CROSSING THE LINE WITH NOLTE; VETERAN OF OVER-THE-EDGE GENRE COMES FULL CIRCLE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Nick Nolte looks almost civilized.

It's a nice, deceptive change. The eccentric actor usually walks around in fuzzy pajamas or green surgical scrubs, but today he's turned out in a sleek, gray-striped suit and a shirt with silver-linked French cuffs.

It's almost as if Nolte's dressing for success - and succeeding at it (the 57-year-old actor is enjoying the best notices of his career for his work in the films ``Affliction'' and ``The Thin Red Line''). Almost, but not quite; Nolte's face is framed by three days' worth of stubble and a lion's mane of flyaway, silver-sandy hair.

Then there's that voice, the crusty growl that gives his most passionate intellectual insights an animal bite. Clothes can't hide the fact that Nolte is still one of the movies' most dangerous, stone-cold rebels.

``Ferocity? That's fairly easy for me to access,'' Nolte says, with a smile that does nothing to soften his statement. ``I've been delving into rage for quite some time.''

For his whole adult life, it could be said. A failed college football player who left school practically illiterate, Nolte has fought a drinking problem, the U.S. government (he was arrested in the early '60s for selling fake draft cards) and three ex-wives over the years.

It took him a decade to make the move from stage work to television and movies. And even after the '70s miniseries ``Rich Man, Poor Man'' and his 1977 feature debut ``The Deep'' established Nolte's star power, he always brought a rough, hair-trigger quality to even the most mainstream commercial efforts (the ``48 HRS.'' comedies, Disney's ``Down and Out in Beverly Hills,'' Barbra Streisand's ``The Prince of Tides'').

Meanwhile, Nolte eagerly pursued the most difficult, over-the-edge emotional challenges the art-film sector had to offer. In the process, he created a distinguished gallery of movie malcontents, ranging from the self-destructive protagonists of ``Who'll Stop the Rain,'' ``Q&A'' and ``Afterglow'' to the doomed idealists of ``Under Fire,'' ``I'll Do Anything'' and even the underappreciated ``Jefferson in Paris.''

All of that, and a lot more, seems excellent preparation for ``Red Line's'' fire-breathing Col. Tall and ``Affliction's'' profoundly dysfunctional Wade Whitehouse. They are, respectively, his most furious and poignant performances to date.

In Terrence Malick's all-but-incoherent adaptation of James Jones' celebrated World War II novel, Nolte provides some much-needed focus as Tall, an aging but untested West Pointer whose determination to take a hill on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal threatens to decimate his troops.

``He's an older man, and he's quite driven,'' Nolte explains. ``I tried to build a man who, when he got to the battlefield, was self-will run riot. But he has a logical argument on his side, and I worked real hard to make Col. Tall seem rational in his assessment of the battle. He has to contrast Elias' character, who is arguing human compassion on the other side.''

Elias is Canadian actor Elias Koteas, whose Capt. Staros balks at Tall's orders to send his men into a suicidal frontal assault on entrenched Japanese positions. Koteas confirms that the charged confrontation between Tall and Staros was reflected off-camera - and this was a match-up the younger actor had dreamed of his whole professional life.

``I've been a huge fan of Nick's; watching him in `Rich Man, Poor Man' was one of the reasons I became an actor,'' says Koteas. ``I remember crying; I wanted to affect people the way he was affecting me.

``Twenty years later, you're in this volatile situation with the man, who's going to run over you if you don't know what you're doing, cause he knows what he's doing; he came with pages and pages of where he came from and where he was going.''

Just how strong is Nolte's ``Red Line'' performance? Consider a typical day at the film's Australian rain forest location.

``For one scene, where Tall is yelling at Staros over a field phone, Terry said, `We're going to have full-load howitzers go off behind you, and you have to be more powerful on that phone than the howitzers,' '' Nolte recalls. ``We literally shot it with those guns going off behind me. The percussion would go WHAM! and the grass would move, and I could just feel the concussion come behind me - and, of course, I chose not to wear earplugs, so I couldn't hear for several weeks afterward.

``But the amazing thing was, when we finished the take, I looked over at the camera crew and everyone was jumping around and brushing at their clothes like mad. All of these jungle bugs had fled from the concussion and crawled up the people as they were trying to get away.''

Col. Tall may be the military's loudest mad dog, but his was a comfortable craziness compared to ``Affliction's'' pitiful Wade Whitehouse's. Indeed, Paul Schrader, who adapted and directed the wintry, eminently depressing picture based on Russell (``The Sweet Hereafter'') Banks' novel, lost financing for the project several years ago when Nolte got cold feet.

``At that time, I was really reluctant to go to the place I had to go in `Affliction,' '' Nolte admits. ``I told Paul I wasn't quite ready to do that role yet, the money fell through, and of course Paul was quite upset.''

But Schrader, who has written such relentlessly bleak movies as ``Taxi Driver'' and ``Raging Bull,'' also understood that even an actor of Nolte's dark sensitivities had to work up courage for so hopeless a role.

The deeply damaged son of a vicious, alcoholic farmer (James Coburn), Wade fails at everything - marriage, fatherhood, romance, even his undemanding police chief job in a quiet New England town - and compounds each mistake with misguided passions, intoxicated foolishness and, inevitably, violent rage.

It was enough to intimidate Nolte. Which is mighty intimidating.

``This is an examination of the violence that we all are,'' Nolte says. ``And the difficulty of doing it is that you have to get to the archetypal violence; you can't just play off of your own intellectual anger, or your dislike of this or that. And when you go there, you have to discover that you, literally, are the killer. You are also the compassionate man, that is the broad range of who we are. But that means you have to take the responsibility for violence yourself, just as we all love to take the responsibility for doing good.

``All of which meant that I had to go to that place, and my reluctance to go there was because I still wanted to think in terms of justifiable rage, justifiable murder, as you rationalize daily with your own emotions. And once there, I learned this valuable lesson that I am the killer - and this is what, desperately, Wade Whitehouse is trying to avoid.''

If that sounds unusually erudite for a college flunk-out, it should come as no surprise to those who know Nolte as a voracious researcher. His copious studying for every role, and for his own pleasure, has made the hell-raising lug one of the most authoritative - and original - thinkers in Hollywood.

Well, make that one who lives near Hollywood. For the past several years, Nolte has said no to all but the most outre studio offers (``Red Line,'' Oliver Stone's ``U-Turn''), and concentrated almost exclusively on low-paying but creatively satisfying independent productions.

It's a matter of mental survival, he says.

``The core issue is to get reconnected to your passion,'' he explains. ``You know, when you do films for commercial success, or to repeat a success, you lose your connection to why you act. If you do one of those $100 million films, and you have to sit on it for six months, it's a really draining and life-defeating experience. No matter how you rationalize it, those films are meant for a broad-based audience from 14 to 26. They're not going to examine the truth of the issue; they're trying to get at an appealing piece of entertainment so they can make money. Now, I have no objections to any of that; it's just death for me.

``So, a while back, I became upset with myself a little bit and I decided I would only do things that I truly love,'' he reveals. ``No other consideration. If I go broke, that's fine. If I have to downscale living, that's fine. I haven't made a decent salary since, and I'm loving it.''

Evidently. Nolte has a number of small films coming up, including an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's ``Breakfast of Champions,'' the Albert Brooks comedy ``Muse'' and ``Simpatico,'' co-starring Jeff Bridges and Sharon Stone and based on a Sam Shepard play.

He's also planning to produce and star in a movie version of James Ellroy's ``White Jazz,'' a sequel of sorts to the noir novelist's acclaimed ``L.A. Confidential.'' Unsurprisingly, ``Demon Dog of American Literature'' Ellroy and Nolte are longtime friends.

No wonder; Nolte's always loved writers who can illuminate his own darker places.

``I became an actor to chase the authors, because the authors were speaking to me in a psychological way,'' he recalls. ``In other words, I needed to be on the stage and play this role in `Death of a Salesman' at this time because those were my issues.

``It's because I was psychologically screwed-up,'' he says with a thoroughly unconvincing, ``I'm-joking-here'' laugh. ``It's because the world, to me, is violent and brutal and hard. When you're acting, you can participate in that and explore and express. The minute I hit the stage, I knew I was home. I had no choice; it was about survival.''

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Cover--Color) NICK`S KNACK

In `The Thin Red Line' and `Affliction,' Nolte shows how to make a role his own.

(2) ``I tried to build a man who, when he got to the battlefield, was self-will run riot,'' says Nick Nolte of his Col. Tall character in ``The Thin Red Line.''