-headed and wooden. Things got better with Karel Reisz's Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), the film version of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, "an important film for me because I was able to display some depth as an actor and a complexity far beyond what The Deep revealed." Nolte casts a gimlet eye on his performances and the circumstances surrounding them, performances that have included such brilliant work as the cynical football hero of North Dallas Forty but have lately centered on a character he calls the "designated old guy." Long since on the wagon and an obviously thoughtful man, Nolte seems to share the reader's surprise that he lived long enough to take that role.Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.

Kirkus Review