The actor whose calling card was versatility
Ned Beatty 1937–2021
Ned Beatty’s remarkably prolific career spanned hundreds of film and TV roles, but his first big-screen appearance was for many viewers his most memorable. Playing a genial businessman on a canoeing trip in rural Georgia, Beatty gave the 1972 movie Deliverance its harrowing standout scene, in which guntoting hillbillies force him to strip and “squeal like a pig” before one of them rapes him. Such chilling fare wasn’t typical—but for Beatty there was no typical. The character actor could be menacing, buffoonish, tough, funny, or sentimental. He was a racist sheriff in White Lightning (1973), an unscrupulous promoter in Nashville (1975), Lex Luthor’s bumbling henchman Otis in Superman (1978), and TV executive Arthur Jensen in Network (1976), who delivers a raging three-minute monologue about global capitalism that earned Beatty an Oscar nomination. That he didn’t become a major star suited Beatty just fine. “Stars never want to throw the audience a curveball,” he said, “but my great joy is throwing curveballs.”
Beatty was born in Louisville, “the son of a traveling salesman,” said The Hollywood Reporter. His mother worked in a high school cafeteria. The young Beatty sang “in barbershop quartets and at Baptist revivals,” and earned a music scholarship to Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., where he considered becoming a minister before turning to theater. “Most preachers are frustrated actors,” he said,
“and most actors are frustrated preachers.” For 13 years he worked steadily at regional theaters, including Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he appeared in a production of The Great White Hope that moved to Broadway. “His life changed forever” after Deliverance, said the Associated Press. The film launched his career “as an actor whose name moviegoers may not have known but whose face they always recognized.”
Beatty was “a familiar face on television as well,” said The New York Times. He played Detective Stanley Bolander in the gritty police drama Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–95) and made repeat appearances on Roseanne as the jovial father of John Goodman’s character, Dan. “One reason I work so much is that I do a lot of what I call mortar acting,” he said, filling in “the cracks of the movie.” But at another point Beatty—who married four times—offered a different reason for his prodigious output. “I have eight kids!” he said. “That’s my excuse for everything.”