Nolte, Charles M.

Charles Miller Nolte was born on November 3, 1923 in Duluth, Minnesota. Nolte was the youngest of four siblings born to Julius Nolte and Mildred Miller. Mildred Miller was a creative amateur musician, and Julius Nolte was an acclaimed adult educator and Director of the Center for Continuing Education (1937-1943) and Director and Dean of the General Extension Division (1943-1963) at the University of Minnesota. Charles Nolte graduated from Wayzata High School in 1941 and performed summer stock at what later became Old Log Theatre. He enrolled at the University of Minnesota for two years, then enlisted in the United States Navy, serving as a pilot from 1943 until 1945. After leaving the Navy, Nolte enrolled at Yale University, graduating in 1947.

Nolte made his Broadway debut in a 1947 production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Katharine Cornell. Later roles included the title role in the 1951 Broadway production of Billy Budd, which garnered him critical attention and acclaim, followed by a co-starring role opposite Henry Fonda in the original 1954 production of The Caine Muntiny Court Martial .

Moving to Europe after the close of Caine Mutiny, Nolte took acting jobs across the continent. He was reunited with Katharine Cornell in Rome in Under Ten Flags (1957). In Paris he was in Medea starring Judith Anderson, Christopher Plummer and Mildred Natwick (1955-1956.) On the London stage he appeared in his own work, The Summer People (1961), based loosely on the Nolte family.

Nolte also appeared in a number of films and television shows between 1950 and 1961, including War Paint (1953), The Steel Cage (1954), Ten Seconds to Hell (1959) and the television series Private Secretary (1953-1956), 13 Demon Street (1959), and Tales of the Vikings (1960).

His greatest success as a playwright was the off-Broadway production, Do Not Pass Go, which open in April, 1965, where his performance and the play were reviewed favorably in the New York Times . The play was not a box office success and closed after two weeks.

In 1962, at age 39, Nolte returned to Minnesota and enrolled in the graduate program in Theatre at the University of Minnesota. He received his MA in 1963 and PhD in 1967, after which he was hired as an assistant professor in the Theatre Department. He wrote ten plays that were produced by Theatre companies in the United States and Europe, including A Night at the Black Pig and A Summer Remembered . He was also a sought-after director, with over 100 productions to his credit at local and regional Theatres. He collaborated with composer Dominick Argento as the librettist for The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe (1975-1976) and The Dream of Valentino (1993).

At the University, Nolte was a popular instructor and sought-after mentor. The University of Minnesota honored him in 1997 by naming a theatre space within the Rarig Center the Charles Nolte Experimental Theatre. He is also credited with inspiring the founding of the Minnesota Playwrite's Lab.

The various phases of Nolte's professional life are connected and documented by his evolving personal experiences as a gay man living in an international, cosmopolitan gay subculture and working in mainstream commercial Theatre. Though Nolte was involved with a number of men during his lifetime, he and Terence Kilburn, a British actor and artistic director, identified themselves as life partners from the early 1960s and remained together for the remainder of their lives.

Charles Nolte died in Minneapolis on January 14, 2010.