The Late Burt Reynolds

[Chuckball]

Burt Reynolds died today of a heart attack in Florida. For members of the forum, we can remember him for that incredible naked spread in Cosmopolitan in 1972. Athough the centre fold was meant for women. A lot of guys liked it too.

[samhexum]

Burt Reynolds, ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ actor, dead at 82

 

 

Burt Reynolds, an icon of 1970s Hollywood, has died at the age of 82.

 

Reynolds’ manager, Erik Kritzer, confirmed the “Smokey and the Bandit” star’s death to The Hollywood Reporter, saying he passed away Thursday morning at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida.

 

A former college football player who took up acting after an injury cut short his playing career, Reynolds spent a decade taking on bit roles in Hollywood before breaking through with roles in some of the biggest films of the decade, including “Deliverance,” “The Longest Yard” and — the movie he’s best known for — “Smokey and the Bandit.”

 

Reynolds was born in Lansing, Michigan, on Feb. 11, 1936. His family settled in Riviera Beach, Florida, after his father, who served in the Army, returned from Europe in 1946. An All State football player in high school, Reynolds attended Florida State University on an athletic scholarship, playing halfback.

 

Although he intended to go pro, his career was cut short by a series of injuries. Reynolds briefly contemplated a career in law enforcement, but a teacher recognized his talent while reading Shakespeare in English class and pushed him toward acting. The move would be a fruitful one, earning him the Florida State Drama Award in 1956, which came with a scholarship to the Hyde Park Playhouse, a summer stock theater in Hyde Park, New York.

 

Afterwards, Reynolds had a brief stopover in New York, where he appeared in several theatrical productions before moving out west to Hollywood. He began appearing on television in the late ’50s, but it wasn’t until 1962 that he secured a consistent role as the half-Native American blacksmith Quint Asper on “Gunsmoke.”

 

A decade later, he had his big-screen breakthrough in “Deliverance,” John Boorman’s psychological thriller about four friends whose rural rafting trip takes a terrifying turn. Reynolds said he considered the Oscar-nominated film, which co-starred Jon Voight, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, the best of his career.

 

The film helped establish Reynolds as one of the most marketable stars of the decade. He’d go on to star in a string of memorable hits including “White Lightning” (1973), “The Longest Yard” (1974), “Gator” (1976), “Semi-Tough” (1977) and, his most famous film, “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977). Reynolds starred in the film alongside future girlfriend Sally Field, playing Bo “Bandit” Darville, a charming outlaw tasked with transporting a tractor-trailer filled with beer over state lines.

 

Reynolds continued to act regularly over the next four decades, notably starring in the “Cannonball Run” franchise in the ’80s and the sitcom “Evening Shade” in the early ’90s. But the most famous role of the latter part of his career was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film “Boogie Nights.” While the film about the golden age of porn earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it never stopped him from trashing the film, which he said he could never finish watching, or the director, whom he said he didn’t like.

 

An action star who did many of his own stunts, Reynolds was also a charismatic rogue and relentless flirt on-screen, helping to make him one of the biggest sex symbols of his time. So did his infamous appearance in the nude as a Cosmopolitan centerfold in April 1972. The actor was as much of a ladies’ man off-screen, and was married twice, to Judy Carne from 1963 to 1965 and to Loni Anderson from 1988 to 1993. Despite those two trips down the aisle, the love of Reynolds’ life appeared to be his “Smokey and the Bandit” co-star Field, whom he famously described as the one who got away.

 

No matter the role, Reynolds always tended to play lovable rascals, something he knew audiences expected of him. “We’re only here for a little while, and you’ve got to have some fun, right?,” he told the New York Times in the spring of 2018. “I don’t take myself seriously, and I think the ones that do, there’s some sickness with people like that.”

[+ Avalon]

Burt Reynolds died today of a heart attack in Florida. For members of the forum, we can remember him for that incredible naked spread in Cosmopolitan in 1972. Athough the centre fold was meant for women. A lot of guys liked it too.

 

I had a female friend who had that picture taped to the back of her bathroom door.

 

I never cared for him. I've shared before I went to see a double feature and after the movie I went to see was over, one of his came on I left.

[BabyBoomer]

Some will remember his relationship with Dinah Shore. He also starred in two short lived TV series "Hawk" and "Dan August".

 

RIP. Burt.

 

~Boomer~

[+ Avalon]

Some will remember his relationship with Dinah Shore. He also starred in two short lived TV series "Hawk" and "Dan August".

 

RIP. Burt.

 

~Boomer~

 

He was also in "Evening Shade"

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening_Shade

[TruHart1]

I remember fondly his willingness to parody his 'nude popularity' in Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie" - shown here with Mel and Dom DeLuise:

 

May he RIP!

 

TruHart1

[+ ProGay]

Burt Reynolds nude: 10 facts about the Cosmo centrefold:

1. It began on a TV show. Burt Reynolds was standing in for Johnny Carson as presenter of the Tonight show on NBC, and Helen Gurley Brown was his guest. "He was handsome, humorous, wonderful body, frisky," she told James Landers, author of a book on the first 100 years of Cosmopolitan. During our conversation I asked him if he would pose for us." He agreed.

 

2. It could have been Paul Newman. Gurley Brown had approached him, before putting the question to Burt Reynolds, but he had refused.

 

3. It made Burt Reynolds into a celeb. The day after the magazine hit news-stands, he was mobbed by women asking him to sign their copy. Reynolds also noticed a change in the behaviour of theatre audiences from "polite to boisterous". "Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls. They cared more about my pubes than they did about the play," he wrote in his 1994 autobiography, My Life. Gurley Brown said: "He had been a movie star, now he was a celebrity."

 

4. It made Cosmopolitan notorious. "At the time, you know, men liked to look at women naked. Well, nobody talked about it, but women liked to look at men naked. I did," Gurley Brown told Landers, who noted that the photograph pushed Cosmopolitan across a threshold, in the public mind, from a mainstream magazine "to a sex magazine".

 

5. It spawned Playgirl magazine. Douglas Lambert, owner of the Playgirl Club, decided to launch the magazine after seeing what a "winner" the Burt Reynolds centrefold was. "It came to me, that's what women want. If a woman says she wants to see a man's smile, his eyes, I say 'Don't lie to me,'" he was quoted as saying.

 

6. Reynolds chose the picture. A number of shots were taken. The choice of which would be published was left to the model.

 

7. The bearskin was a humorous touch. "I think that's probably a joke," says New York-based fashion portrait photographer Max Vadukul. "This is a very macho statement, a real bloke, full on, and totally confident," he says. He reckons Reynolds would have been happy going further, and removing the artfully placed arm from his lap.

 

8. You won't see this in 2012. It would be a tough photograph to take in 2012, Vadukul says, because of the "commodity factor" - the actor's publicists would be concerned about damage to his brand, among some members of the public. "It's a very modern picture, it would still be a very talkative picture. Who would be the equivalent of this guy - George Clooney? It's very far ahead of its time, from that period when anything goes, people swinging partners non-stop..."

 

9. The photographer was the celebrated Francesco Scavullo. Scavullo shot most Cosmopolitan covers over a 30-year period, and was involved in controversy again when he took photographs of a young Brooke Shields that some considered too sexual. He died in 2004, on the day he was due to photograph CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.

 

10. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the next but one centrefold. Cosmopolitan did not do these very often. It took two years for the next to appear, and Schwarzenegger made his appearance in 1977. Another man to grace the centre pages was Scott Brown, now a Massachusetts senator, but in June 1982 a law student who had entered and won the magazine's America's Sexiest Man contest. He posed for the cameras days before his final exams.

[bnm73]

So long, Gator McCluskey. Your airboat to the next life is ready.

[samhexum]

If you just watch an actor’s body of work removed from cultural context, it can be difficult to gauge just how large they loomed in pop culture. With news of Burt Reynolds’ passing at the age of 82, the understandable urge will be to immediately stream any number of his culture-defining hits. Deliverance, Boogie Nights, Smokey and the Bandit,The Longest Yard, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,Cannonball Run – all of those movies show Reynolds as the magnetic hunk of tanned Hollywood mega-talent that he was. But while watching them will give you a direct dose of Reynolds’ trademarked brand of sexy, cocky swagger, you might not get a feel for just how big a deal he was. Surprisingly, if you want to see the effect Burt Reynolds had on people, you might want to check out an episode ofThe Golden Girls.

 

Reynolds’ downright iconic cameo comes early in the show’s run, a Season 2 episode titled “Ladies of the Evening.” In it, the girls win three tickets to the premiere of Burt Reynolds’ new movie as well as passes to the after-party. The effect Burt Reynolds has on all of them is the stuff of myth and legend. They all fall under his sway, just at the thought of being able to breath in his musk. Blanche can only refer to the actor as “Mistuh Burt Reynolds,” emphasizing her husky accent. Blanche, Rose, Sophia, Dorothy–they all want a piece of Burt, and Sophia’s angry she’s getting left out.

 

Things don’t go as planned. Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy stop by for a drink on the way to the premiere at a hotel bar–but the hotel turns out to be a brothel. And the girls get roped up along with all the other ladies of the evening and tossed in the slammer. Instead of bailing them out, Sophia snatches the tickets and hops over to the premiere. As she tells her roommates the next day, she had a totally Hollywood night schmoozing with Reynolds’ entourage members Lonnie Anderson and Dom DeLuise. The girls don’t believe her… that is, until the doorbell rings.

 

Enter: Burt Reynolds, as if carved from the finest wood, a burly and handsome slab of man standing in the doorway. The normally unimpressed Dorothy is stunned, absolutely stunned. Sophia runs to the door for her date with Burt, thus leading to one of the absolute best jokes in all of Golden Girls history:

Such was the power of Burt Reynolds.

[+ quoththeraven]

He was great in Boogie Nights. Sure, he played a type, but what a type!

 

Also possibly the owner of the best mustache in show business.