OUR ‘BUDDY’
Film icon, Jupiter legend Burt Reynolds dies at 82
He was a Florida boy to the end. Burt Reynolds, the actor, director, ’70s superstar and Hollywood sex symbol who never forgot where he grew up, died Thursday at Jupiter Medical Center. He was 82.
Reynolds was the most famous celebrity to emerge from Palm Beach County. He knew it when it was a small, segregated Southern community in the ’50s, and he saw the area grow both socially and culturally.
Reynolds’ acting career, forged from classes he took at Palm Beach Junior College, began in TV in the late 1950s. He became one of the top movie actors of the 1970s, showing his dramatic and comedic range in movies from “Deliverance” to “The Longest Yard” to “Sharky’s Machine” to perhaps his most beloved film, “Smokey and the Bandit.”
He earned an Emmy for “Evening Shade,” his fifth TV series, in the 1990s. And even though his film career dimmed after his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Boogie Nights,” he never stopped working in TV, movies, commercials — whatever paid the bills.
At the same time, Reynolds was never far from home. At the time of his death, he lived in Hobe Sound, and over the years built a studio/ranch, a theater training company and a small museum of his movie memorabilia in Jupiter. Reynolds also filmed movies and his TV series “B.L. Stryker” here.
Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1936. His father, Burt Sr., enlisted in the Army in 1941, and gained a battlefield commission; he won five battle stars and a bronze star in the European theater.
Reynolds’ family moved to Riviera Beach when he was 10. Burt Sr. became a policeman in Riviera Beach and rose through the ranks until he became the police chief.
Reynolds moved through the public school system and in his sophomore year at Palm Beach High he was named first team All State and All-Southern fullback. He was a gregarious, friendly kid, widely liked by his classmates, and a frequent presence in such West Palm Beach neighborhoods as Flamingo Park.
One of his best friends was Dick Howser, the future manager of the World Series champion Kansas City Royals. In those days, Howser was known as “Peanut,” and Reynolds
was known as “Buddy.”
He had a wide range of college scholarships and opted for Florida State, where he was a halfback and roomed with Lee Corso, later a notable sports broadcaster.
At this point, Reynolds’ ambition was to play pro football, but a knee injury put an end to that, as well as his football scholarship. His second choice of a career was to follow his father into police work, and Burt Sr. suggested that he finish college and become a parole officer.
Reynolds began attending Palm Beach Junior College in Lake Worth, where he attended classes taught by Watson B. Duncan III, who nudged Reynolds into trying out for the school play “Outward Bound.” Reynolds won the 1956 Florida State Drama Award for his performance, and for the rest of his life Reynolds considered Duncan his mentor and the most influential person in his life.
The award included a scholarship to the Hyde Park Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Hyde Park, New York, where Reynolds met Joanne Woodward, who helped him get an agent.
“If someone asked me, ‘What are some of the best times of your life?’ I’m sure they would think it was ‘Deliverance’ or ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ but it really was that summer,” he told The Post in 1986. “I was working with Joanne Woodward, starting out. And I saw some wonderful productions of plays and I also saw some actors who were on their way out, struggling to make a living. It was a phenomenal education.”
From there, he was off to the races, working in stock, touring shows — there was a revival of “Mister Roberts” with Charlton Heston in the lead. And there was the usual procession of odd jobs — at one point, Reynolds worked as a bouncer at the Roseland ballroom in New York.
By 1959, Reynolds had moved to Hollywood and snagged a role in the TV series “Riverboat.” TV was awash in promising young actors but Reynolds slowly began amassing good credits, partially because of an easy-going likability that ran alongside a smoldering physical resemblance to Marlon Brando.
In 1962, he was cast in the long-running western series “Gunsmoke” as a half-Indian blacksmith, and continued in the part until 1965, when he left to make low-budget movies and front his own TV series — “Hawk” and “Dan August.”
Reynolds’ life and career changed in 1972, when he was cast in the movie version of James Dickey’s novel “Deliverance,” about a weekend river trip of four somewhat unlikely friends where everything goes terribly, but plausibly, wrong.
Reynolds’ physical presence anchored the film, even though he spent most of the film’s second half moaning in pain from a broken leg. That same year, he posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine. The combination of hulking masculinity and sense of humor catapulted Reynolds into the celebrity stratosphere.
For roughly the next 10 years, Reynolds maintained his stardom through films lowbrow (“White Lightning,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Hooper,” “Cannonball Run”), highbrow (“Starting Over,” “Best Friends,” “The Man Who Loved Women”), successful (“The Longest Yard,” “Semi-Tough”) and disastrous (“At Long Last Love,” “Lucky Lady”).
Reynolds was unusual in that he could play both good-ol’-boy or smooth sophisticate, depending on the script. The former was for commercial clout, while the ambitious prestige films were for proving his acting bona fides, such as Alan Pakula’s “Starting Over” — probably his best performance, as a sad divorcee looking for love.
Reynolds expanded his franchise by directing: “Sharky’s Machine,” a good variation on “Laura,” and “The End,” an amusing black comedy. But even box-office failures never dimmed his basic likability, and his commercial appeal remained enormous. The National Association of Theater Owners voted Reynolds the No. 1 box office star for five straight years, from 1978 through 1982.
In 1979, he opened the $2 million, 400-seat Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, bringing in many friends to do productions such as “The Rainmaker” (Reynolds and Sally Field), “Same Time, Next Year” (Carol Burnett), “Two for the Seesaw” (Martin Sheen) and “Death of a Salesman” ( Julie Harris, Vincent Gardenia). Farrah Fawcett made her stage debut there in “Butterflies Are Free.”
Reynolds occasionally directed shows, and when he didn’t, Charles Nelson Reilly did. Reilly once dismissively called Jupiter “a truck stop,” but Reynolds was committed to bringing theatrical culture to the area, despite those who maintained that Jupiter simply didn’t have the population density needed to support such a theater.
Throughout the ’70s, fame agreed with Reynolds. He became a fixture on “The Tonight Show,” easily moving from a funny guest with a knack for self-deprecation to a funny guest host.
Because of an unhappy early marriage to the actress Judy Carne, he embarked on a series of highly public relationships without benefit of wedlock: Dinah Shore, Sally Field, Chris Evert, etc., a period that ended when he married the actress Loni Anderson in 1988, with whom he adopted a son, Quinton. The wedding ceremony took place on Reynolds’ ranch in Jupiter, and the best man was Vic Prinzi, the quarterback on the Florida State football team when Reynolds was the halfback.
From a period when everything worked, when he was on top of the Hollywood firmament, Reynolds slowly found himself in an environment where nothing worked. He turned down pictures he should have made, such as “Terms of Endearment,” in favor of sure paydays with the drive-in fare with which he had made his initial success, except to severely diminishing returns — “Cannonball Run,” “Stroker Ace.”
And some pictures he made seemed cursed. “Stick,” an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that he directed, went far over budget and failed miserably. So did such follow-ups as “Heat” and “Malone.” A switch to screwball comedy in “Switching Channels” didn’t help, and neither did a character part in “Breaking In.”
“I lost my audience stupidly,” he said in 1987. “I did too many films for the wrong reasons. I didn’t need the money. I was never calculating in terms of what I should do with my career. I had hits in spite of my scripts, not because of them.”
Reynolds re-entered TV with “B.L. Stryker,” a series shot in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast. That was followed by “Evening Shade,” an easy-going success that ran five years and earned him an Emmy Award in 1991.
Reynolds had downshifted, and he knew it. “It’s a pure entertainment show, and that’s what I do best,” he said of “B.L. Stryker.” “I gave up on doing ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ a long time ago.”
Despite a 15-year run at high salaries — Reynolds’ peak salary was $5 million for a picture — he had an extravagant overhead, and frequently made bad business decisions. His highly publicized marriage broke up in 1993, the dinner theater closed, and, in 1996, he went bankrupt, owing more than $11.5 million.
Court filings revealed a lavish lifestyle — Reynolds’ overhead was estimated at about $1.5 million a year, with $100,000 a year being spent on toupees alone — complicated by the catastrophic failure of a couple of restaurant chains in which he had invested in the ’80s, along with $6 million in debt from the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater.
Reynolds emerged from bankruptcy two years later, with creditors receiving less than 20 cents on the dollar.
He once again made a bid to establish himself as a character actor with a leading role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” playing the gentle head of a looseknit family of porn performers and technicians. It was a performance of style and authority, and it won Reynolds nearly every critics award, including the Golden Globe and the New York Critics Award. The award that got away was the Oscar, for which he was nominated and which he deserved.
But there was no real followup. Through the rest of the ’90s and the 21st century, Reynolds was relegated to a succession of direct-to-video movies (“End Game,” “Grilled,” “Broken Bridges,” “Randy and the Mob,” “Deal,” “Delgo,” etc.), with the occasional theatrical — the remake of “The Longest Yard,” improbably starring Adam Sandler in the part once played by Reynolds, or playing Boss Hogg in the remake of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
He developed a sideline in teaching acting, first at the Burt Reynolds Theater Institute, which later moved to Lake Park and then North Palm Beach after his underappreciated Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum closed down for the construction of Harbourside Place in Jupiter. He also made a habit of supporting budding filmmakers, often attending awards ceremonies for student films.
In 2015, Reynolds experienced a surge of interest when he published his second memoir, “But Enough About Me,” which became a New York Times bestseller. Major magazines did reappraisals of his career, and he appeared on national talk shows. In early 2016, he attended the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin to promote a documentary about the making of “Smokey and the Bandit.” He also discussed his memoir at the Palm Beach Book Festival.
In early 2018, he once again drew widespread national media attention for “The Last Movie Star,” a film about an aging celebrity that traded on Reynolds’ outsized legend. And even more when he was cast in Quentin Tarantino’s film about Manson-era Los Angeles, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which he was supposed to begin filming in a few weeks.
Reynolds’ friends were numerous, for he was widely known and appreciated for a personal loyalty and humor that was mirrored in his on-screen personality, and maintained close friendships for decades.
He endured numerous health problems over the years, from a 1990 narcotic addiction for relief from a jaw injury suffered on the set of “City Heat,” to a 2009 addiction to prescription painkillers to a 2010 quintuple bypass. In a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he told a reporter: “I haven’t had two hours of no pain for, gosh, I don’t know, honey, 20 years.”
Although his work took him all over the world, he always maintained a Florida residence, initially the 160acre farm in Jupiter, later a 3-acre property on the Intracoastal in Hobe Sound that he bought in 1980, called Valhalla. He sold it in 2015, but still lived there at the time of his death.
“Thomas Wolfe was never from Jupiter,” he once said.
And Palm Beach County will never see a celebrity like Burt Reynolds again.