Nick Nolte and his little-known Iowa upbringing reveals love of rivers and football

Editor's note: This story by Register reporter Mike Kilen was originally published in January 2018. 

Nick Nolte was an Iowa kid. Who knew? In Iowans’ zeal to follow stars with roots here, not much has been written about the Oscar-nominated actor’s upbringing in Iowa.

Until he did it himself.

His memoir released in January 2018, “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines” (William Morrow), details his time in Ames as the son of an Iowa State University football player, and his junior high football skills in Waterloo.

Nolte, 77, became a tough-guy actor who made a splash in 1979 with, appropriately, a football movie —  “North Dallas Forty.” He went on to critical acclaim in films such as “Prince of Tides” and “Affliction,” roles that earned him Oscar nominations. He was often the all-American man’s man who smoldered with a kind of volatile wound, even in romps like “48 Hours” with Eddie Murphy.

Now he writes about where all that eccentric passion originated — right here in Iowa — in a chapter called “Corn-fed.”

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His dad, Franklin Arthur Nolte, was a huge, 6-foot-6, 260-pound farmer’s son who lettered at ISU in football from 1929 to 1931, got a degree in engineering and met his mother, also an ISU student. But Nick Nolte’s earliest memories of his father was his return from World War II. The house in Ames buzzed with anticipation, he wrote:

“But then the front door opened and a skeleton walked in.” The terror of the war, fighting the Japanese and malaria “reduced him to a sack of bones.”

The war deeply affected his dad, and like many in his generation, Nolte wrote, he lost faith in man so retreated to conformity and repressed emotions to deal with it. His mother, Helen King Nolte, made up for it with her rebellious nature and creativity, the daughter of ISU engineering professors who thought that “imagination was the only crop worth cultivating.”

She was liberal and permissive, Nolte wrote, and the daily morning stimulant Dexedrine that she popped in her mouth was even given to her son when he couldn’t get out bed for school.

Nolte didn’t do well in school but loved football. His family left Ames when he was 7 to live in Waterloo after his father took a transfer selling irrigation pumps for the Fairbanks Morse company, while his mother became a buyer for Black’s department store.

In Waterloo, Nolte transferred his childhood anxiety onto the football field.

“I often found myself playing with such passion and concentration that I simply started to cry,” he wrote.

He played defensive end and was a punter and attracted enough attention to be invited to big-time college camps in junior high, before his family moved to Omaha. He finished his schooling there and went on to play junior college football for a time to get his grades up to play big-time college football, which never happened.

Football helped him channel his intensity. But so did the nearby woods and rivers in Iowa.

“I called myself a river kid, because the big rivers on whose banks we lived were my soul mates, in many ways,” he wrote.

They represented a release from society’s rules, which he fought much of his life. It didn’t matter out there because nature — on the Skunk, Cedar and Iowa rivers — set its own rules. He learned to combat fear with outrageousness, swimming across the widest, most dangerous stretch of river he could find.

Nolte went on to do that often. As a young man, he was convicted of a federal felony for selling fake draft cards during the Vietnam War and got a suspended sentence. He got into drugs in Hollywood, even before he found acting was his passion, and had trouble with them later in life.

Many remember his mug shot with the wild hair and a Hawaiian shirt after being arrested for driving under the influence of drugs in 2003. But more perhaps remember his roles in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” or “Cape Fear.”

Most don’t know of his time in Iowa. His parents divorced and his father returned to sales in the Midwest before his death in 1978, while his mother opened an antique store before her death in 2000.

But he took from her a rebellion against conformity, fought in Iowa, and a love of imagination he nurtured along the river banks here.

He lives in Los Angeles and has built several homes. One of them is made of river rock.