Burt Reynolds

Macho movie star whose decision to pose naked may have cost him an Oscar

Burton Leon Reynolds Jr, actor, director and producer. Born: 11 February 1936 in Lansing, Michigan, United States. Died: 6 September 2018 in Jupiter, Florida, United States, aged 82

Burt Reynolds, the wryly appealing Hollywood heartthrob who carried on a long love affair with moviegoers even though his performances were often more memorable than the films that contained them, died after a heart attack on Thursday in Jupiter, Florida. He was 82.

A self-mocking charmer with laugh-crinkled dark eyes, a rakish mustache and a hairy chest that he often bared on screen, Reynolds did not always win the respect of critics. But for many years he was ranked among the top ten film draws worldwide, and from 1978 through 1982 he ruled the box office as few, if any, stars had done before.

From car chase comedies like Smokey and the Bandit to romances like Starting Over to the hit television series Evening Shade, Reynolds delighted audiences for four decades, most often playing a good-hearted good ol’ boy seemingly not that different from his offscreen self.

Throughout an often turbulent career that spanned some 100 films and countless TV appearances, he had close brushes with death, some resulting from his insistence on doing many of his own dangerous stunts. He braved the raging rapids of the Chattooga River between Georgia and South Carolina for a favourite role, as one of four suburbanite pals who take a journey into America’s heart of darkness, in Deliverance (1972).

A decade later he battled an addiction to prescription medication after his jaw was shattered in a fight scene, an accident that left him wizened and led to false whispers that he was dying of AIDS.

Fellow actors praised Reynolds as an exacting artist who worked hard at his craft and fought to overcome many demons, including a volatile temperament.

But he himself projected an air of insouciance and professed not to take his career too seriously. He told the New York Times in 1978, “I think I’m the only movie star who’s a movie star in spite of his pictures, not because of them; I’ve had some real turkeys.” To many in Hollywood, Reynolds was an enigma. Tormented by self-doubt, he was also strong-willed, clashing often with directors and producers. For much of his career he accepted roles, he admitted, “that would be the most fun, not the most challenging,” while turning down more substantive parts, like the one in Terms of Endearment that led to an Academy Award for Jack Nicholson. Reynolds never won an Oscar, though he was nominated for best supporting actor (and won a Golden Globe) for his performance as a paternalistic director of pornographic movies in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights. “I once said I’d rather have a Heisman Trophy than an Oscar,” Reynolds, who played football in college, later wrote. “I lied.”

Burton Leon Reynolds Jr., originally called Buddy to distinguish him from his father, was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in Riviera Beach, Florida, where his father was the police chief.

Reynolds signed a sevenyear contract with Universal Studios in 1958 and was cast in a new NBC series, Riverboat. He rubbed shoulders with Hollywood royalty on the Universal lot and, he recalled, received some valuable advice from Spencer Tracy on how to be a successful actor: Don’t let anybody catch you at it.

Riverboat did not last long, and Reynolds was gone even before the show ended its brief run. (He later said he left after tossing an assistant director in the studio lake.) He returned to New York in 1961 for what turned out to be a brief run on Broadway in the play Look, We’ve Come Through and then went back to Hollywood to play a half-indian blacksmith on the long-running CBS western Gunsmoke. It was his most high-profile role to date, but he tired of being a supporting player and left the show after a couple of years.

His career did not take off until he became a regular on the chat show circuit in the early 1970s, drawing laughs as the guest of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and others by self-effacingly presenting himself as, in his words, “the most well-known unknown”.

“I spent ten years looking virile and saying ‘Put up your hands’,” he told critic Roger Ebert in an interview in 1972. “Suddenly I have a personality. People have heard of me.”

One TV host who was particularly captivated by Reynolds’ charm was singer Dinah Shore. The difference in their ages raised some eyebrows – she was almost exactly 20 years older than he was – but shortly after he was a guest on her popular afternoon show, the two became inseparable, and they remained a couple for several years.

His appearance in Deliverance in 1972 – his first substantial role in a major movie – was a turning point in his career. Almost simultaneously he became something of a popculture punch line.

His star turn in the film was critically praised and prompted talk of a possible Oscar nomination. That he did not get one was attributed by some, including Reynolds himself, to his decision to pose artfully nude as a centerfold in an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine that was published at roughly the same time the movie was released. The photo was a sensation, but the image it projected made it harder for Hollywood to take him seriously as an actor.

“It was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Reynolds said in 2016. “I really wish I hadn’t done that.”

He nonetheless worked steadily for the next decade; he made more than 20 movies between 1973 and 1982, most of them hits. They included two in which he got to revive his college gridiron dreams: The Longest Yard (1974), which cast him as an imprisoned football star who coaches fellow convicts to victory over the warden’s team, and Semi-tough (1977), based on Dan Jenkins’ comic novel about professional football. By the end of the decade Reynolds had made enough money to buy a Hollywood mansion, a private aircraft and a dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida.

Reynolds took on one of his defining roles in 1977, when he played a daredevil driver who leads the law on a madcap chase from Texas to Georgia in Smokey and the Bandit, a boxofficesmashthatspawnedtwo sequels and ignited a romance between Reynolds and his costar, Sally Field. “One of the things people say about Smokey is that you watch two people fall in love on the screen,” Reynolds wrote in But Enough About Me, “and it’s true.”

Although he once called Field “the love of my life,” their relationship ended after a few years. Success gave Reynolds the freedom to try new things, including directing and musical comedy. By the time he returned to the cars-as-stars genre as a stock car racer in Stroker Ace (1983), his career had peaked. One critic called it “the must-miss movie of the summer,” and this time audiences agreed.

Reynoldsandhisstrokerace co-star, Loni Anderson, began living together in 1984 and wed in 1988. The marriage ended in 1993, in acrimony unusual even by Hollywood standards. “The truth is,” Reynolds wrote in 2015, “I never did like her.”

Survivors include their son, Quinton.

RALPH BLUMENTHAL