Burt Reynolds

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Burt Reynolds, the American actor famous across the 1970s and 1980s, built a career on joking about himself. He called himself America's most "well-known unknown". He said his movies were the kind "they show in airplanes or prisons or anywhere else the people can't get out."

  That voice can make him sound like an easy subject. He was not. His story runs through injuries, rivalries, regrets and large sums of money, gained and lost.

  A few questions follow him from start to finish. Where did the grin come from, and who first noticed it could be worth something? Why did a man so many people liked keep walking away from roles that might have helped him? And what does it cost to be one of the best-known faces in the country, and then to stop being that?

  939517

• 2. Fullback to Footlights

  ›

  For years Burt Reynolds told interviewers he was born in Waycross, Georgia. In 2015 he said the real place was Lansing, Michigan. His autobiography puts the family there when his father, Burton Milo Reynolds Sr., was drafted into the United States Army. Reynolds was born on the 11th of February 1936, and his mother was Harriet Fernette, known as Fern.

  In 1946 the family settled in Riviera Beach, Florida. There, in sixth grade, he began a lifelong friendship with Dick Howser. His father eventually became the town's chief of police, and neighbors called the boy "Buddy".

  In 1953 Palm Beach High School's fullback earned first-team All-State honors. Andy Gustafson of the University of Miami offered him a scholarship. Reynolds chose coach Tom Nugent and Florida State instead. His roommate there was Lee Corso, a future coach and broadcaster, who later said Reynolds "was so good-looking, I used him as bait."

  In the fall of 1954 Reynolds started at right halfback in Florida State's first win and scored from one yard out against Louisville. A separated shoulder interrupted the season. Even so, he finished with 134 rushing yards on 16 carries and two touchdowns.

  Then the injuries piled up. During preseason workouts in 1955 he tore the cartilage in his right knee. He tested it in a "B" game against Georgia Tech and found he could no longer cut the way he once had. "I knew then I was finished as a football player," he told The Palm Beach Post. Surgery followed at St. Mary's Hospital in West Palm Beach, and the surgeon predicted he could play again the next year.

  Two months later, at 19, Reynolds ran into a stalled truck on Florida State Road A1A. He suffered a ruptured spleen and other internal injuries. The newspaper reported that the truck's driver fled. Reynolds said the crash totaled his car and cost him a prized wristwatch from the 1955 Sun Bowl.

  He stayed away from Florida State for almost two years. Early in 1956 he enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College in Lake Park to keep up with his studies. That spring, an English instructor named Watson B. Duncan III heard him read Shakespeare in class. Duncan was directing a school play called Outward Bound, and he gave Reynolds a main role. The performance won Reynolds a best actor award at the 1956 drama awards. "I read two words and they gave me a lead," he said. In his autobiography he called Duncan his mentor and the most influential person of his life.

  In 1957 football had one more chance to break his heart. Reynolds returned to Florida State as a backup halfback, still hampered by what the crash had done to him. After a loss to North Carolina State on the 12th of October 1957, he was blamed, fairly or not. He told his teammates on the spot that he was finished with the game. He then got engaged to Jean Hayden, a former beauty queen from Jacksonville who was also a student there. The couple never married.

  The drama award came with a scholarship to the Hyde Park Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Hyde Park, New York. Reynolds saw it as a pleasant alternative to heavier summer jobs. He did not yet think of acting as a career. At the playhouse he met Joanne Woodward, who helped him find an agent. "I knew him as this cute, shy, attractive boy," she said.

  Work in New York followed. He was cast in Tea and Sympathy at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Look, We've Come Through gave him his Broadway debut and favorable reviews. He toured with the cast, driving the bus as well as acting. Back in the city he took classes alongside Frank Gifford, Carol Lawrence, Red Buttons and Jan Murray. His teacher was Wynn Handman at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Reynolds noted that he had worked as an actor for two years before he took a real class. In December 1956 he won a supporting part in a revival of Mister Roberts at the New York City Center. Charlton Heston starred, and Orson Bean played Ensign Pulver.

  Money stayed thin. Reynolds waited tables, washed dishes, drove a delivery truck and worked as a bouncer at the Roseland Ballroom. He wrote that while working as a dockworker, he was once offered $150 to jump through a glass window on live television.

  After Mister Roberts, the director John Forsythe arranged an audition with Joshua Logan for the film Sayonara. Reynolds was told he could not be in it because he looked too much like Marlon Brando. Logan did advise him to try Hollywood. Reynolds did not yet feel confident enough to go.

  1215233240

• 3. Apprenticeship on Screen

  ›

  Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios had a blunt view of the young actor. "I don't care whether he can act or not," Wasserman said. "Anyone who has this effect on women deserves a break." The studio gave Reynolds a seven-year contract. By then he had already made guest appearances on Flight, M Squad, Schlitz Playhouse, The Lawless Years and Pony Express.

  His first big chance was Riverboat, which ran from 1959 to 1961 with Darren McGavin as its star. Reynolds played Ben Frazer, the boat's pilot. One contemporary report called him "a double for Marlon Brando". He quit after only 20 episodes, saying he clashed with McGavin and the executive producer and had "a stupid part". The exit hurt. He later said he "couldn't get a job" afterward. "You just don't walk out on a network television series," he explained.

  So Reynolds went back to guest spots. "I played heavies in every series in town," he said, in shows such as Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Zane Grey Theater. "They were depressing years." In 1961 he starred in the low-budget film Angel Baby, then appeared in the war film Armored Command. Of the second, he joked that it was the one picture on which Howard Keel did not sing, and he called that a terrible mistake.

  More guest work came on Naked City, Route 66, Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone. On the last he appeared in "The Bard", an hour-long send-up of Marlon Brando, the actor he was so often compared to. "I learned more about my craft in these guest shots than I did standing around and looking virile on Riverboat," he later said.

  In 1962 Dennis Weaver wanted to leave Gunsmoke, one of the top-rated shows in the country. The producers invented a new character, the blacksmith Quint Asper. They picked Reynolds over 300 other actors. He announced he would stay on the show "until it ends". He left in 1965 anyway. Looking back, he called it "the happiest period of my life", but said he had served his apprenticeship and the show had no room for two leading men.

  Operation C.I.A., a low-budget action picture from 1965, gave him his first movie lead. In 1966 and 1967 he played the Native American detective John Hawk in the series Hawk, which ran 17 episodes before cancellation. He played another Native American in the spaghetti Western Navajo Joe, filmed in Spain. It was not his favorite picture, and he said he had just two expressions, mad and madder.

  Around 1969 a rush of films followed. Sam Fuller removed his name from Shark!, shot in Mexico, and its release was held up for years. Reynolds called Fade In the best thing he had ever done, yet it also sat unreleased, and its director Jud Taylor took his name off it. Impasse was a war movie made in the Philippines. Sam Whiskey, a comic Western by William W. Norton, was in Reynolds's view "way ahead of its time." On 100 Rifles, with Jim Brown and Raquel Welch, he said he spent the whole shoot refereeing fights between his two costars.

  In 1970 Reynolds turned down the lead in MAS*H, and Elliott Gould took it. He made Skullduggery in Jamaica. After "those wonderful, forgettable pictures", he joked, he realized he was "as hot as Leo Gorcey."

  Later in 1970, Quinn Martin cast him as the title detective in Dan August. Reynolds had already guest-starred twice on Martin's The F.B.I. The reputations of Martin and Reynolds earned a full order of 26 episodes. Still, the show struggled in the ratings against Hawaii Five-0, and it was not renewed. Around then Albert R. Broccoli asked Reynolds to follow Sean Connery as James Bond. Reynolds said no. "An American can't play James Bond. It just can't be done," he said.

  Offers for more television pilots kept arriving, but he did not want to play a detective again.

  4750525444

• 4. Charm Offensive

  ›

  On The Merv Griffin Show, Reynolds found that a guest who made fun of himself could win a crowd. Griffin and Johnny Carson kept inviting him back, and he guest hosted The Tonight Show. A network even offered him his own talk show. He turned it down because he wanted to keep acting.

  He later called those appearances "the best thing that ever happened to me." Before them, he said, he spent 10 years looking virile and saying, "Put up your hands." After turns with Carson, Griffin, Frost and Dinah's show, "suddenly I have a personality." He drew a plan from it. He realized "that people liked me, that I was enough." If he could carry his irreverent, self-deprecating side onto the screen, he reasoned, he could have a big career.

  The Godfather taught a different lesson. Reynolds was considered for Sonny Corleone, but Francis Ford Coppola cast James Caan. Rumor said Marlon Brando had vetoed Reynolds. In a January 1979 Playboy interview, Brando denied it and said Coppola would not have cast Reynolds anyway. Reynolds himself later claimed he had turned the part down.

  The feud between Brando and Reynolds became Hollywood legend. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Reynolds said of Brando, "He was a strange man. He didn't like me at all." Reynolds insisted he never imitated Brando or tried to look like him. He even grew a mustache so people would stop making the comparison. When they were finally introduced, Reynolds told Brando he was the finest actor in the world. Brando answered, "I wish I could say the same for you."

  Director John Boorman cast Reynolds in Deliverance after seeing him on a talk show. Reynolds joked that it was the first script that did not have Paul Newman and Robert Redford's fingerprints all over it. "I've waited 15 years to do a really good movie," he said in 1972. He added, "I made so many bad pictures. I was never able to turn anyone down."

  In April 1972 he also posed nude for Cosmopolitan. He said he did it for "a kick" because of his strange sense of humor, and because he knew Deliverance was about to open. He later regretted it. His well-publicized relationship with Dinah Shore, who was 20 years his senior, kept him in the papers as well.

  Deliverance was a commercial and critical success. On the night of the Academy Awards, Reynolds counted a half-dozen jokes about himself. He felt he had become a household name and the most talked-about star in the room.

  Fuzz in 1972 reunited him with Raquel Welch, and Woody Allen gave him a cameo in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. In Shamus, from 1973, he played a private detective. Reviews were lackluster, but it made money. The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, with Sarah Miles, is remembered mostly for the death of Miles's lover, an aspiring screenwriter, who died by suicide during filming.

  Reynolds had hoped to reunite with Boorman on Zardoz. He fell ill, and Sean Connery took the part.

  6364666165

• 5. Car Chase Kingdom

  ›

  White Lightning, a light-hearted car-chase film written by William W. Norton, opened a new road for Reynolds in 1973. He later described it as the start of films made in the South, about the South and for the South. "You could make back the cost of the negative just in Memphis alone," he said, and anything beyond that was "just gravy." Car-chase movies became his most profitable genre.

  By the end of 1973 Reynolds ranked fourth among the ten most popular movie actors in the United States. He stayed on that list until 1984.

  Robert Aldrich directed him in The Longest Yard in 1974, a popular sports comedy. Aldrich later said that "on occasion, he's a much better actor than he's given credit for." He added that sometimes Reynolds acted like a caricature of himself.

  In 1975 came two big-budget fiascos: At Long Last Love, a musical for Peter Bogdanovich, and Lucky Lady, with Gene Hackman and Liza Minnelli. The lighter W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings did better, as did the Aldrich police drama Hustle. Reynolds also had a cameo in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie in 1976. That year he reunited with Bogdanovich for Nickelodeon, which disappointed. Aldrich was baffled by Reynolds's devotion to the director. "Bogdanovich can get him to do the telephone book!" he said.

  In 1976 Reynolds directed for the first time, on Gator, the sequel to White Lightning, again written by Norton. He had waited 20 years to try it. "I enjoyed it more than anything I've ever done in this business," he said, and he thought directing was what he did best.

  Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 brought the biggest success of his career. Hal Needham directed, and Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed and Sally Field co-starred. Semi-Tough followed the same year, with Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson, produced by David Merrick. In 1978 Reynolds directed The End, a dark comedy, in a role originally written for Woody Allen. Hooper, made with Needham and Field, cast him as an aging stunt man.

  From 1978 to 1982 Reynolds was voted the world's number-one movie actor in the annual Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll. That five-year run matched a record held by Bing Crosby.

  He believed he was improving. He made two and a half or three films a year, and he said any picture, compared with Deliverance, was "miles above" what he did then. But when films resemble each other, he noted, "people take it for granted."

  For California Suite in 1978, he declined a leading role, and Alan Alda took it. "I'd rather direct than act," he said. David Merrick had offered to produce two movies for him to direct without acting in them.

  Starting Over in 1979 was a change of pace, a romantic comedy with Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen, co-written and produced by James L. Brooks. In Rough Cut in 1980 he played a jewel thief, while producer Merrick fired and rehired director Don Siegel during filming. Smokey and the Bandit II in 1980 and The Cannonball Run in 1981, both directed by Needham, were huge. He directed himself in Sharky's Machine in 1981. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982 was a musical he wanted to try, and it succeeded, as did Best Friends with Goldie Hawn.

  Around then he said he had never figured out exactly who his audience was, but that they knew he gave it 100 percent. "I don't have any pretensions about wanting to be Hamlet," he said. "I would just like to be the best Burt Reynolds around."

  7374757680

• 6. The Long Slide

  ›

  James L. Brooks wrote the astronaut Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment, released in 1983, with Reynolds in mind. Reynolds refused. He made Stroker Ace for Hal Needham instead. The role he turned down went to Jack Nicholson, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. "I felt I owed Hal more than I owed Jim," Reynolds said in 1987. Stroker Ace failed.

  He came to call the refusal a mistake. It was "a real acting part", he said, and he blamed what he called his "stupid period." In 2016 he told Business Insider that he had also declined Han Solo in Star Wars. "Now I regret it," he said.

  In 1983 an unnamed producer warned that Reynolds's salary would hold up despite Stroker Ace. But two or three more flops, the producer said, and people would stop putting him in the kind of film that paid him the most. Reynolds felt it was the turning point. "That's where I lost them," he said of his fans.

  The Man Who Loved Women, also from 1983, was Blake Edwards's English-language remake of François Truffaut's 1977 film, and it failed too. Around then Reynolds told an interviewer, "Getting to the top has turned out to be a hell of a lot more fun than staying there." Tom Selleck, he said, was "crawling up my back." He was in his late 40s and leaned toward directing and producing.

  Cannonball Run II in 1984 earned only half as much as the first film. City Heat, which teamed Reynolds with Clint Eastwood, was mildly popular but a major critical and box-office disappointment. It also hurt him badly.

  Reynolds often did his own stunts. In Deliverance he injured his coccyx in the fall over the waterfall. A fight scene in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing left him needing hernia surgery. On the first day of City Heat, a metal chair, not a breakaway prop, struck his face. The blow caused temporomandibular joint dysfunction. He was limited to a liquid diet and lost 30 pounds. The painkillers he was prescribed led to an addiction that lasted several years. For years rumors circulated that he had AIDS.

  Stick in 1985 was an Elmore Leonard adaptation that he also directed, and it failed critically and commercially. So did Heat in 1986, and Malone and Rent-a-Cop with Liza Minnelli in 1987. Reynolds said he made Heat and Malone because of the rumors. "I had to get out and be seen," he said.

  In 1987 Reynolds and Bert Convy co-produced the game show Win, Lose or Draw. It grew out of sketch pad charades that Reynolds played with friends in his living room in Jupiter. Vicki Lawrence hosted the daytime version for NBC. Convy hosted the syndicated version until 1989, when he left to host 3rd Degree, another show created by the pair.

  Switching Channels in 1988 was a box-office bomb. Physical Evidence in 1989, directed by Michael Crichton, was received even worse. Breaking In earned excellent reviews that year but sold few tickets. Reynolds also voiced Charlie B. Barkin in All Dogs Go to Heaven, one of his few successes of the period. "When I was doing very well, I wasn't conscious I was doing very well," he said. He became conscious when it stopped. "The atmosphere changed."

  B.L. Stryker, a detective series that began in 1989 and ran two seasons, did more than give Reynolds a job. Michael Chiklis said Reynolds hired him after he was blackballed for portraying John Belushi in Wired. Reynolds understood, Chiklis said, because he "grew up during the McCarthy era and didn't believe in blackballing."

  Evening Shade ran from 1990 to 1994 and gave Reynolds the part of Woodward "Wood" Newton, a former Pittsburgh Steelers player. The sitcom produced 98 episodes over four seasons. It earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Reynolds credited the role for his membership in Steeler Nation. In The Player in 1992 he played himself, complaining about people in Hollywood.

  7972819839

• 7. Love and Money

  ›

  Reynolds married the English actress Judy Carne in 1963, and the marriage ended in 1965. From 1968 to 1971 he lived with the actress Miko Mayama. The singer-actress Dinah Shore and he were together from early 1971 until 1975. In the mid-1970s he briefly dated the singer Tammy Wynette.

  Sally Field was the partner he later singled out. They were together from 1976 to 1980, on and off until 1982, and appeared in four films together. In 2016 Reynolds said he regarded Field as the love of his life.

  His marriage to the actress Loni Anderson ran from 1988 to 1994. They had an adopted son, Quinton. The couple separated after Reynolds became infatuated with a cocktail waitress named Pam Seals. He and Seals later traded lawsuits, which were settled out of court.

  At the height of his movie career Reynolds made as much as $10 million a year, yet he proved a poor businessman. With the music executive Buddy Killen, he invested in Po' Folks, a country-cooking restaurant chain in Florida, Louisiana and Texas. The chain was named after a Bill Anderson song. When it failed, the pair put money into another regional chain, Daisy's Diner, which also failed. Reynolds had invested as an individual rather than through a corporation. That left him personally responsible for the debts. His restaurant ventures lost $20 million in all.

  Other ventures were smaller. In the late 1970s he opened Burt's Place, a nightclub restaurant in the Omni International Complex in Atlanta. It closed after a year. In 1979 he opened a dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida, with an emphasis on training young performers. He operated it until 1989 and leased it until 1996, and by 2004 it was the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. In 1984 he opened Burt & Jacks, a Fort Lauderdale restaurant he co-owned with Jack Jackson.

  Football never left his blood. He once told Johnny Carson he would rather have played in the NFL than win an Oscar. From 1982 to 1986 he was a minority owner of the Tampa Bay Bandits of the USFL. The name came from the Smokey and the Bandit films and from Skoal Bandit, a sponsor of his motor-racing team. That team, Mach 1 Racing, was co-owned with Hal Needham. It ran the No. 33 Skoal Bandit car in NASCAR's Winston Cup Series with driver Harry Gant.

  When Evening Shade ended, his earnings fell sharply. Bad publicity from his divorce from Loni Anderson became tabloid fodder, and the settlement, child support and alimony drained his cash by the mid-1990s. In 1996 CBS, which produced Evening Shade and managed its syndication, sued him over a $3.7 million loan he had not repaid. He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The causes included an extravagant lifestyle, the divorce and the failed restaurants. He emerged two years later. His filings listed $6.65 million in assets against debts of $11.2 million.

  On the 16th of August 2011, Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation filed foreclosure papers. It claimed Reynolds owed US$1.2 million on his home in Hobe Sound, Florida.

  The Burt Reynolds Ranch, where scenes for Smokey and the Bandit were filmed and which once had a petting zoo, was sold during the bankruptcy. In April 2014 the 153-acre property was rezoned for residential use. The Palm Beach County school system sold it to the developer K. Hovnanian Homes.

  4862788081

• 8. Comeback and Farewell

  ›

  Striptease in 1996 forced Reynolds to audition. The producer later said the studio was not enthusiastic at first. On the first day, Reynolds had to take off his toupee in front of six or seven people. The producer called it a "very, very humbling thing to do", and by the end it was clear he was the right man. Reynolds accepted a salary of $350,000, lower than earlier in his career. "I always played likable and dangerous," he said. "I had a persona. Unfortunately, my persona became bigger than my acting." He modeled Congressman Dilbeck on politicians he knew in his youth, since his father was a police chief and a prominent local Republican.

  In 1996 his agent described a split in Hollywood. Executives under 40 grew up loving Deliverance and were open to him. Older executives remembered how crazy he had been and were less receptive.

  Boogie Nights in 1997 gave him Jack Horner, a high-minded pornographer, in a film by Paul Thomas Anderson. The role won Reynolds 12 acting awards and three nominations. One was his first and only Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actor. He lost to Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. He did win the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.

  Despite the praise, Reynolds disliked making the film and did not get along with Anderson. He reportedly dismissed his agent for recommending it. William H. Macy said in an interview that Reynolds was clueless about the film and out of touch with the industry. Reynolds turned down a role in Anderson's Magnolia in 1999. In 2012 he called Boogie Nights "extraordinary". In a 2015 GQ interview he blamed Anderson's youth. "I think mostly because he was young and full of himself," he said. He recalled the first shot, driving to Grauman's Theater. Anderson asked if it was amazing, and Reynolds named five pictures with the same shot. "But if you have to steal, steal from the best," he said.

  Prestige projects never followed. Work was plentiful, but Reynolds did not return to the A list. His credits included straight-to-video action films and, in 2002, the voice of Avery Carrington in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Some later roles winked at his past. Without a Paddle in 2004 riffed on Deliverance. In the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard, Adam Sandler played Reynolds's old role while Reynolds took the part of the Michael Conrad character. The same year he played Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard.

  In 2011 he voiced himself as the mayor of Steelport in Saints Row: The Third. In 2012 he voiced himself again in the animated series Archer, in the episode "The Man from Jupiter". The title character, Sterling Archer, was largely inspired by Burt Reynolds.

  In May 2018 Reynolds joined Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as George Spahn, an 80-year-old blind man who rented his ranch to Charles Manson. He died before filming his scenes, and Bruce Dern replaced him. His final performance appears in the 2020 movie Defining Moments.

  Reynolds died of a heart attack at the Jupiter Medical Center in Jupiter, Florida, on the 6th of September 2018, at the age of 82. His ex-wife Loni Anderson and their son Quinton held a private memorial service on the 20th of September at a funeral home in North Palm Beach. Sally Field, coach Bobby Bowden, Lee Corso and Doug Flutie attended. His body was cremated, and his niece, Nancy Lee Brown Hess, received the ashes. He was interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the 11th of February 2021. That September a bronze bust of him was placed there.

  On the evening of his death, Atlanta television news noted that he was the first to make major movies in Georgia, all of them successful. That helped make the state one of the top filming locations in the country. Antenna TV broadcast a Tonight Show episode from the 11th of February 1982, with an interview and a This Is Your Life-style skit about him.

  Stephen Dalton wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that Reynolds "always seemed to embody an uncomplicated, undiluted, effortlessly likable strain of American masculinity that was driven much more by sunny mischief than angsty machismo." Dalton also praised the later roles that referred to his own reputation as "sophisticated, soulful performances". In 2020 his niece Nancy Lee Hess produced a biography and documentary titled I Am Burt Reynolds.

  That fall, back in Tallahassee, the Florida State football team wore helmet decals reading "BAN ONE" for the rest of the 2018 season. The design copied the license plate of the Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit and carried Reynolds's signature.

  91929596100