Smoke screen

Nick Nolte’s living room is a labyrinth of velvety antique couches, large Australian musical instruments and half a dozen coffee tables decorated with bronze naked ladies holding up lamps.

Scattered throughout his six-acre Malibu compound are mementos of his life as an actor: The mini Monticello in the backyard, for instance, is a souvenir of “Jefferson in Paris.”

It quickly becomes clear that Nolte’s decorating tastes resemble his life -- extravagantly eclectic, erratic, extreme.

Nowhere on display is the mug shot seen around the world -- a crazed-looking Nolte wearing a Hawaiian print shirt, mouth slightly open, his blond hair wild, eyes dim and sunken, after being arrested in September for driving under the influence of drugs.

Yet despite that highly publicized episode, which ended with a no contest plea and three years’ probation, Nolte is entering a season of cinematic visibility. He’s undeterred, working the publicity circuit, ‘fessing up to his problems with Larry King and shrugging off being the butt of a Steve Martin joke at this year’s Oscars. (His handlers insist the bad hairdo came directly from the set of “The Hulk,” where Nolte was playing a mad scientist.)

His addiction and subsequent arrest will likely affect his insurability rates for big-budget studio films -- unless he and his doctors can convince underwriters that he’s cleaned up his act, according to one major insurance broker.

His latest movie is Neil Jordan’s heist drama “The Good Thief,” which opens today -- he plays an ex-heroin addict and former gambler. On June 20 he will be seen in Ang Lee’s “The Hulk” and July 11 in Mark and Michael Polish’s “North Fork,” a fable-like drama in which Nolte plays a priest.

Over his 30-year film career, his best performances tap into the extremes of his personality: the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, chain-smoking cop in “48 HRS.”; a boisterous, damaged ex-football coach in “The Prince of Tides” (which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor); the deeply dysfunctional, smoldering son in “Affliction” (another nomination, this one for supporting actor); and the washed-up football star in “North Dallas 40.”

“He is the definition of a man, a throwback to the time when there were men actors like Robert Mitchum,” says Mark Polish, co-star in “North Fork” and “The Good Thief.”

Like Mitchum, Nolte appears to be the sturdy, all-American type, but beneath the surface lurks a dangerous volatility.

On the day of this interview, he is feeling tired. He has been sleeping odd hours and decides he wants to do the interview in his bedroom.

“But don’t worry,” he says, looking back as he climbs up a “Gone With the Wind”-style staircase. “I won’t do the interview from my bed, like Brando does,” referring to his friend and fellow eccentric Marlon Brando.

Nolte falls into an oversized lounge chair, with broad arms that catch the ash falling from the many Winstons he inhales over the course of three hours.

The room is darkened by shades with blown-up images of Hindu goddesses Shiva and Krishna on every window. Wild parrots nestled in the trees outside make a colossal racket -- the only indication that it is daytime.

Since his separation from longtime girlfriend Vicki Lewis (“Newsradio”), he shares this ranch-style home with his only son, Brawley. The 62-year-old actor has been married and divorced three times.

Nolte revels in provocation. He is a free spirit who has often tested the endurance of those closest to him.

“He is an original soul,” says his production partner, Greg Shapiro, co-founder of Kingsgate Films, who has been with him since 1996. “Nick is an adult and I’ve learned that he is going to do what he is going to do, and he knows the consequences of his actions.”

Although the frame of an athlete remains, drugs, cigarettes and alcohol have taken their toll.

His hands shake. His skin is a moist shade of pink. He shuffles through the vastness of his home in black orthopedic shoes. As he walks, he hobbles (two years ago, angry that his mother was dying, Nolte kicked his weight machine so hard he blew out the calf muscle on his right leg).

The temptation to booze it up or down some pills is ever present.

“This is something I’ve got to deal with the rest of my life,” he says as he sips a large mug of herbal tea with a wedge of lemon. “I don’t like myself much when I’m in that addiction phase.”

His voice is still trademark Nolte -- strong and gravelly from the cigarettes, but a little shaky, as if tempered by age.

The day of his arrest, he says, he was heading to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the back roads of Malibu’s canyons. But when he saw his buddies standing outside the meeting spot, he turned around.

“For some reason, I got there, saw some old friends and I knew I couldn’t go in,” he says. “So I went straight down on PCH and got arrested. I am not saying I did this consciously, but in some way the time was ripe because I was praying mightily to get off this stuff.”

He may be a troubled man, but there are few American actors who can give such complex and vulnerable performances, says Jordan, his director in “The Good Thief.” Jordan has a lot of experience bringing such characters to life on screen, in “The Crying Game,” “The Butcher Boy” and “Mona Lisa,” among others.

“I think he is the kind of actor that is increasingly difficult to find in American movies. You can see it in his face, can’t you? He has lived a life,” Jordan says via telephone from his home in Dublin.

With his handsomely chiseled features and talent, Nolte easily could have become a heartthrob. But, as Jordan observed, Nolte has “refused to eat at the table.” With few exceptions (notable turkeys such as “The Deep,” “Another 48 HRS.” and “I Love Trouble”), Nolte has focused on story-driven, smaller films. He accepted the role in “The Hulk,” he says, only because Ang Lee saw it as a movie about the relationship between father and son -- not a traditional Hollywood formula film based on a comic book character.

“Ang said to me he didn’t know how to make a comic book [movie], but he knew how to make a Greek tragedy,” says Nolte, who plays the father of the Hulk, portrayed by Australian actor Eric Bana.

Nolte came close to pulling out of “North Fork” due to exhaustion from working on “The Hulk.” Indeed, he filmed his scenes in the quirky, independent “North Fork” in one week, working for scale, without a contract, promising himself to the Polish brothers the old-fashioned way -- on a handshake.

On a one-week break from “The Hulk,” Nolte says he came home to find a party at his house. Tired and not in the mood to party, Nolte got on a plane that afternoon to Montana where “North Fork” was filming.

Still reeling from his mother’s death a year before, Nolte found the movie’s theme of spiritual redemption reassuring.

His character, Father Harlan, is not only the soul of a forsaken town in Montana that will be wiped out to make room for a dam, but also the guardian of a desperately ill orphan who has been abandoned by his adoptive parents.

“Harlan is a death watcher,” he said. “He is also the caretaker of birth and death.”

Recalling his experience nursing his mother before her death, Nolte adds: “People need the presence of another human to die as they need the presence of another human to be born. You have to let go of yourself and just become a witness.”

In “The Good Thief,” a quasi-remake of the French film “Bob Le Flambeur,” Nolte plays a down-and-out gambler and former addict who plans a fake heist within a heist and suddenly finds his luck turning at the gambling tables.

Nolte is compulsive about his research. On every role, he highlights the script in caps and bold; he works his notes into his script and rehearses his lines in his bathtub. He also writes detailed descriptions of each of the characters he has played.

Back in his bedroom, he reads one page of his single-spaced, typewritten description of the ex-pat, ex-gambler Bob Montagnet from “The Good Thief”: He was a kid who was always in trouble, hated school, got into drinking and smoking at an early age.

Looking up from the page, he observes, “Sounds like I’m talking about myself.”

Last year Nolte caused a minor hubbub at the Toronto Film Festival, where “The Good Thief” premiered, when he told journalists he had tried heroin to get into character. He now denies he did the drug and says he only said that to goad an annoying reporter.

“I have also told them I had a testicle tuck and that my ex-wife was in the circus.” He cracks a smile, thinking of little fibs he has told reporters in the past.

And as the interview winds down, there’s no way of knowing whether this, too, is an act.