Burt takes final bow
WITH his mustachioed swagger, muscular physique and twinkling eyes, nobody could match Burt Reynolds for sheer rugged sex appeal.
Reynolds, who died yesterday after a heart attack aged 82, embodied the permissive mores of the ’70s.
He dated the most dazzling beauties including tennis star Chris Evert and actresses Farrah Fawcett, Faye Dunaway, Sarah Miles, Kim Basinger, Dinah Shore and Sally Field — whom he described as the ‘love of my life’. Legend had it that the only woman who turned him down was JFK’s widow Jackie.
His wise-cracking, carefree persona helped him to become one of the most famous, best-paid actors in showbusiness and his status as the globe’s premier sex symbol was cemented by a naked centrefold in Cosmopolitan in 1972.
A publishing first, it was so wildly popular that the issue sold out and had to be reprinted. Some 1.5 million copies were snapped up. Reynolds, though, came to regret it as he feared that the ballyhoo over his hirsute frame cost the film Deliverance the recognition it deserved.
The John Boorman movie about a disastrous canoeing expedition into the Georgia backwoods, notorious for its 10-minute male rape scene, lost out to The Godfather, which won the Oscar for best picture.
In his later years, broke and ill, he gamely kept working. He put out a memoir in 2015 and a biographical film swansong, The Last Movie Star, earlier this year.
He was also set to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood — about the Charles Manson murders — as George Spahn, who rented his ranch to the “Manson Family”, but had not yet filmed his scenes. “It’s not easy for us movie stars,” he said in February. “It’s not all roses and lollipops.” That much is true. His home in Florida was sold by the bank, and much of his iconography was flogged off too to cover his debts. The Pontiac Trans-Am from the 1977 hit Smokey And The Bandit, along with his two Golden Globes, were sold in a 2014 auction, along with the car used in 1981’s comedy The Cannonball Run last year.
He had a quadruple heart bypass, overcame addictions to sleeping pills and painkillers, and endured pneumonia and plastic surgery in later life, which wrecked those rugged good looks.
He used to go for lunch almost daily at Jetty’s waterfront restaurant, wearing his gold Rolex watch and signet ring, and his trademark black cowboy boots. Every head would turn when he arrived. In the final months he had be
come almost a recluse.