BURT REYNOLDS

Rated America’s number one box-office attraction for five successive years between 1977 and 1981, and with a 60-year career across film, TV and theatre, Burt Reynolds was one of Hollywood’s most resilient stars. “My being nominated this year is no comeback story,” he said upon being shortlisted for 1998’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar, for Boogie Nights. “I simply refused to go away.”

Born in Lansing, Michigan, on 11 February 1936, Burton Leon Reynolds Jr. headed to New York to become a stage actor, appearing in a 1956 production of Mister Roberts with Charlton Heston. Television work followed in Riverboat, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone and Hawk over the next decade, along with several movies, with Reynolds often in Native American roles.

His big break came in Deliverance (1972), playing Lewis, the leader of a group of city slickers whose rafting

adventure in the Appalachians descends into a gruelling battle for survival. Reynolds’ brand was man of action and good ol’ boy, with movies such as The Longest Yard (’74), Hustle (’75) and The Cannonball Run

(’81) cementing his credentials.

He also proved a capable filmmaker, directing himself in such vehicles as Gator (’76) and Sharky’s Machine (’81). The Smokey And The Bandit series, meanwhile, utilised Reynolds’ twinkleeyed humour and capabilities as a stuntman to hugely popular effect.

Reynolds’ life comprised vertiginous ups and downs: turning down Bond when Sean Connery stepped aside, and passing on John McClane in Die Hard; posing nude in Cosmopolitan in 1972; two marriages, to actresses Judy Carne and Loni Anderson, that both ended in divorce; an addiction to triazolam in the ’80s; and a reputation for abusive relationships with female co-stars such as Sally Field and Kathleen Turner.

But through it all he kept working, winning an Emmy for Evening Shade (’90-’94) and racking up more than 300 TV credits and a lot of movies, not all of them good (“My movies were the kind they only show in prisons and planes, because nobody can leave,” he quipped).

Reynolds died of cardiac arrest on 6 September 2018. He is survived by his adopted son, Quinton. JG