![]() ![]() ![]() After the family moved to Florida, Burt attended Palm Beach high school and won a sports scholarship to Florida State University. Others in that frantic, car-oriented and stunt-dominated style included the Smokey and the Bandit films.īorn in Lansing, Michigan, Burt was the son of Burton Reynolds, who had been in the military and later became a police chief, and his wife, Fern (nee Miller). That film was one of many, beginning with White Lightning (1973), that contributed to Reynolds’s good ole boy image, aimed at the drive-in audience and blue-collar workers. Yetin 1981 he had been voted the world’s top box office attraction for the fifth consecutive year, and his film The Cannonball Run had been one of the year’s highest earners. Reynolds was hit with a real bar stool rather than a fake one, and suffered a broken jaw, leading to year-long complications with his teeth, jaw and inner ear. In fact, his debilitating illness had been caused by a fight scene that went disastrously wrong during the shooting of City Heat (1984), in which he co-starred with Eastwood. The altercation came during a dismal period in Reynolds’s life, when an addiction to the painkiller triazolam and severe weight loss had led to widespread rumours that he had been diagnosed with Aids. ![]() This caused fights, and during the filming of Heat (1986) he hit and severely injured the film’s director, Dick Richards, who sued him for assault. Throughout his career, which effectively began in 1959 with the TV series Riverboat, he claimed to have one of the three quickest tempers in Hollywood, alongside those of Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood. He was a very physical actor who often did his own stunts, and had initially hoped to become a professional football player. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex Features Sally Field and Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, 1977. ![]()
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