Burt Reynolds

Burt Reynolds passed away yesterday, at 82 years of age. I always was very aware of who he was, despite the fact I haven't seen many of his films. I think I first became aware of him when he did his Cosmopolitan centerfold. My mother had a copy, but said as I looked at it, "Isn't it silly?" I remember he was very hirsute.

Throughout the '70s Reynolds was extremely famous, and for a while was the number one star on the planet. He did this not by making great pictures, but by making pictures where he could hang out with his buddies and drive cars. You can't argue with his success, but years from now I'll think he'll be largely forgotten, because he decided to sacrifice artistic integrity for the easy buck.

Having said that, I don't think Reynolds was a bad actor. He was very good in a handful of films: Deliverance, The Longest Yard, Semi-Tough, and Boogie Nights, where he earned his only Oscar nomination (to show you that he couldn't tell good material from bad, he fired his agent after making that film and bad-mouthed it until he died, though he never saw it. He still attended the Oscar ceremony, and was reportedly devastated that he lost [to Robin Williams]).

Looking at his filmography, those films are outliers. Most of them presented him as a good ol' boy, using his trademark cackle and good looks. He was also omnipresent on television, either on talk shows or game shows (I love Norm MacDonald's impression of his on the SNL Jeopardy spoof). His personal life made news: Dinah Shore and Sally Field were famous partners of his, and he married Loni Anderson. He also had an earlier marriage to Judy Carne. You have to be old enough to remember Laugh-In to know who she was.

I don't know if Reynolds had any regrets about turning in lazy performances in movies featuring multiple car crashes. The huge amount of money he made was frittered away (he had to sell the Golden Globe he won for Boogie Nights), though he was a philanthropist. At the time he thought he was doing good work. In a Playboy interview, which I think was around the time of the release of the easily forgettable W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, he claimed that though he may not be able to play Shakespeare, what he did was unique, and great actors like Robert De Niro couldn't do it. I remember scoffing at that at the time, because back then De Niro could play anything he put his mind to. De Niro has since proven he can turn in lazy performances just as well as Reynolds did.

Reynolds seems like he was a good man, though oddly uptight in his later years (on one of his last pictures, The Last Movie Star, he said that he was admonishing co-star Ariel Winter for swearing). He also clung to his ridiculous toupee--you can see that he's starting to bald in The Longest Yard). I just think he wasted his talent by not becoming a serious actor. Maybe he was jut not a serious person.