The following 1974 appearance on the Tonight Show, made while promoting The Longest Yard, gives the modern viewer an idea of the early swagger that he would later parlay into the films that made him the top box-office attraction of the late Seventies and early Eighties: Instead of the usual actors taking themselves ultra-seriously, mumbling about how much effort and technique and skill they put into their roles, Reynolds would cheerfully call his latest film a flat-out turkey, poke fun at his lack of top-flight acting ambition, and shamelessly play the part of a rich, sexy, fun-loving Hollywood star who was enjoying the wild ride like no one else. Whatever he drank, his stints on the program utterly transformed his persona in the eyes of the public.
“The guy on the Tonight Show is who I was after seven vodka and tonics, which is generally what I had before I walked out.” “The guy on Evening Shade is who I am and always was,” Reynolds feels. “The beginning of almost everything good that ever happened to me,” he says, “was a result of my being on the Tonight Show.” His first appearances there were a revelation, creating a pop-culture electricity that today is hard to fathom. The venue Reynolds ultimately used to introduce his jocular side to the public was novel. Something important was missing from the mix: humor. The Needham/Reynolds friendship grew over the course of fifteen years, and Reynolds never forgot the way his pal shared his contacts and expertise.īy the end of the 1960s, Reynolds was an established television personality, but his early work had stereotyped him as a serious, angry, morose action star, a role that didn’t jive with his true nature. “There are two or three young actors around,” he once said in his heyday, “I won’t mention any names - who if I see them painfully staring at the rug in one more picture, I’m gonna puke.” I imagine Reynolds shares that thought, then and now, with a vast swath of the nation’s movie-going public. The rarefied careers of emotive twerps like Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino didn’t interest him. In that way, over a long period of association, Reynolds’ persona became more of a stuntman than an actor - and for the most part, that was fine by him. Burt started coming around every weekend. Every weekend there were fifteen or twenty stunt guys practicing. I had motorcycles and a tree where we used to do high falls. “One time,” Needham remembers, “ mentioned that he didn’t know much about motorcycles, so I suggested that he come over to my place and practice. While many of his friends tried to emulate the new hip stars of that decade and their space-cadet ways, Reynolds was drawn to a different world, one to which his pal Hal Needham provided the gateway. “I should be on a farm with a few cases of good beer.” Reynolds’ first marriage, to the English actress Judy Carne, disintegrated when he couldn’t bring himself to join the never-ending drug-infested parties she presided over with an assortment of heroin-addicted hippies and Charles Manson rejects. “I don’t belong in places like New York or Los Angeles,” he insisted when pressed. “I spent a long time playing the third Indian from the left,” he says ruefully of those early jobs.įrom the start of the “swingin’ Sixties,” he seldom felt at home among the young, self-important thespians who would eventually rule the industry. He even served as a contestant on The Dating Game. At the time he bore an uncanny resemblance to superstar Marlon Brando, and along with new pals like Clint Eastwood he spent long, disheartening years scrambling between minor roles in various television shows such as Riverboat and Gunsmoke. Future stars like Joanne Woodward and Rip Torn were early friends during his New York salad days, and the connections he built there ultimately allowed him to journey west in the late Fifties to seek his fortune in Hollywood. Like John Wayne thirty years earlier, an injury ended Reynolds’ budding college football career, and in 1955 he turned toward acting. Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke - Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless - by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby).
Burt reynolds smokey and the bandit images movie#
The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida.
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