Four years younger than Stone – they remind me of brothers – Nolte could have played the lead in adaptations of all his novels as he aged. You need a Neal Cassady for Heart Beat (1980)? Who ya gonna call? You need someone capable of embodying the curdled macho idealism of Robert Stone’s characters in Who’ll Stop The Rain, you called the right guy. Even then, with his linebacker’s slab-like physique, his astronaut’s jawline and his surfer-blond hair, he brought more heft and physical conviction to his work than all the weedy Method New Yorkers combined cameras wanted to lick him. (In Walter Hill’s Extreme Prejudice, perhaps it already did.)įorty years ago, the Dorian Gray version of Nolte shot to fame in the interminable Irwin Shaw miniseries Rich Man Poor Man, at the late age of 35. He’s Peckinpah-perfect: give him a horse, a hat, a headful of bad memories, some dead men to haunt him and a wilderness in which to feel old and obsolete, and, hey, that western just writes itself.
Take a look at the guy: all crags and rasps, grizzled and gravelly white hair, cold, sky-blue eyes, a face like Monument Valley, that Mitchum-esque barrel chest that pinch of Ward Bond’s ferocity, always trailing a Pigpen-dustcloud of waywardness and notoriety, alcoholic and narcotic excess, rehab and recidivism.
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