Nick Nolte held for drink-driving

Actor Nick Nolte has been arrested on suspicion of drink-driving.

The rugged Hollywood star, who has a history of drink problems, was handcuffed and escorted into the back of a police car after officers stopped him on the Pacific Coast Highway in Agora, California.

Witnesses claim the 62-year-old was speeding and driving erratically, weaving his black Mercedes between oncoming traffic along the busy road yesterday.

Nolte, who starred in Down And Out In Beverly Hills and got an Oscar nomination for The Prince of Tides, was believed to be heading back to his Malibu home when he was stopped.

It is not the first time the 6ft 4in actor has been arrested for alleged drink-drinking, despite vowing in 1990 to "never touch a drop of alcohol again" after years of abuse.

More recently he was arrested for reckless driving, and later for selling fake "draft cards" to underage youngsters so they could get into bars. The judge gave him five years' probation.

Nolte, who also starred in Golden Bowl, has had a rocky life as he struggled to give up drink.

When actress Katharine Hepburn accused him of falling down drunk in every gutter in town, Nolte famously replied: "I've got a few to go yet."

On Oscar night in 1998 when he lost best actor to Roberto Benigni, he did have a drink, declaring: "I needed that one for my soul." Until that night he had been sober for 10 years.

Nolte also has a taste for gingering up his life history with outlandish additions.

He once claimed he was raised in a Mexican whorehouse and that his first wife walked the high wire at a circus. His father, he once said, had a wooden leg, which he left Nolte in his will.

Periodically he admits the stories are false, but for now he insists his father's leg was wooden, and after the funeral, he lost it on a drinking spree in New Mexico.

Nolte, who once modelled on boxes of Clairol Summer Blond hair lightener, has alternated between obsessive drinking and a fanatical health regime. As well as taking up to 60 vitamin pills a day and having human growth hormone injections, he has reportedly filled his six-acre Malibu home with tanks of oxygen and regularly studies his blood under a microscope.

His acting career has been equally sketchy.

After his flop romantic comedy I'll Do Anything, which also starred Julia Roberts, he admitted: "Sometimes I am a whore and just do it for the money. Those have been horrible experiences and memories."

Nolte has played many drinkers. In North Dallas Forty, his football player started each day with a painkiller and a swig of stale beer - a breakfast he was familiar with as a student of the game at Arizona State.

Regional theatre offered the most tolerant home for his restless energy. After 15 years he graduated to the big time with the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. He played the misfit son.

He won over the critics with Who'll Stop the Rain? as a Vietnam veteran caught up in a heroin smuggling scam.

"I really thought I was mature enough to handle the Hollywood crap, but obviously I wasn't," he once admitted.