Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines

by Nick Nolte

Overview

“I had become an actor because real life was hard for me. Sometimes it was really rough. Acting was different from real life, yet it gave me the chance to search for complex stories that helped me understand and cope with what I encountered away from the stage lights.”

Legendary actor Nick Nolte delivers his most revealing performance yet. This intimate memoir is a tale of art, passion, commitment, addiction, and the quest for personal enlightenment as intense and hypnotic as the man himself.

In a career spanning five decades and hundreds of roles, Nick Nolte has become a true Hollywood icon. Rising from a difficult childhood in the rural Midwest to leading roles and a trio of Oscar nominations in the golden West, he has been both celebrated and vilified; survived marriages, divorces, and a string of romances; was named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine; and suffered public humiliation over his addiction issues, including a drug-fueled trip down the Pacific Coast Highway that resulted in his infamous 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 thirty-five 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, a committed actor willing to go to extremes for a role, Nolte is motivated by personal, edgy projects, not box office success. Today, he has found peace on his own terms, yet is still driven, juggling projects while raising his young daughter.

Nick’s untold story, with never-before-seen photos, offers a candid, unvarnished close-up look at the man, the career, the loves, and the life.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062219572
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

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

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

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