Burt Reynolds revealed the “best times” of his career
In the 1970s, they didn’t come any cooler than Burt Reynolds.
For one thing, he made chewing gum an art form, he could rock a cowboy hat better than John Wayne, and he made pretty much every kid in the world want to drive a black Pontiac Trans-Am with a gold eagle on the front, which is no mean feat.
Thanks to his Cannonball Run movies, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit, Reynolds was the all-American hero who could do action as well as comedy, the wisecracking, hairy-chested sex symbol with perma-white teeth and a proclivity to step hard on the accelerator pedal.
Reynolds first came to attention in the 1960s in Gunsmoke, a western drama set in the late 1800s in Kansas. Started in the mid-1950s, it ran for an astonishing 20 years, making it the longest-running scripted show in US TV history at the time. He played Quint Asper, a blacksmith in the series for three years, and he once described those years as a highlight of a career that eventually lasted for more than half a century.
In his autobiography, Reynolds stated, “For many years [45 to be exact] I have been asked, ‘What were the best times for you growing up as an actor?’ Without hesitation, I have always said, ‘The two and a half years I was on Gunsmoke.’ They were for me ‘the best of times’. There were many reasons, but the main reason was that it was then I learned how actors on a film set should behave.”
Reynolds took that knowledge and turned it into becoming one of the best-paid and highly sought-after actors in the world, with his breakout role coming in the harrowing adventure-gone-wrong movie Deliverance in 1972.
Directed by British filmmaker John Boorman, the tale of four friends venturing into the woods of Georgia on a weekend away and facing nightmarish attacks, the movie won several Oscar nominations and was a box office smash, making Reynolds an instant star. He made the most of it and, despite being passed over by Francis Ford Coppola for a role in The Godfather, within six years, he was voted the number one movie actor in the world.
His 1977 car-chase movie Smokey and the Bandit was his biggest hit, establishing his classic moustache and ten-gallon hat look, tearing across the United States with a hapless Jackie Gleason hot in pursuit, and he followed it with a well-received sequel and then the really quite similar Cannonball Run, which used many of the same crew.
After a quiet 1980s, his career had dropped off before he made something of a comeback with a TV sitcom called Evening Shade and then had a renaissance in 1997 thanks to his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights as a sleazy porn director.
He picked up a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Oscars for that role, and despite a testy relationship with its director, he was offered a part in his next Magnolia, which he turned down, calling Boogie Nights “extraordinary”.
Sadly, due to his advancing age and some bouts of ill health, Reynolds never quite got back to the kind of fame he had experienced in the 1970s, but he did it the first time around, and there were few people who could match him for pure charisma.
Reynolds concluded, “I learned that acting isn’t an easy career. Long, tough hours sometimes—but it can be a wonderful time. That the working environment really can produce a ‘family’ with real warmth among the cast and an honesty that you may or may not share again, but you will always be striving for from that time on.”
