‘Deliverance’ helped spark character actor’s long career
NEW YORK — Ned Beatty, the indelible character actor whose first film role as a genial vacationer raped by a backwoodsman in 1972’s “Deliverance” launched him on a long, prolific and accomplished career, has died. He was 83.
Beatty’s manager, Deborah Miller, said Beatty died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles.
After years in regional theater, Beatty was cast in “Deliverance” as Bobby Trippe, the happy-golucky member of a male river-boating party terrorized by backwoods thugs. The scene in which Trippe is brutalized became the most memorable in the movie and established Beatty as an actor whose name moviegoers may not have known but whose face they always recognized.
“For people like me, there’s a lot of ‘I know you! I know you! What have I seen you in?’ ” Beatty said in 1992.
Beatty received only one Oscar nomination, as supporting actor for his role as corporate executive Arthur Jensen in 1976’s “Network,” but he contributed to some of the most popular movies of his time and worked constantly, his credits including more than 150 movies and TV shows.
Beatty’s appearance in “Network,” scripted by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, was brief but titanic. His three-minute monologue ranks among the greatest in movies. Jensen summons anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, to a long, dimly lit boardroom for a bombastic lecture about the elemental powers of media.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t
have it!” Beatty shouts from across the boardroom before explaining that there is no America, no democracy. “There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”
He was equally memorable as Otis, the idiot henchman of villainous Lex Luthor in the first two Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies and as the racist sheriff in “White Lightning.” Other films included “All The President’s Men,” “The Front Page,” “Nashville,” and “The Big Easy.” In a 1977 interview, he had explained why he preferred being a supporting actor.
“Stars never want to throw the audience a curveball, but my great joy is throwing curveballs,” he said.
Between movies, Beatty worked often in TV and theater. He had recurring roles in “Roseanne” as John Goodman’s father and as a detective on “Homicide:
Life on the Street.”
On Broadway he won a Drama Desk Award for his portrayal of Big Daddy in a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” a role he had first played as a 21-year-old.
Ned Thomas Beatty was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Lexington, where he joined the Protestant Disciples of Christ Christian Church. For a time he thought of becoming a priest, but changed his mind after he was cast in a high school production of “Harvey.”
He spent 10 summers at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia, and eight years at the Arena Stage Company in Washington, D.C. His life changed forever when he took a train to New York to audition for director John Boorman for the role of Bobby Trippe. Boorman told him the role was cast, but changed his mind after seeing Beatty audition.
Beatty, who married Sandra Johnson in 1999, had eight children from three previous marriages.