HOLLYWOOD LEGEND BURT REYNOLDS DEAD AT 82
CHARISMATIC Burt Reynolds vowed to have as much fun off screen as on it – and dismissed his mortality with wry humour.
The Smokey and the Bandit star – who was one of the world’s highest-paid actors – hopped from bed to bed dating actresses from Farrah Fawcett to Goldie Hawn, and said he felt lucky to have lived so long given his lifestyle.
Considered one of Tinseltown’s most legendary macho men with his gruff demeanour, ever-present smirk, and his signature moustache, during his final years he had become a recluse.
After a string of illnesses, in 2016 he opened up about how happy he was to have reached 80, saying “because the alternative is pretty grim”.
Friends said he felt he would never make that milestone. Decades of illness and injury took their toll on the actor and he was rarely seen out since 2015.
At 82, he suffered a heart attack after falling ill and was taken to a hospital in Jupiter Florida yesterday, according to manager Erik Kritzer.
Stars including Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes and Dolly Parton lined up to pay tribute to their friend and hero last night.
Reynolds, who received an Oscar nomination when he portrayed porn director Jack Horner in the 1997 Boogie Nights movie was once the world’s biggest box-office attraction in films including Cannonball Run with Farrah in 1981. A year later he was in romcom Best Friends opposite Goldie.
Born in February 1936 in Waycross, Georgia, he was raised in Florida’s Palm Beach County. His father was an Army veteran who became the police chief in Riviera Beach near the Everglades.
Despite a strict upbringing, Reynolds openly rebelled at 16.
“I can still remember the rhythm of my father’s belt when I got whipped,” he would say later.
He was also fond of telling interviewers: “We have a saying in the South: No man is a man until his pappy tells him. And mine never did.”
“My dad was my hero, but he never acknowledged any of my achievements,” he later wrote in his memoir. I always felt that no amount of success would make me a man in his eyes.”
Then known as Buddy Reynolds, he was a promising American football player but when he suffered a knee injury as a teenager his hopes of making the NFL were over.
Instead, Reynolds enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College and appeared in a production of Outward Bound, playing the part handled by John Garfield in the 1944 adaptation, Between Two Worlds.
His performance led to a scholarship and a stint at the Hyde Park Playhouse in New York. After a few appearances on Broadway and on TV, Reynolds, who as a young man bore a strong resemblance to Marlon Brando, set off for Hollywood where he signed with Universal, appearing in the US shows Riverboat and Gunsmoke. There he met and married British actress Judy Carne in 1963, but the union came crashing down two years later. In her 1985 autobiography, she said he beat her. Despite landing parts in various movies, Reynolds biggest break came in print. In 1972 after he posed for his famous Cosmopolitan centrefold, stripping down to his hairy chest, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson catapulted him to stardom. The same year Woody Allen cast him in a small comedic role in his film “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” and he starred in Deliverance. He solidified his position as a rising film star in the 1974 prison football drama, “The Longest Yard.” Three years later he starred with Sally Field and Jackie Gleason in the comedy