Burt Reynolds: Mustachioed Hollywood star and centrefold sex symbol 1936-2018
Maintained that nude Cosmopolitan spread cost him Oscar for ‘Deliverance’ role
● Burt Reynolds, whose moustache and twinkling eyes made him a 1970s Hollywood heartthrob, died in Florida on Thursday at the age of 82. His publicist said he died after suffering a heart attack.
Reynolds starred in more than 80 films, including Deliverance, The Longest Yard, Smokey and the Bandit, and Boogie Nights, for which he garnered an Oscar nomination. Last year, he also drew critical acclaim for his performance in the indie movie The Last Movie Star.
At the peak of his career he was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, combining rugged good looks with an easy charm. His heart-throb status even led to him posing naked for Cosmopolitan in 1972 — a strategically positioned arm preserving his modesty.
Hillbilly horror
Reynolds, whose hopes of becoming a professional American football player were dashed by a string of injuries, had starred in TV shows such as Gunsmoke and Dan August before landing the role of Lewis Medlock in the 1972 thriller Deliverance. The film — infamous for its hillbilly male rape scene — earned three Oscar nominations for best picture, best director and best editing. Reynolds would later say that his nude spread that year probably cost him a chance at the golden statuette.
He would become known as much for the hit movies he racked up as the big roles he turned down. Reynolds reportedly walked away from playing the space scoundrel Han Solo in the first Star Wars, claimed to have turned down the role of James Bond and declined the leading role played by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. He also rejected an offer to play retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove in the 1983 hit movie Terms of Endearment. The role was taken up by Jack Nicholson, who took home an Oscar.
Reynolds often said he would rather enjoy himself than push his acting abilities to their limit. “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,” he wrote 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.”
Few actors rivalled Reynolds’s box-office appeal during a prolific run, starting in the ’70s, when he starred in Deliverance, The Longest Yard, Smokey and the Bandit and Starting Over. The films established Reynolds as a likable, adventurous rogue.
On TV, he starred in the CBS series Evening Shade from 1990 to 1994, winning an Emmy award in 1991 for outstanding lead actor in a comedy. A series of flops dimmed Reynolds’s Hollywood star before his performance as a pornographic-film producer in Boogie Nights (1997) earned him an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor.
The Cosmopolitan photo shoot in 1972 stemmed from an impromptu showdown of the sexes between Reynolds and editor Helen Gurley Brown when both were on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Brown challenged Reynolds to pose.
“I thought it would be a kick,” Reynolds told the New York Times in 1972. “I have a strange sense of humour.” Intended as a satire of Playboy, the centrefold became a popular poster, a symbol of the sexual revolution of the ’70s, and, according to Reynolds, an obstacle to being treated seriously as an actor. Deliverance, his breakout movie, hit theatres while the centrefold was still big news.
Married twice, the second time to blonde actress Loni Anderson, Reynolds was also reported
‘I didn’t open myself to … risky parts because I wasn’t interested in challenging myself as an actor. I was interested in having a good time’
to have had romantic relationships with Lorna Luft, Tammy Wynette, Sally Field, Dinah Shore, Adrienne Barbeau and tennis star Chris Evert. He told Vanity Fair in 2015 that Field was the “love of my life” and he regretted their 1980s breakup.
His longtime assistant, Elaine Blake Hall, said in a 1994 memoir that his appearance was so important to him that Reynolds bought a $1,500 hairpiece every week.
His lavish spending, failed investment in a Florida restaurant chain and pricey 1994 divorce from Anderson led Reynolds to file for bankruptcy protection in 1996, claiming $10m in debts. He emerged from bankruptcy in 1998 still owning his multimillion-dollar Florida estate.
In his autobiography, Reynolds called himself “a lower-middle-class Southern boy at heart who’s been fortunate beyond his wildest dreams”.
Burton Leon Reynolds jnr was born on February 11 1936 and raised in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Burt snr, served in the US Army and was part of the D-Day invasions of Europe during World War 2. After the war, he and his wife, Fern, a nurse, moved their two children — Burt and elder sister Nancy Ann — to Riviera Beach, Florida, where he became chief of police.
Reynolds played football at Florida State University until he was injured in a car accident. At Palm Beach Junior College, he tried his hand at acting.
Hollywood honcho
Reynolds made his New York stage debut in 1957 in Mister Roberts. He signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in Hollywood in 1958 and, from 1962 to 1965, played a half-Native American blacksmith in the TV series Gunsmoke.
Funny and self-deprecating, he became a popular guest on TV talk shows. Filling in one night for Carson on The Tonight Show, he delighted the audience by having his first wife, actress Judy Carne, as his guest. The next day, according to Reynolds, he got a call from director John Boorman asking him to try out for Deliverance.
Smokey and the Bandit (1977), starring Reynolds as a good-’ol-boy beer smuggler outrunning and outwitting law enforcement, was a huge hit, second only to Star Wars at the box office that year. It also ignited the romance between Reynolds and Field, his co-star.
Time magazine put Reynolds and Clint Eastwood on its cover in January 1978 as “Hollywood’s Honchos”. Reynolds, outlining the plan for his acting career, told the magazine: “My strategy is to become so bankable that they can’t ignore me.”
The 1988 marriage of Reynolds and Anderson, who had starred in CBS’s WKRP in Cincinnati, was banner entertainment news. People magazine reported that “Burt and Loni at last found a way to turn beefcake and cheesecake into wedding cake”.
The couple adopted a son, Quinton, before Reynolds filed for divorce in 1993, kicking off a bitter legal battle.