Prolific character actor whose role in Deliverance left lasting impression
Ned Beatty, a supporting actor whose hundreds of screen and stage roles captured the full spectrum of humanity – from sincerity to villainy, buffoonery to tragedy – and made him one of the most versatile performers of his generation, has died aged 83.
In a career spanning six decades, Beatty marshalled his booming voice, roly-poly physique, beady eyes and Cheshire-cat grin into an impressive range of characters: amiable, self-deluding, menacing, terrified, or a nuanced combination of the four.
After years working in theatre – including eight seasons with Arena Stage in Washington –
Beatty emerged in his mid-30s as a much-indemand supporting actor on-screen.
Beatty was born in Louisville, Kentucky and grew up in nearby St Matthews, where his mother was a high school cafeteria worker. He was 15 when his father, a travelling salesman of filtration products, died.
He helped support his family by singing at weddings and other functions. He earned a music scholarship to Transylvania University, a Disciples of Christ school, and considered becoming a minister before he felt a more secular calling – to the theatre.
‘‘Most preachers are frustrated actors,’’ he told People magazine, ‘‘and most actors are frustrated preachers.’’
For much of his youth, he said, his girth and stentorian voice made him a natural fit for older characters and brought him steady work for 13 seasons at regional theatres.
His movie debut was in 1972’s Deliverance, about a quartet of Atlanta businessmen (Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox were the others) whose canoeing adventure in Appalachia turns into a gruesome tale of sexual assault and murder.
Beatty’s character is forced by armed backwoodsmen to strip naked and squeal like a pig before one of them sexually assaults him – a brutalisation unlike any shown up to that time in mainstream cinema and one that made a lasting impression on audiences.
He went on to play Southerners of various stripes, including a racist sheriff in White Lightning (1973), a country singer in W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) and a friedchicken magnate in Stroker Ace (1983), all starring his friend Reynolds; and an unsavoury promoter in Robert Altman’s acclaimed drama Nashville (1975).
Beatty also played Florida investigator Martin Dardis in the 1976 film All the President’s Men about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) unravelling the Watergate scandal.
One of his most memorable screen moments came in 1976s Network, an acid satire of media and modern culture, in which
‘‘I like to surprise the audience, to do the unexpected.’’
Beatty’s powerful TV executive Arthur Jensen delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon about global capitalism.
‘‘You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr Beale,’’ Jensen fulminates to deranged news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), whose on-air rants have raised questions about a shady business deal involving the conglomerate that owns the network.
Beatty earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor but lost to Jason Robards, who played Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men. Beatty later told People magazine he was grateful simply for a chance to play a toughminded businessman after a run of Southernfried ‘‘schnooks’’.
‘‘If I’d been casting that role,’’ he said of Jensen in Network, ‘‘I’d have been the last person I’d have thought of. Basically I look like a used-car dealer.’’
Over the years, Beatty provided muchneeded ballast to dozens of lightweight movies. He was the clueless henchman Otis to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor in 1978’s
Superman and its 1980 sequel, an oily college dean in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School in 1986 and a corrupt police captain in The Big Easy, starring Dennis Quaid.
New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael marvelled at Beatty’s ‘‘marvellously piggish’’ turn as a corrupt district attorney in the 1988 romantic comedy Switching Channels,
starring Reynolds, Kathleen Turner and Christopher Reeve.
‘‘Stars never want to throw the audience a curveball,’’ Beatty once told the New York Times, ‘‘but my great joy is throwing curveballs. Being a star cuts down your effectiveness as an actor, because you become an identifiable part of a product and somewhat predictable. You have to mind your p’s and q’s and nurture your fans. But I like to surprise the audience, to do the unexpected.’’
In 1991, Beatty had a rare leading role onscreen, portraying Irish tenor Josef Locke in
Hear My Song.
He kept up his hectic pace with small parts in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and the voice of the evil bear Lotso in 2010’s Toy Story 3.
‘‘One reason I work so much is that I do a lot of what I call mortar acting,’’ he told the
Times. ‘‘That is, in the cracks of the movie . . . When I’m playing one of those pieces of mortar, I pretend the movie is about that character and not the stars.’’
Equally prolific in TV movies, Beatty received two Emmy Award nominations: one for 1979’s Friendly Fire, in which he played the grief-stricken father of a soldier killed accidentally during the Vietnam War; and another for Last Train Home (1989), as the builder of a Canadian transcontinental railway.
He was a founding cast member of the gritty TV series Homicide: Life on the Street,
playing hard-edge detective Stan Bolander; and made recurring appearances on the sitcom Roseanne, as the father of John Goodman’s character Dan Conner.
He returned to his stage roots in 2003 as the terminally ill Southern patriarch Big Daddy in a 2003 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which he won a Drama Desk Award for outstanding featured actor in a play.
Beatty is survived by his fourth wife and eight children from his previous marriages.
‘‘I got eight kids! That’s my excuse for everything,’’ he told the New York Observer of a prodigious career in which prestige was rarely a priority and work was all that mattered. – Washington Post