Last role showed he kept his love of acting to end

WHEN I called Burt Reynolds at his Florida home I wondered how he’d react to my opening question.

How did it feel to be a washed-up, hobbling has-been with a bad wig, a car-crash love life and a six-decade career built on iffy money-spinning movies rather than Oscar winners?

Burt, 82, laughed his socks off before replying in that still-smokey voice: “Well ma’am, I guess I was just the guy for the role!”

He was plugging 2017’s The Last Movie Star, where he played a faded screen icon looking back at his life.

But neither of us knew that Burt’s typically candid reflections on his own career would be some of his last public words. Because despite his health history – spinal surgery, a heart complaint, painkiller addiction – he said he felt reinvigorated.

The Smokey and The Bandit star was rightly proud of his performance and told me: “I did things, emotionally, I haven’t done in a long time. I went to places I needed to go.

“When you’ve spent your career driving fast cars and punching and shooting people you don’t get much chance to show some vulnerability.

“This movie gave me a chance to show my soul. I feel I am, only now, ready to do my best work.”

When I asked about his health, Burt insisted he was “doing fine”.

Regrets? He had a few. Like that Cosmo bearskin-rug centrefold, £8.5million debts that made him bankrupt and, worst of all, losing the love of his life, Sally Field, in 1982.

But Burt saw life through those trademark rose-tinted glasses. And while he may have known more about his failing health than he let on, his passion for acting endured.