Burt Reynolds: What he lacked in talent he made up for with charm and sex appeal

“I created a character for myself who was super-cocky: a wise-cracking, carefree, outlandish, daredevil womaniser,” wrote Burt Reynolds in his 1994 autobiography My Life. “This might have been a tough man for a woman to live with, but it played great on television.”

The actor, who has died at the age of 82, played this character to the hilt on The Johnny Carson Show. Just watch him swagger through the curtain and across the studio floor in 1977, to promote his new film, Smokey and the Bandit, and try not to smile.

As he chewed gum, and chatted about moving in next to Barbra Streisand, it wasn’t hard to see Reynolds’ appeal. Reynolds was Hollywood hot and he knew it. He was 41, and one year away from being the biggest box office draw in the world – a title that had previously been held by John Wayne and James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day. Reynolds would hold on to it for five years.

Wayne had been a tough guy, Stewart the loveable everyman, Taylor a tempest. Reynolds was pure sex symbol – muscled, handsome, ready with a one liner, 100 per cent beef.

Catch him four years earlier on Carson’s show, wearing a wine-red, male pin-up trouser suit. It’s the shortest distance imaginable to understand why director Paul Thomas Anderson was so desperate to have him in Boogie Nights (1997), asking him eight times before Reynolds agreed.

Back in 1972, the actor had posed nude, though not quite full frontal, for a Cosmospolitan centrefold. In later years, he claimed to have regretted it, but it certainly didn’t damage his prospects. At his peak, Reynolds was reportedly earning $10m a year.

His career nose-dived in the Eighties, and looking back it seems as if Reynolds made a lot of bad films and bad choices – he famously turned down Die Hard (1988), but also claimed to have turned his nose up at playing James Bond, Han Solo and the Richard Gere role in Pretty Woman – but the truth was that throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, Reynolds had chosen carefully. The Cannonball Run, for instance, was one of the highest grossing films in 1981, even if it was not a great work of art; Cannonball Run II in 1984 was a turkey, but it was a logical sequel.

From his breakthrough role in Deliverance in 1972, through to his two fine football movies, The Longest Yard (1974) and Semi Tough (1977), his twin outings as the hard-bitten ex-moonshiner Gator McKlusky, White Lightning (1973) and Gator (1976), his turn as an ageing stuntman in Hooper (1978), and his gritty cop in Sharky’s Machine (1981), Reynolds was doing what he did best; playing variations of a rough and ready masculine ideal. He took risks during this time, too, allowing Mel Brooks to send up his persona in Silent Movie (1975), singing into a toothbrush in a duet with Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) and directing himself in a comedy about suicide, The End, in 1978.

For a decade or more, Reynolds was making the most of his acting talent, which was undeniably limited. He’d forged a career in TV westerns, beginning with Riverboat in 1959, when he was 23 years old, making it all the way to the hit series Gunsmoke, in which for two-and-a-half years, between 1962 and 1965, he was a not very convincing half-Comanche blacksmith.

He did, however, exude a physical menace in bar-room brawl scenes. Reynolds had a reputation for having a short fuse in real life. He had wanted to be an American footballer, but like later stars such as Ed Harris and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he didn’t make it to the NFL. He’d won a football scholarship to Florida State, but an injury put paid to his dream. He did, however, look and move like an athlete on screen, one who could actually fight, and it would pay off.

The idea that he had real Cherokee roots, however, appears to have been a bluff, as was his claim to be part Italian. His family tree suggests he had English, German, Scots-Irish/Northern Irish, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry but no trace of Native American forebears. He was able to parlay his “halfbreed” Quint Asper in Gunsmoke into a spray-tanned Navajo Indian, on the trail of revenge for the murder of his tribe, in the 1966 spaghetti western Navajo Joe. Like Clint Eastwood, who had also come up through TV westerns and had a powerful male presence, Reynolds might have become a star this way. The film, however, was memorable for a great Ennio Morricone theme, but not, sadly, for Reynolds’ performance.

It wasn’t a one-off. Anyone who saw how memorably bad Reynolds was in the $60m box-office bomb In the Name of the King (2008), will know that the actor continued to have his off days. He received a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actor for the film (although he deservedly lost out to Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia!).

He did, however, have a secret weapon – charm. Most of the biggest movie stars of all time have had it. Cary Grant had it. Jack Nicholson has it. George Clooney has it. As do Sean Connery, Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy. Marlon Brando, who reportedly said he’d pull out of The Godfather if Reynolds got the part of Sonny Corleone, didn’t. It’s a secret elixir that makes films glow and box offices hum. Sex appeal is part of it, but it’s much more elusive than that.

Admirers of Burt Reynolds will point to Deliverance as his best performance (can anyone bear to watch that film now?). Or the porn producer he played in Boogie Nights (legend has it that Reynolds lost his rag with the 27-year-old Anderson after being asked for the eighth time to star in the movie – the director told him that if he could reproduce the same performance on screen, he would be nominated for an Academy Award, and of course he was). And I have no doubt that Quentin Tarantino would have coaxed a brilliant performance out of him for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which Reynolds was cast as the owner of the Manson family ranch in California, but hadn’t filmed his scenes – a swansong for Reynolds that we will never see.

But if you really want to treasure Reynolds, you can’t do better than sit down and watch Smokey and the Bandit. You’ll be in the presence of a particular kind of dated Hollywood machismo. (Reynolds, remember, was accused of domestic violence by both the women he married in his long and eventful love life – actresses Judy Carne and Loni Anderson.) You’ll see moments where his acting is creaking badly, you’ll see him with the woman he described as his great love, Sally Field. You’ll see his charm.