FAREWELL, BANDIT
‘Smokey’ star, H’wood hunk is dead at 82
Hollywood heartthrob Burt Reynolds, who zoomed across the screen in “Smokey and the Bandit,” survived the Georgia wilderness in “Deliverance,” and captained convicts against prison guards in “The Longest Yard,” died Thursday after suffering a heart attack. He was 82. The mustachioed moviemaking machine was a bonafide bankable box-office star for much of the 1970s with a string of big-screen hits.
Reynolds won over female fans with rugged good looks, and appealed to movie-going men with muscle cars and a good ol' boy style.
But it was his 1998 role as an adult film director in “Boogie Nights,” a movie he swore he never saw to the end, that earned him his only Academy Award nomination.
Reynolds said he had trouble with the subject matter, and wasn't fond of director Paul Thomas Anderson, whom Reynolds thought was cocky, one of the more potcalling-kettle-black assessments in the history of Hollywood.
Reynolds was just as big in the supermarket tabloids as he was on a movie house marquee. The actor was almost as well known for his off-screen romances with Sally Field and his marriage to Loni Anderson as he was for “The Cannonball Run” or “Semi-Tough.”
But Reynolds took the scrutiny in stride.
"I've been very, very lucky through ups and downs,” Reynolds told USA Today earlier this year. “When you crash and burn, you have to pick yourself up and go on and hope to make up for it. Along the way, I've met some wonderful people. And you always run into some jerks. But that would be the same if you were working for the Ford Motor Company.
"It's a tough business. Very tough. But I always tried to leave a good impression wherever we shot, and I didn't leave any buildings burning or anyBurton thing," he said. "And I've had a good time through it all." Leon Reynolds Jr. was born Feb. 11, 1936 in Lansing, Mich. and raised in Florida. In the 1950s, he was an all-Southern Conference running back at Florida State University with a style that impressed professional scouts, until a knee injury and an automobile accident sacked his NFL dream.
Reynolds dropped out of college and made his way to New York, where he worked as a dockhand, dance hall bouncer, bodyguard and dishwasher before returning to Florida in 1957 to enroll in acting classes at Palm Beach Junior College.
Longtime fans remember him as the blacksmith Quint in the TV western “Gunsmoke” in the early ‘60s, and as California police detective Dan August in the early ‘70s. But it was the searing survival drama “Deliverance” in 1972 — which featured an infamous male rape scene — that turned him into a Hollywood star.
"If I had to put only one of my movies in a time capsule, it would be ‘Deliverance'," Reynolds once said. "I don't know if it's the best acting I've done, but it's the best movie I've ever been in. It proved I could act, not only to the public but me."
By 1974, Reynolds was flexing his comedic muscles in “The Longest Yard” as a former star quarterback who
helps coach a rag-tag team of prisoners after he’s sentenced to 18 months in jail.
But it was the original “Smokey” in 1977 for which Reynolds was best known. The Hal Needham action comedy featured Reynolds as Bo “Bandit” Darville, hired to transport 400 cases of beer from Texas to Atlanta in 28 hours in a black Pontiac Trans-Am. The film was a mega hit, raking in the equivalent of $523 million at today’s box office.
It was also a hit in Reynolds’ personal life. He co-starred with actress Sally Field, sparking a five-year relationship between the two that soured in the late ‘80s.
Reynolds would reminisce repeatedly on his relationship with Field, and more than once declared her the love of his life and “the one that got away.”
“Even now, it’s hard on me. I don’t know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know,” he told Vanity Fair in 2015. “You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up.”
Field responded to news of Reynolds’ death Thursday by fondly remembering the years they spent together.
“There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away,” she said in a statement. “They stay alive, even forty 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 also famously posed for a nude centerfold that graced the pages of Cosmopolitan.
He later said he looked back on the 1972 photo — in which he wore only a smile while lying on a bearskin rug — with a “shudder.”
“I didn’t have to do that. But people thought you had to do it because it, you know, it caused a little fuss and all that and I enjoyed that, but I didn’t enjoy doing it,” he told Katie Couric in 2017.
Reynolds continued to churn out films deep into his 60s and 70s, even as his health failed, and guest-starred on several TV shows like “My
Name is Earl,” “Burn Notice” and “Archer.”
The actor completed a stint in rehab in 2009 after back surgery sparked an addition to painkillers, and by the following year, was under the knife again for a quintuple bypass surgery.
Reynolds was married to English actress Judy Carne from 1963 to 1965, and “WKRP in Cincinnati” star Loni Anderson from 1988 to 1993, with whom he adopted a son, Quinton.
His divorce from Anderson was a famously messy one that reportedly cost Reynolds more than $2 million, and was rife with scandalous accusations of infidelity.
His financial woes didn’t stop there. Reynolds filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996, and was forced to sell off his major assets, including many of his homes.
One of Reynolds’s final roles came in 2017 in the film “The Last Movie Star,” in which he starred as an aging actor coming to terms with the fact that he is past his prime.
“You can never think you’ve made it. If you think that then you’re in deep quicksand,” he told The Hollywood Reporter of the film in March. “But if you think you’re on the way to doing good things, that’s a good thing. I think I’m old enough that I’m on the way because I can’t go back now. It’s too late.”