Nick Nolte was once described by the late American film critic Pauline Kael as “a master of the mixed-up”, and the consensus is that in real life too the actor is a funny man – in the funny-peculiar sense. When I arrive at a Beverly Hills hotel to interview him, he greets me wearing pyjama bottoms and slippers. “No one ever said I should dress up to meet the press,” he says by way of explanation. “It’s just the way I am. I wore medical clothes for years because they were the most comfortable.”

His obsession with all things medical doesn’t stop with fashion. Eric Bana, who starred with Nolte in Ang Lee’s film The Hulk, remembers him carting oxygen tanks around the set and confiding: “I don’t really need them but sometimes it’s good if people think you’re crazy.” Visitors to Nolte’s six-acre Malibu home are apparently invited into his laboratory to view their blood sample on a medical microscope.

All in all, then, it seems fair to say that Nolte is something of a Hollywood eccentric. Sixteen years ago he was top of People magazine’s annual list of Sexiest Men Alive, after a run of blockbuster roles. Today, though, the chiselled good looks of an all-American high-school quarterback have been replaced by the grizzled and lined face of a man who has spent years battling inner demons – not least alcohol.

He didn’t attend the Oscars ceremony last week, preferring to stay away from the limelight. He wasn’t up for a prize, though he has been nominated twice for the best actor award: once in 1992 for his role in The Prince of Tides as a football coach who has fallen hard for Barbra Streisand’s shrink, and again seven years later for his boozing sheriff in Affliction.

Nolte’s most famous recent starring role was in a police mugshot in 2002, after he was pulled over in his black Mercedes for erratic driving on Malibu’s scenic Pacific Coast Highway (the same stretch on which Mel Gibson was arrested in 2006). Published widely, it showed Nolte with mad scientist’s hair protruding at gravity-defying angles and wild staring eyes. “I should have asked for a cut,” Nolte says. “He sold it, I’m sure, for a good chunk of change.” The actor was put on three years’ probation, including counselling and drug testing, and lost his driving licence.

Nolte, 67, made his name in films such as 48 Hrs, Cape Fear and Hotel Rwanda. “Acting is so much fun for me because it’s time-suspension,” he says. “I have no responsibilities. I can step out of life and don’t have any of the garbage we carry round in life as soon as I step into a trailer on set. I know I should be able to do that in life but I’m not quite able to.”

It is a reference to what he calls his disease: “It’s not alcoholism; it’s addiction,” he says. “And it’s a genetic defect. My lack of dopamine receptor sites leads to the inability for satiation. Running is an excellent way to get it. Sex is good too but round the clock it’s just not the way to go.” After years of heavy drinking he has sobered up and claims to lead a lifestyle dominated by healthy eating (his diet includes fresh produce grown on his ranch) and a rigorous exercise regime.

The son of an agriculture equipment salesman and a department store buyer, Nolte says he and his older sister had an idyllic upbringing. “I grew up in a magical place, a little town in the Midwest. Ten minutes in any direction and you were out of town, in the woods, by the creek, in the lime pit.”

He was a star American football player at school and loved movies, even customising his first car to make watching them more comfortable: “I worked in a packing house all summer to get my first car. I really wanted a ’57 Chevy but I couldn’t afford one so I got a red and black ’55 Plymouth convertible, took the back seat out and put a lawn chair in it to go and see drive-in movies.”

He eventually won a university scholarship to play football but drifted from college to college when his grades failed to match his on-field prowess. While he was at his last college, just outside Los Angeles, a friend took him to see a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which proved an epiphany for Nolte. He spent the next decade training and treading the boards but getting nowhere fast. It wasn’t until he appeared in Rich Man, Poor Man, a popular American mini-series, in the mid1970s that he began to be noticed. Since then he has had starring roles in about 40 films, although the odd one has slipped through his fingers: he was reportedly the original choice to play Superman in 1978 but lost out to Christopher Reeve, having been narrowly beaten for Han Solo in Star Wars by Harrison Ford a year earlier.

Now, after three decades of playing the tough guy on and off screen, he is starring in his first children’s film, The Spiderwick Chronicles, as the voice of a shape-shifting 995-year-old ogre. What scares him in real life? “Everything, probably, when we get down to it. It’s instilled in the American culture to be afraid; even when you’re driving, there’s a cop that’s going to stop you.”

Nolte may soon be adding speed cameras to his list of fears. He and Clytie Lane, his English girlfriend, with whom he has a five-month-old daughter, are thinking of relocating to Britain and are property-hunting here. But, true to his eccentric form, it is not just a house he is interested in buying.

“I always wanted a title like ‘Baron’,” he says. “And I looked on the internet and found I could buy one. I thought, ‘If Steven Spielberg is going to be a ‘Sir’, why can’t I be a baron?’ I don’t even really know what it means but I like the sound of it. ‘Hello, I’m the Baron of Littleville’.”

Whatever you say, your lordship.

My stuff...

On my DVD player I make movies but don’t watch them. It’s like a knee surgeon. He doesn’t come home and watch documentaries on knee surgery. And I stopped watching television about five years ago

In my parking space I’ve got a 1973 Mercedes 600

On my CD player Blue Moon and How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? by Patti Page, right. I remember that being on the hit parade when we just had a radio

I will never throw away My passport. I always carry it because I don’t have a driving licence

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