Burt Reynolds (1936-2018)

I have been considering doing a Burt Reynolds Retrospective on the blog for a while now, which is why the news of Reynolds' passing yesterday, as unexpected as things can be at the age of 82, seemed shocking since he's been in my mind lately.  When I saw Best Friends last year, I was struck by the fleeting nature of even the biggest of stardoms, how the movies are so famously cavalier and dismissive of the stars that built them, to the point where only the Marilyn Monroe's or James Dean's seem to survive in eternal iconography.

For Burt Reynolds, at least during the 1970's and 80's, was truly one of Hollywood's biggest stars.  After landing noteworthy TV roles on Gunsmoke and Dan August, he had a breakout film role in 1972's Deliverance (which would be nominated for Best Picture), and would dominate the big-screen for a decade with work in The Longest Yard, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  During this time Reynolds would have two of the most famous celebrity relationships of his career, first with the 20-years-his-senior Dinah Shore and then later with his frequent costar Sally Field; Reynolds, a famous sex symbol in his heyday would marry twice, first to Rowan & Martin star Judy Carne (1963-65) and twenty years later to Loni Anderson (1988-93), who was, like Reynolds, a big star of a specific era.

Reynolds, though, has not been taken as seriously by Hollywood history as he probably should have been considering his long reign as a box office champ.  A string of failed films in the 1980's and the tumultuous run of his hit series Evening Shade (which was cancelled, despite solid ratings, due to the cast's salary demands, though Reynolds would win an Emmy for the show), led to a career slide for the actor.  Combined with a slow patch at the movies and his tabloid-catered divorce from Anderson, Reynolds filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and got labeled a has-been.  Thankfully, Paul Thomas Anderson saw that the star potential was still there for the actor, and gave him the role of a lifetime as Jack Horner in Boogie Nights.  Reynolds won the only Oscar nomination of his career for his brilliant work as a fading porn producer, oftentimes trading on his movie star ruggedness to create a compelling, fragile soul within; it's a remarkable piece-of-work, and one we'll revisit with gusto when we get to 1997.

Reynolds career was one of ups-and-downs, and sadly we won't get to see what seemed like a probable "up" again as he had just been cast in Quentin Tarantino's next picture.  But for a time he was a major star in Hollywood, and while the film industry can be cruel to the people who bankroll it once their ticket sales decline, film fans forget about box office receipts when they continue to celebrate the work of a specific actor, and so I will still do my Reynolds Retrospective later this year, a fitting tribute to an actor frequently counted out, but always ready for whatever Tinseltown brought him next.