Nick's Time

Nick Nolte lies on a bed, smoking Marlboros in a converted schoolhouse outside Pittsburgh. I sit near Nick Nolte on a chair, studying the books on his bedside table. He has She: Understanding Feminine Psychology. And The Way of All Women. And What Men Are Like. I'm asking him a lot of questions. He's giving me a lot of answers.

''Boss!'' booms a young man with an Australian accent, loping into the classroom with a walkie-talkie hissing in his hand. ''Boss, have you got the radio on?''

''Yeah,'' drawls Nolte, nodding to the intercom on a table near the window, ''but I'm not listening to it. I'm bullshitting tremendously fast!'' He laughs, a guy-to-guy laugh. A smile breaks on his famously beaten-up face — chiseled and lined, handsome and debauched, part Marlboro Man and part Raging Bull.

''Um, well, Boss, they need you on the set.''

''Right.'' Five minutes.'' Nolte swings off the bed, stands up. ''I'll be right back,'' he says in the direction of where I sit. We're in a kind of base camp for the production of Lorenzo's Oil, Nolte's new movie, due out this fall. Just across the street is the house where lights and cameras and his costar Susan Sarandon wait to shoot a scene, the house where Nick Nolte becomes Augosto Odone, a character based on a real-life Italian-born lawyer who spent years looking for a cure for his son's rare genetic disease.

At this moment, it's the movie-set house that feels most like homes to Nolte, an actor who is masterfully at ease in any man's skin except, perhaps, his own.

For more than 15 years, Nolte has made a deeply interesting career out of playing the untrustworthy, the unsmiling, the unkempt handsome, the uneasy and uneasy-making. He has played a disenchanted Vietnam vet and a world-weary football player, a rough good cop and a twisted bad cop, a suicidal bum and a bullying painter. Ever since 1976, when he first demanded attention as restless Tom Jordache, all feral and blond, in the TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, Nolte has unnerved and impressed audiences with his dark personifications of Man At His Worst.

Now, at 50, he is in his middle-aged, cleaned-up, sobered-up prime with big roles in two of this season's biggest movies: In Martin Scorsese's remake of the nasty 1962 thriller Cape Fear, he plays Sam Bowden, a spiritually weak lawyer desperately trying to shield his family from terror. In Barbra Streisand's Southern psychosoaper, The Prince of Tides, he plays Tom Wingo, a former English teacher from South Carolina who has hidden the awful truths about his childhood from himself.

Nolte's Wingo in an intense characterization of a man whose blustery exterior slowly cracks to reveal inner pain. It's a turn that seems destined for an Academy Award: Hollywood's Oscar buzz gives only The Silence of the Lambs' Anthony Hopkins and Bugsy's Warren Beatty a shot at overtaking Nolte. But this Oscar talk makes the actor, whose moodiness is well known, edgy. In fact, interviews make him edgy.

''I'm already getting too sensitive about what other people presume I am,'' he warns. At the urging of his agent and his wife, Nolte — who has never so much as attended the Oscar ceremony — did actually enroll as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last year. Just in case.

And then he says, as he has said to umpteen other tape recorders, why he lies to people like me. ''I tell the journalist, 'You make it up.' I just give you a bunch of anecdotes,'' he says. ''If a journalist is going to come and talk, we're going to talk. Just talk. I'll dodge some questions. And I'll lie about some, you know, when I feel they're areas that I don't want to talk about. On the other hand, I don't do what other people do — get mad, upset. Tuesday Weld at one time, you know, you'd have to give her written-out questions.'' Then his mouth smiles while his eyes don't, and he lights yet another Marlboro.

Talking to Nick Nolte is a bit like studying one of those Zen bits of paper that says, ''The statement on the other side is true,'' and then you turn the paper over and it says, ''The statement on the other side is false.''

He has always played the underside of handsome. Although blond and rugged as any big-screen hero, Nolte prefers playing men tormented by impulse, intellect, and screwed-up insides. He's no Superman; Nolte lore says he turned down that role when he was told he couldn't play the Man of Steel as a schizophrenic.

And he has always played his characters to the edge. Like his colleague Robert De Niro, Nolte is legendary for the intensity and zeal with which he does his homework: To play a down-and-out bum in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, he lived on the streets for days; to become a mad-prophet soldier in Borneo in Farewell to the King, he hied himself into a cop-gone-bad in Q&A, he gained 50 pounds and added six inches to his height with shoe lifts. To convey the big, messy obsessiveness of painter (and, some say, ultimate Nolte alter ego) Lionel Dobie in New York Stories, Nolte painted and drank with real-life artist Chuck Connelly, whose paintings are at the heart of the tale Stories' costar Rosanna Arquette called Nolte's research ''one hundred percent focused. He really watched Chuck,'' she says, ''the way he moved, how he looked at the canvas, how he cocked his head.''