Actor Craig T. Nelson has been working in Hollywood since the late 1970s.
He’s learned a thing or two on his journey.
And Coach star Craig T. Nelson had one lesson about values that Hollywood will hate.
Craig T. Nelson says farm life is where American values are found
Actor Craig T. Nelson is best known for playing Minnesota State Screaming Eagles head football coach Hayden Fox on the ABC sitcom Coach.
He won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his role in the series that ran for nine seasons before its finale aired in 1997.
Nelson tried to get his career in show business started in the early 1970s by doing standup comedy and joining the sketch comedy group The Groundlings.
He left the industry in 1973 to move to rural Northern California near Mount Shasta with his family to live in a cabin he built with money he inherited from his mother.
The cabin had no running water or electricity.
“And that was a seven-year journey of absolute struggle, having never built anything before,” Nelson recalled.
He built the cabin using a book that a friend gave him on building log cabins.
“[It] showed me a weakness and a character defect that I was carrying, which was a lack of patience,” Nelson recalled. “And I have no knowledge of how to do this. And so I had to learn. And you learn with a family. I had two kids at the time. Noah, my youngest son, was born there up in the mountains.”
Nelson learned a valuable lesson living off the grid
The Coach star used determination and got out of his comfort zone to make life work living in a cabin.
“And eventually it got done,” Nelson said. “It got done with community, it got done with help from people that you normally wouldn’t go to and or ask for help.”
He took on a variety of jobs to make ends meet.
“And I learned, and so I was an apprentice plumber,” Nelson continued. “I was a surveyor. I logged. I was a janitor. I taught school. I mean, I did anything I could to make some money and ended up on food stamps, of course, and had to eventually hitchhike back to Hollywood and try to establish myself as some kind of actor.”
Moving back to Hollywood eventually paid off for him.
Nelson starred in the 1982 hit Poltergeist along with All The Right Moves and Action Jackson before landing the lead role on Coach.
The 80-year-old stars in the movie Green and Gold about a down-on-his-luck Wisconsin farmer who bets on the Green Bay Packers to win the Super Bowl.
Nelson said his experiences living in a cabin helped him connect with the character.
He got a newfound appreciation for farm life from the movie.
“Spend a couple of weeks on a farm and, you know, you’ll find out quickly where your heart lies,” Nelson explained. “The margins that they’re living on are so small. And so you identify with the struggle, and the beauty of that is, is that within that there is a humor and there’s a reverence and there’s a sense of community and… American values, traditional.”
Craig T. Nelson is one of the Hollywood celebrities who’s lived the struggles of everyday life.
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