Burt Reynolds
Actor whose amiable beefcake image made him Hollywood’s top box-office draw of the 1970s
BURT REYNOLDS, the American actor, who has died aged 82, became Hollywood’s biggest name in box-office beefcake in the 1970s as the genial hero of films such as Deliverance and the phenomenally successful moneyspinner Smokey and the Bandit. Despite a receding hairline and an everwidening girth, Reynolds continued to play all-action he-man roles until the mid1980s, when a sudden and severe illness prevented him from working for more than a year. The resulting press coverage was uniformly unsympathetic, far outweighing the unwelcome attention he had received in 1973 when the agent of his British co-star Sara Miles died in suspicious circumstances during filming of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.
Reynolds was rumoured, first, to have incurable cancer and, later, to be dying from Aids. He became, in his own words, “untouchable and unemployable” and did not work again until the end of the decade.
In order to stay solvent he began accepting any acting work he could get, but that included quirky roles such as that of an ageing safe-cracker in Bill Forsyth’s lowbudget production Breaking In (1989). The star received a paltry $150 a day, but was “as good as he has ever been” according to the respected critic David Thomson.
Reynolds had focused his early film career on cutting a lucrative deal, paying little heed, on the whole, to the artistic value of the material he took on. Only after establishing his reputation at the box office with mindless hits did he turn to more challenging roles, but with his trademark moustache and brazenly unconvincing toupees, it was some time before he was given credit for his wit and intelligence.
These qualities emerged in the early 1990s when he conceived and starred in the television sitcom Evening Shade. The series, which featured a collection of his friends, attracted large audiences and won Reynolds an Emmy, his first professional award. Then in 1997 he received his first Oscar nomination, for his sympathetic turn as Jack Horner, an ageing and curiously sexless director of pornographic films, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.
Burton Leon Reynolds was born on February 11 1936 in Waycross, Georgia, one of three children. His parents (of Irish and Cherokee Indian extraction) moved to Florida when his father, a one-time cowboy also named Burton, was appointed police chief of Riviera Beach. Reynolds recalled that he had been a “feisty and rebellious kid”, and that he had run away from home on more than one occasion.
He showed some interest in acting while at school, appearing in school plays, but his real passion was for American football. Hoping to become a professional, he won a scholarship to Florida State University as a half-back. But a car accident and repeated knee injuries put an end to his ambitions and he dropped out of college in his second year, moving to New York, where he took a series of part-time jobs, working as a ballroom bouncer and as a dishwasher at a Schrafft’s restaurant.
After two years Reynolds returned to Florida and decided to try acting as a career. He enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College in 1957 and the following year won the Florida Drama Award and the opportunity of a booking at the Hyde Park Playhouse in New York. His professional stage debut was as Mannion in a revival of Mister Roberts (1958), and the following year he made his first television appearance with a tiny role in M Squad. Having signed a seven-year contract with Universal, he fell out with the director, and broke his contract after only 26 episodes of the Western series Riverboat.
His reputation as difficult and a propensity for getting into fights restricted him to work as a stunt extra. And he had little more success on Broadway, where a production of Look, We Have Come Through in which he was appearing closed after only five days.
In the early 1960s Reynolds turned up on television, usually playing heavies and Indians. He played the mixed-race Quint Asper in Gunsmoke and in 1966 took the lead in Hawk, a series about an Iroquois Indian sheriff.
Reynolds developed his film career by accepting virtually any role offered, starting with Angel Baby in 1961 and featuring in low-grade projects such as Operation CIA (1965) and the spaghetti Western Navajo Joe (1967). By the dawn of the 1970s he had resigned himself to being a jobbing actor.
But his fortunes changed dramatically when be began to appear on late-night chat shows. He had always described himself as “a constipated actor” who did not take risks on screen. On television, he came across as self-aware, funny and relaxed. “The talk shows changed everything,” he said.
“Suddenly I had a personality.”
Reynolds sealed his public popularity by posing as Cosmopolitan magazine’s first naked centrefold in 1972.
“I got a real kick out of it,” he recalled. “It was satirising Playboy, which I hate, so I was very keen to do it.”
Later that year, he finally achieved film stardom and critical approval in John Boorman’s cerebral Deliverance. The film, which featured in bleak detail the ordeals of a group of urban businessmen on a survival holiday in the Appalachian mountains, proved an ideal vehicle for Reynolds’s muscular charm. Fans of what he described as his “gun-toting, ladies’ man” image were surprised when he accepted a role in Woody Allen’s zany Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex … But Were Afraid to Ask, before going on to star as a bumbling policeman in the ill-fated comedy caper Fuzz with Raquel Welch (both 1972).
On the strength of these early successes, Reynolds was considered for the role of James Bond after Sean Connery left the series, but he turned the producers down, later explaining: “An American can’t play James Bond. It just can’t be done.”
Meanwhile, he was showing the same lack of discrimination in his choice of projects that he had had as an eager newcomer: Shamus, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and White Lightning (all 1973) did little to burnish his reputation, though they enriched his bank account. He fared better with critics the next year playing a jailed American footballer who coaches the prison team in Robert Aldrich’s comedy The Longest Yard.
Off screen, too, Reynolds showed little inclination to be accepted as a serious actor. He was involved in several fist fights in bars and earned a reputation for hostility to the press. He rejected roles which might have won him Academy Awards, notably the part of the boozy astronaut in Terms of Endearment that would earn Jack Nicholson a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1984. Nevertheless, he remained enormously popular with fans of the action movie genre.
His biggest single film hit was Smokey and the Bandit (1977), in which he played a truck driver flouting the speed limit across various American states. Such was the film’s success that a sequel rapidly followed. Reynolds then made a series of cheerfully imitative pictures, including an all-star car-race caper The Cannonball Run (1981), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982 – as the sheriff, with Dolly Parton playing the madam of the “Chicken Ranch”) – Smokey and the Bandit Part III (1983) and The Cannonball Run II (1984). After remaining the top box office draw in Hollywood for more than a decade – a feat unequalled since Shirley Temple – Reynolds found his run of success ending abruptly during the filming of a fight scene in 1984 when he was accidentally struck on the jaw with an iron chair. Reynolds developed temporomandibular joint disease, but the condition remained undiagnosed for almost a year.
His hearing, balance and speech were all affected, he suffered from migraine and sensitivity to light, and because he could not eat properly lost several stone.
His weight loss, haggard appearance and slurred speech led to a flurry of rumours that he was suffering from cancer or Aids.
After consulting 13 dentists Reynolds’s disease was diagnosed and he spent the next three months having each of his teeth realigned.
“It was hard,” he remembered, “I knew I wouldn’t be number one forever but I guessed I would just slide out gently, not go from being top to having no work at all.”
He did not work for another three years. Friends and former employers shunned him and he found himself facing bankruptcy with debts of $16 million. Eager to pay off his creditors and rebuild his career, he spent his time teaching acting at the theatre school he had started in Florida in 1979. He also reverted to his earlier habit of accepting any film role he was offered, including a series of tepid comedies such as Rent-a-cop (1987) and Switching Channels (1988).
Reynolds’s rehabilitation was completed when he started work on the sitcom Evening Shade in 1990. He had married his long-time girlfriend Loni Anderson in 1988 and the couple adopted a baby boy, Quinton. (His first marriage to the Britishborn actress Judy Carne lasted three years and had ended in 1965 after accusations by Carne that Reynolds beat her.)
Eager to reflect what he saw as his new “family man image”, Reynolds rejected suggestions that his role in Evening Shade should be that of a divorcee, still chasing girls. “I wanted to play a family man,” he insisted. “I never guessed how fantastic having a kid could be and I certainly wanted to get that across in the series.”
When Reynolds got his way, portraying a happily married husband and father teaching football in a small American town, Evening Shade proved an immediate success. He chose the cast and surrounded himself with a group of close friends, including Marilu Henner as his wife, and Charles Durning. Scripts were well-written, production quality and performances were uniformly high, and Reynolds won the Emmy for Best New Comedy in 1992.
Despite this, he was experiencing another crisis in his domestic life. After 11 years with Loni Anderson, five as a married couple, Reynolds accused his wife of infidelity and admitted to his own two-year affair with a waitress. In a blaze of publicity involving vast sums of money and lie detector tests the couple were divorced in 1993.
The messy break-up added to the pressures on Reynolds’s finances, already stretched on account of his extravagant lifestyle and failed investments. In 1996 he filed for bankruptcy, at the same time attempting a film comeback as a repulsive congressman, the only highlight of the otherwise lurid and lacklustre Striptease. Although a financial success, the picture was panned by critics. They looked with greater favour on his follow-up, Boogie Nights (1997); he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and won a Golden Globe Award.
He hated making it, however, telling an interviewer: “It just wasn’t my kind of film – it made me very uncomfortable.” He was asked about the rumour that he had admitted to wanting to hit the film’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, in the face. “No, I didn’t want to hit him in the face,” he said. “I just wanted to hit him. I don’t think he liked me.” Reynolds was so displeased with the film that he fired his agent after making it.
In 2005 he starred in a remake of The Longest Yard, with Adam Sandler playing Paul Crewe, the role Reynolds originated in the 1974 version. The older actor, as Nate Scarborough, earned a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actor. His output in later years, mostly forgettable, included television movies, some of which he directed, and video games, notably Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in which he enjoyed himself voicing a corrupt Texan property developer.
In the low-key British comedy A Bunch of Amateurs (2008) Reynolds gave a jovial performance as a washed-up star tricked into playing King Lear in an amateur dramatic production, expecting Stratford-uponavon. At the premiere in London in aid of the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund the Queen was reported to have found the film amusing.
Last year, in self-reflective mode, Reynolds played an elderly film star haunted by the possibility that he has not fulfilled his potential, in Adam Rifkin’s
The Last Movie Star.
Burt Reynolds is survived by his son.