BURT REYNOLDS Remembering the screen icon and legendary heart-throb
With his wicked smile and his trademark moustache, Reynolds became a hit movie star – and an even bigger hit with the ladies
With his trademark moustache, flirtatious charm and tendency to play the lovable rogue, 1970s screen icon Bert Reynolds was known just as much for his off-screen love affairs as he was for his film roles. The notorious ladies’ man, who died at age 82 on Sept. 6 in Florida from a reported heart attack, starred in some of the biggest films of the ’70s while romancing a string of high-profile beauties and marrying and divorcing twice: to Judy Carne and Loni Anderson.
But it was his five-year romance with his Smokey and the Bandit co-star Sally Field that Reynolds considered his most significant relationship, with the actor describing the Academy Award winner as the “love of his life”. “It was real. I really cared for her. She’s very, very special,” Reynolds said in a 2015 interview with WHO.
On his passing, Field, 71, issued a statement saying, “There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away,” she said. “They stay alive, even 40 years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart, for as long as I live. Rest, Buddy.”
Reynolds shot to fame with films such as 1972’s Deliverance, 1974’s The Longest Yard and 1977’s Smokey and The Bandit. His breakout turn as Lewis Medlock in the Oscarnominated Deliverance made Reynolds a star, however he later regretted posing naked for a centrefold in the April 1972 issue of US Cosmopolitan magazine.
“I wish I hadn’t done it because I wasn’t taken as a serious actor,” Reynolds, who later famously turned down Harrison Ford’s role of Hans Solo in Star Wars and Richard Gere’s role in Pretty Woman, told Business Insider in 2016. “I wasn’t pleased that I did it, but at the time I wanted everyone to understand the humour of it.”
When roles began to dry up in the early 1990s, Reynolds returned to television, winning a Best Actor Emmy for his role in the sitcom Evening Shade. In more recent years, his turn as pornographic film director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) put him back on the radar and earned him a Golden Globe and his first Academy Award nomination.
Of his tendency to play rascals, Reynolds said he always approached his roles with both professionalism and a sense of humour. “I think you have to be a little bit of a rascal, because people would be disappointed if I didn’t do that,” he told The New York Times. “We’re only here for a little while, and you’ve got to have some fun, right?”
With charisma and that famous twinkle in his eye, Reynolds had just as much success with beautiful women as he did at the box office at the height of his career. He was briefly engaged to Lori Nelson in 1960s before a short-lived marriage to Judy Carne three years later after six months of dating.
After their split in 1966, Reynolds romanced a string of beauties including the late Inger Stevens, Dinah Shore, Lorna Luft, tennis champ Chris Evert and French beauty Catherine Deneuve.
The star instantly fell for Field when he cast her in his hit 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit. Their high-profile romance lasted for five years. In 1988, he married actress Loni Anderson and the pair later adopted a son, Quinton. The couple’s divorce in 1994 was one of the nastiest in Hollywood history, with Reynolds telling WHO in 2015, the marriage was “a really dumb move on my part.” Anderson paid respects to her late ex-husband after his death telling Fox News, “He was a big part of my life for 12 years, and Quinton’s father for 30 years. We will miss him and his great laugh.”
“You’ve got to have some fun, right?” —Burt Reynolds