In 1991, Nick Nolte landed his first Best Actor nod for the family melodrama, The Prince of Tides, directed by Barbra Streisand.
In 1998, at age 58, Nolte received his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for the intense drama Affliction, directed by Paul Schrader
Nolte was rewarded for his performance as the brutal Wade Whitehouse, a misunderstood small-town cop who still bears the scars of years of physical abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father, played by James Coburn, who won the Supporting Actor Oscar.
Nolte dug deep into the ugliness of domestic violence in a heartbreakingly needy and destructive characterization. In the end, he breaks his family’s cycle of violence, even though he uses violence to break it.
It’s noteworthy that in Streisand’s Oscar-nominated Prince of Tides, Nolte also played a man traumatized by sexual abuse as a child.
The Oscar winner in that category was Roberto Benigni for Life Is Beautiful, which he also directed.
In 2011, Nolte was nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Gavin O’Connor’s martial arts drama Warrior, as the father of the two estranged brothers, played by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton.
