Why Burt Reynolds’ most “triumphant moment” made him feel “lousy and depressed”
Life is duality incarnate, and what can give us the most joy can leave us desperately sad. Likewise, in the bleakest of moments, we can find our true happiness. Burt Reynolds stands as a testament to this.
The actor’s career was built out of such duality. The stonewall hunk made his name through a series of increasingly poor movies that seemed to only be buoyed by his roguish good looks. Those good looks would see him become a centrefold for Playgirl, only to cheapen his image and see him fall down the pecking order for male leads.
That led him down the path of a seemingly endless run of disgruntlements with his co-stars, which cast him as a Hollywood pariah. This, in turn, made him a bit of an icon, as cantankerous behaviour can tend to do for me, of a certain edge. This was typified when, during the making of Boogie Nights, the veteran actor fell out with the up-and-coming director Paul Thomas Anderson throughout the production, which would end up in perhaps Reynolds’ finest entry in his filmography.
Life, is a dichotomy and Burt Reynold’s life is perhaps the finest distillation of that. But that is perhaps the realest thing about a Hollywood icon’s life. The starry life of a legend in the film industry might well be covered in glitz but not all that glitter is gold and Reynolds’ found that out when picking up his finest triumph.
“In September I won the Emmy for Best Actor, a triumphant moment that was extraordinary,” explained Reynolds in his memoir. Picked up for his role in Evening Shade as Woodrow ‘Wood’ Newton, the ex-professional NFL player that the show centred on, the award should have been a crystallising moment for Reynolds.
The star had been struggling for some time, and now, decades after it seemed that his career had been buried under moustache oil and a Playgirl cover, he was back. “Against almost insurmountable odds, I’d fought back and won,” explained the star.
But, life can be cruel, and while golden awards have a certain glimmer, they only really shine on the night. “The next day it was just a statue,” Reynolds confessed. “I was still miserable. I should’ve been full of joy, but instead I felt lousy and depressed.” The truth is, Reynolds was struggling with being a real person, detached from the image the world had of him. A messy divorce from Loni Anderson had rendered him unable to be the brutish star many thought him to be.
“This wasn’t me. Burt Reynolds was a guy who played hard, drove fast, and made people laugh. How’d I get caught up in some Eugene O’Neill nightmare?”
Life is all about ups and downs, but just how quickly you can go from one to another is often accentuated by Hollywood. Reynolds’ entire life was a rollercoaster of highs and lows, but this moment typified it better than most.
