Meet the Actor Whose ‘Butt Gets Special Billing’ in Season 2 of ‘The Pitt’

“I had the first line,” he recalls. “The music was playing, the curtain was ready to go up ... and I crossed the stage over to Julie and said, ‘Julie, I can’t remember my line!’ She told me what my line was and said, ‘Sweetheart, it’s OK. I just finished throwing up in my dressing room, I’m so nervous.’  ”

A three-year run on the daytime soap Search for Tomorrow brought Nouri a Daytime Emmy nomination and steady TV work. Then came Flashdance, the 1983 cultural phenomenon that catapulted him to a new level of fame. After reading the script, the actor turned down work with famed director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) on his final film, The Osterman Weekend, and instead chose the scrappy underdog story of a welder who dreams of dancing.

“Flashdance touched me in ways that the Peckinpah script did not,” says Nouri, whose gut instinct was right-on. The Osterman Weekend limped in at No. 90 at the box office that year. Flashdance soared to No. 3.

The film had such a global impact, he says, that on a press junket to Japan “the kids wore torn sweatshirts and leg warmers and were breakdancing. It was really something to be part of that. I haven’t experienced anything like it since.”

The film also cemented Nouri’s forever heartthrob status. To this day, women approach him on the street. “They say, ‘Oh my God, I had such a crush on you when I was a teenager!’ And I say, ‘What about now?’  ”

In the years that followed, Nouri gravitated toward TV projects rooted in real life and social consequences, from Quiet Victory: The Charlie Wedemeyer Story (1988), about a football coach confronting ALS, to Shattered Dreams (1990), which exposed the shocking domestic abuse committed by John Fedders, enforcement director at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“He was evil,” says Nouri, who found that filming the scenes of abuse with co-star Lindsay Wagner was disturbing but “also rewarding because it had a very positive impact on the audience. And the responses that we got were [that] a lot of women who saw it reached out for help.”

Nouri paired his gravitas with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Sandra Bullock (The Proposal) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (The Terminal). But it was while working opposite Sean Connery on Finding Forrester that Connery got a taste of Nouri’s off-camera humor. After director Gus Van Sant asked the actor to perform his rumored impression of Connery for the crew, “I went to the prop department, got a golf bag, filled it with bottles of J&B, went to the wardrobe, put on a kilt, had the makeup people powder my hair white, and I walked onto the set.”

Armed with his best Scottish brogue, Nouri had the crew in stitches — only to discover that Connery was standing behind him, laughing along.

And while a new generation of TV viewers came to know him through regular roles on The O.C., Damages and Yellowstone, Nouri considers his full-circle return to the Broadway stage in the mid-1990s — as King Marchand in the musical Victor/Victoria — to be “the summit” of his career.

“Singing a wonderful score by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse and kissing Julie Andrews eight times a week, that wasn’t bad,” he says, “Yeah, not a cross to bear.”

And taking his Broadway-loving parents backstage to meet Andrews “really popped my father’s buttons.”

Andrews was one of many illustrious pals who sent the actor a happy 80th birthday message on his birthday, the night before our December Zoom, as friends feted him at a party in New York.

“I sang “O Sole Mio,’  ” he says, “and did a little a little soliloquy from Zorba the Greek.”

But the grandfather of three didn’t go overboard with the birthday toasts. Once a connoisseur of Cuban cigars and single malt whiskey, he has sold off his collections of both to ensure the “third act of my play” continues with vibrancy and vigor.

At home in Los Angeles, as he keeps an eye out for a screwball comedy to come his way, Nouri maintains a calm, Zen rhythm — hiking with his terrier, Charlie; listening to James Taylor ballads; and meditating, a daily practice he’s kept for more than 50 years.

“There’s a wonderful saying,” he says. “  ‘Enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes you accident-prone.’ So I practice.”