The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
GEORGIA MOVIE-INDUSTRY ICON
He blended machismo, wise-guy playfulness to launch career. Reynolds, 82, considered Georgia to be his ‘good luck state.’
Burt Reynolds, whose blend of Southern-fried machismo and wise-guy playfulness launched his worldwide celebrity in the 1970s, first as a freewheeling chat-show guest, then as a nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan magazine and finally as a Hollywood action star, has died at 82.
His agent, Todd Eisner, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. Additional details were not immediately available.
Tire-screeching fare such as “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977) and “The Cannonball Run” (1981) largely bookended Reynolds’s reign as a top box-office draw and cemented his onscreen persona as a carefree man’s man with an arm around a lady and his foot on the gas pedal.
Off-screen, the mustachioed actor developed a reputation as a hard-drinking playboy whose charm alternated with a volcanic, hair-trigger temper. He made atrocious career decisions, propelled in part by a drug addiction and dramatic financial reversals. A low point was his excruciatingly public break-up and divorce from actress Loni Anderson in the early 1990s.
Critical plaudits and peer recognition appeared wildly beyond his grasp when, in the twilight of his professional life, he summoned a precisely calibrated performance in “Boogie Nights” (1997) as a 1970s movie pornographer with delusions of artistry.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, “Boogie Nights” earned Reynolds an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He lost to Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting” but the attention seemed a testament to Reynolds’s resilience.
In a career spanning five decades and more than 100 movie and television roles, Reynolds said he mostly chose projects that seemed “fun” at the time.
The rebellious son of a Florida police chief, Reynolds ventured into acting in the late 1950s after injuries pushed him out of college football. Theater class, he wrote, was where he could find “pretty girls.”
With his pillowy lips, rugged build and uncooperative hairline, Reynolds resembled a young Marlon Brando but possessed little of that actor’s depth and subtlety. Yet Reynolds’ sexual charisma and willingness to perform his own stunts in action sequences helped ease his way into the ranks of Hollywood hopefuls.
He spent the next 15 years as a journeyman in TV and movie Westerns and cop shows, seemingly doomed to serve out an artistic sentence as a C-lister. He made news in the early 1970s when he temporarily gave up his hard-living lifestyle to begin a long-term relationship with the sweet-mannered singer and TV personality Dinah Shore, 20 years his senior.
Reynolds’s rise to the front-rank of stardom was owed almost entirely to his unpredictable and disarming appearances on late-night television with hosts such as Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson. Reynolds dispensed with the expected niceties and platitudes about Hollywood and family, and he poked fun at his career, saying he was known for movies “they show in airplanes or prisons or anywhere else the people can’t get out.”
Then-director John Boorman, who once said he was intrigued by the actor’s blend of “power, vulnerability and style,” provided Reynolds with his breakthrough role in “Deliverance” (1972): an overconfident Atlanta businessman whose canoeing adventure with three friends in Appalachia turns into a gruesome tale of backwoods rape and murder.
A Time magazine film reviewer described Reynolds as “exceptional” amid a firstrate cast that also included Jon Voight, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty.
“Deliverance” was a revelation of Reynolds’ potential, but the film was released after his Cosmo centerfold appearance. He insisted the photo — he was stretched out on a bearskin rug with his arm discreetly placed between his legs — was done in the spirit of satire.
Male pinups were almost unheard of in mainstream ladies’ magazines, and Reynolds’ image proved a sensation, quickly selling out all 1.5 million copies. He later said his hope of being taken seriously by audiences and critics was undermined by the centerfold and may have cost him an Oscar nomination for “Deliverance.”
During the next several years, Reynolds appeared in more than a dozen hit movies, playing moonshiners (“White Lightning”), policemen (“Hustle”), gridiron veterans (“The Longest Yard,” “Semi-Tough”) and an aging stuntman (“Hooper”).
“I probably could do a film about the sewer system in Moscow and make it commercial,” he joked at the time.
His defining films — “Smokey and the Bandit,” “The Cannonball Run,” and their stitched-together sequels — drew astounding profits on gossamer plots.
“Smokey and the Bandit,” often described as a 90-minute car chase between Reynolds and an exasperated sheriff played by Jackie Gleason, cost about $4 million and grossed more than $100 million, making it the year’s most profitable film after “Star Wars.”