Burt Reynolds, Movie Star Who Played It for Grins,
Dies at 82
Burt Reynolds Turned Down Boogie Nights, 7 times
Lauren Bacall presents the award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture to Burty Reynolds for his role in Boogie Nights.
The opening of the 46th Academy Awards in 1974, featuring performances by Liza Minnelli, an introduction by Academy President Walter Mirisch, welcoming remarks from host Burt Reynolds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3sM_Fn_Q90
Burt Reynolds and Dyan Cannon present the prestigious Oscars in 1974 for Musical Scores to Charles Chaplin, Raymond Rasch & Larry Russel for Limelight, Ralph Burns for Cabaret at the 45th Academy Awards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmQJqxdLnMo
The
ex-jock from Florida starred in 'Deliverance' and 'Boogie Nights' but preferred
making such populist, fun fare as 'Smokey and the Bandit,' 'The Cannonball Run'
and 'Starting Over.'
Burt Reynolds, the
charismatic star of such films as Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit who
set out to have as much fun as possible on and off the screen — and wildly
succeeded — has died. He was 82.
Reynolds, who received an
Oscar nomination when he portrayed porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas
Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) and was
the No. 1 box-office attraction for a five-year stretch starting in the late
1970s, died Thursday morning at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, his manager,
Erik Kritzer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Always with a wink,
Reynolds shined in many action films (often doing his own stunts) and in such
romantic comedies as Starting Over (1979)
opposite Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) with Dolly Parton; Best Friends (1982) with Goldie Hawn; and, quite
aptly, The Man Who Loved Women (1983) with Julie
Andrews.
Though beloved by audiences
for his brand of frivolous, good-ol'-boy fare, the playful Reynolds rarely was embraced
by the critics. The first time he saw himself in Boogie Nights, he
was so unhappy he fired his agent. (He went on to win a Golden Globe but lost
out in the Oscar supporting actor race to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, a bitter disappointment for him.)
"I didn't open myself
to new writers or risky parts because I wasn't interested in challenging myself
as an actor. I was interested in having a good time," Reynolds recalled in
his 2015 memoir, But Enough About Me.
"As a result, I missed a lot of opportunities to show I could play serious
roles. By the time I finally woke up and tried to get it right, nobody would
give me a chance."
Still,
Reynolds had nothing to apologize for. He was Hollywood's top-grossing star
every year from 1978 through 1982, equaling the longest stretch the business
had seen since the days of Bing Crosby in the 1940s. In 1978, he had four
movies playing in theaters at the same time.
Reynolds' career also is
marked by the movies he didn't make. Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson and Bruce
Willis surely were grateful after he turned down the roles of Han Solo, retired
astronaut Garrett Breedlove and cop John McClane in Star Wars, Terms of Endearment and Die Hard, respectively. He often said that passing on
James L. Brooks' Endearment was
one of his worst career mistakes. (Nicholson won an Oscar for playing
Breedlove.)
Reynolds also indicated he
was Milos Forman's first choice to play R.P. McMurphy (another Nicholson
Oscar-winning turn) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
"backed away" from playing Batman on TV in the 1960s and declined the
part made famous by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman.
In John Boorman's Deliverance (1972), based on a book by James
Dickey, Reynolds starred as macho survivalist Lewis Medlock, one of four guys
from Atlanta who head to the wilderness for the weekend. Filmed by Vilmos
Zsigmond along the Chattooga River near the Georgia-South Carolina border, it
was an arduous production that Boorman shot in sequence.
"When I asked John
why, he said, 'In case one of you drowns,'" Reynolds wrote.
He had good reason. When
Reynolds saw test footage of a dummy in a canoe going over the falls in one
scene, he told Boorman the scene looked fake. He climbed into the canoe, was
sent crashing into the rocks and ended up in the hospital. "I asked
[Boorman] how [the new footage] looked, and he said, 'Like a dummy going over
the falls,'" Reynolds wrote.
Deliverance,
infamous for its uncut 10-minute hillbilly male rape scene ("squeal like a
pig"), was nominated for three Academy Awards but came away empty. It lost
out to The Godfather in the best picture battle.
"If I
had to put only one of my movies in a time capsule, it would be Deliverance," Reynolds wrote. "I don't know
if it's the best acting I've done, but it's the best movie I've ever been in.
It proved I could act, not only to the public but me."
Three months before the
movie opened, Reynolds — once described by journalist Scott Tobias as the
"standard of hirsute masculinity" — showed off his mustache and other
assets when he posed nude on a bearskin rug for a Cosmopolitan centerfold
in April 1972. (Seven years later, he would become the rare man to grace the
cover of Playboy.)
The Cosmo issue sold an outlandish 1.5 million
copies. "It's been called one of the greatest publicity stunts of all
time, but it was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made," he wrote,
"and I'm convinced it cost Deliverance the
recognition it deserved."
A running back in high
school and college who talked with legendary coach Bear Bryant about attending
Alabama, Reynolds put his gridiron skills to use in Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard(1974), playing Paul
"Wrecking" Crewe, who leads his rag-tag team of prison inmates in a
game against the guards. He later starred in Semi-Tough (1977),
another football film.
Smokey and the Bandit (1977),
written and directed by his pal, the legendary stuntman Hal Needham, grossed
$126 million (that's $508 million today, and only Star Wars took
in more that year). Reynolds, who stars as Bo "Bandit" Darville,
hired to transport 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Atlanta in 28 hours, noted
that, unbelievable as it sounds, Smokey was
Alfred Hitchcock's favorite movie.
Reynolds drives a sleek
Pontiac Trans-Am in the film, and after the picture opened, sales of the model
soared. (His black car is mentioned in Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac
Ranch," and the Tampa Bay Bandits, a U.S. Football League team in which he
had an ownership stake, were named for the movie.)
Smokey spawned
two sequels, and Reynolds went on to work again with Needham in The Cannonball Run (1981), another fun-filled
action film that spawned another franchise. His other high-octane films
included Sharky's Machine (1981) and two movies as ex-con
Gator McClusky.
In Smokey, Reynolds starred alongside Sally Field, and
the two were an item for some time. He also had relationships with the likes of
Dinah Shore (20 years his senior), Inger Stevens and Chris Evert, and he talked
about dating Hawn and Farrah Fawcett in his book.
Reynolds was married to
British actress Judy Carne (famous for NBC's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In)
from 1963-66 and then to Loni Anderson, the voluptuous blonde best known for
the CBS sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, from 1988-93.
Both marriages were tempestuous, and his divorce with Anderson was particularly
messy.
After a string of
big-screen failures and the cancellation of his ABC private detective series B.L. Stryker, Reynolds rejuvenated his career by
starring in the 1990-94 CBS sitcom Evening Shade,
created by Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason.
He won an Emmy Award in
1991 for best actor in a comedy series for playing Woodrow "Wood"
Newton, a former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback who returns to his small-town
home in Arkansas to coach a woeful high school team.
Burton
Milo Reynolds Jr. was born on Feb. 11, 1936, in Waycross, Georgia, and raised
in Florida's Palm Beach County. His father was an Army veteran who became the
police chief in Riviera Beach, Florida, not too far from the Everglades.
"My dad was my hero,
but he never acknowledged any of my achievements," he wrote in his memoir.
"I always felt that no amount of success would make me a man in his
eyes."
Then known as Buddy Reynolds,
he played halfback at Palm Beach High School, where his teammate was future New
York Yankees manager Dick Howser, then suited up at Florida State, where Lee
Corso, later a college coach and ESPN analyst, played on both sides of the
ball. But he suffered a knee injury as a sophomore, and that was it for
football and Florida State.
Reynolds enrolled at Palm
Beach Junior College and appeared in a production of Outward Bound,
playing the part handled by John Garfield in the 1944 film adaptation, Between Two Worlds. That led to a scholarship and a
summer-stock stint at the Hyde Park Playhouse in New York. He roomed with
another aspiring actor, Rip Torn, and they studied at the Actors Studio.
After a few appearances on
Broadway and on television, Reynolds was off to Hollywood, where he signed with
Universal and manned the wheel as Ben Frazer on Riverboat, an NBC
Western that starred Darren McGavin.
He met Needham on that
show, and the stuntman would double for him on projects through the years.
Reynolds is referenced in "The Unknown Stuntman," the theme song from
the 1980s ABC series The Fall Guy, and
he played an aging stuntman in Needham's second film, Hooper (1978).
Reynolds joined Gunsmoke for its eighth season in 1962 as Quint
Asper, a half-Comanche who becomes the Dodge City blacksmith. He played the
title warrior in the 1966 spaghetti Western Navajo Joe, was an
Iroquois who worked as a New York City detective in the short-lived ABC series Hawk and portrayed a Mexican revolutionary in 100 Rifles (1969).
Reynolds got another shot
at toplining his own ABC show, playing homicide detective Dan August in a
1970-71 Quinn Martin production, but the series was axed after a season.
Reynolds appeared often on
NBC's The Tonight Show, and in 1972 he became the first
non-comedian to sit in for Johnny Carson as guest host (Reynolds' first guest
that night was his ex-wife, Carne; they hadn't spoken in six years, and she made
a crack about his older girlfriend Shore). He and Carson once engaged in a wild
and improvised whipped-cream fight during a taping, and he got to show a side
of him the public never knew.
"Before I met Johnny,
I'd played a bunch of angry guys in a series of forgettable action movies, and
people didn't know I had a sense of humor," he wrote. "My appearances
on The Tonight Showchanged that. My public image went
from a constipated actor who never took a chance to a cocky, wisecracking
character."
Reynolds showed that
lighter side when he played a sperm in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Sex (1972), and he lampooned his lavish Hollywood
lifestyle in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976).
He was not above making fun of himself and his toupee.
In 1979, he opened the Burt
Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter and in the 1980s, he developed the
syndicated game show Win, Lose or Draw with
host Bert Convy. The set was modeled after his living room.
With his divorce from
Anderson and bad restaurant investments contributing to more than $10 million
in debts, Reynolds filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1996 and came
out of it two years later. In recent years, he sold properties in Florida,
including his fabled 160-acre ranch — The Allman Brothers recorded an album
there in the 1990s — and auctioned off personal belongings.
Survivors include his son,
Quinton; he and Anderson adopted him when he was 3 days old.
Despite the ups and downs
of a Hollywood life, Reynolds seemed to have no regrets.
"I always wanted to
experience everything and go down swinging," he wrote in the final
paragraph of his memoir. "Well, so far, so good. I know I'm old, but I
feel young. And there's one thing they can never take away: Nobody had more fun
than I did."
Borys Kit contributed to this report.
Movies Burt Reynolds turned down from, Bond to Solo
PHOTOS THROUGHT THE YEARS
