(1937)
The American actor and brother of Shirley McLaine made his début on television before starring in Splendor in the Grass, in 1961 opposite Natalie Wood. Warren Beatty was next often typecast as the good looking leading man in such films as All Fall Down, in 1962 and Promise Her Anything, in 1965 – films that tended to focus on his seductiveness rather than his acting talent. In 1967, he finally obtained a part worthy of his skills, with Bonnie and Clyde, opposite Faye Dunaway, which made a huge impact in Hollywood, epitomizing American cinema’s second Golden Age. During the 1970s, the actor continued acting in popular features such as McCabe and Mrs Miller, in 1971 and Shampoo, in 1975. In the 1990s, he renewed with popularity thanks toDick Tracy, in 1990 and Bugsy, in 1991 before directing the political satire, Bullworth, in 1998, following which his career declined. Deeply involved in liberal politics, Warren Beatty was often seen as a marginal in Hollywood while it was mostly his reputation as a womaniser that attracted the attention of the public. Rumours maintain he has slept with 12 775 women in his life: real or not, from pushing Natalie Wood to attempt suicide to Carly Simon who wrote You’re So Vain about him, he was evidently linked to numerous women including the likes of Madonna, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton and Annette Bening with whom he finally settled and married.
Synopsis
Warren Beatty made his debut as a tortured teenager in Splendor in the Grass (1961). His next big role was in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which he also produced. The film became a colossal hit and a milestone in cinema history. Beatty was nominated for four Oscars for Heaven Can Wait and won one for directing Reds, in which he also starred. He has written, directed and starred in many films since.
Early Life
One of Hollywood's legendary talents, Warren Beatty has received great acclaim for many of his works, from the 1961 social drama Splendor in the Grass to the 1998 political satire Bulworth. He has also created a lasting legacy for his many dalliances with his leading ladies and others before settling down with actress Annette Bening.
The son of a drama teacher, Beatty seemed to always possess a certain charm and charisma. At Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, he was a top football player and president of his class. He went on to Northwestern University in 1955, but he dropped out after a year to move to New York City. Focused on becoming an actor, Beatty studied with famed teacher Stella Adler. His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, had already enjoyed some success as a performer.
Career Beginnings
In the 1950s, Beatty landed some television roles, including a recurring part on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He made his Broadway debut in the William Inge drama A Loss of Roses in 1959. Receiving underwhelming reviews, the production folded quickly folded. Beatty, however, managed to give an impressive performance, raising his professional profile. He also won over the playwright who helped the young actor get his first feature film, 1961's Splendor in the Grass. Starring opposite Natalie Wood, Beatty played a wealthy teen who struggles with his love and desire for Wood's character. The film's depiction of teenage sexuality was quite daring for the times.
Beatty's career reached a new level of fame in 1967 with his crime dramaBonnie and Clyde, based on the real-life thieving couple of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Behind the scenes, Beatty took the reins as the film's producer. He worked closely with director Arthur Penn to create this now classic film. A commercial and critical hit, Bonnie and Clyde earned 10 Academy Award nominations, including several acting nods for Beatty, his co-star Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman and other supporting cast members.
In the 1970s, Beatty seemed to be quite selective in his projects. He won praise for his work in Robert Altman's 1971 western McCabe & Mrs. Millerwith Julie Christie. For 1975's Shampoo, he worked hard both in front of and behind the cameras. Beatty wrote, produced and starred in this story about a straight, promiscuous hairstylist and his romantic misadventures. Some believed the film to be autobiographical to some extent, given Beatty's reputation as a ladies' man.
Teaming up with Elaine May, Beatty co-wrote 1978's Heaven Can Wait, which also marked his directorial debut. The remake of 1941's Here Comes Mr. Jordan proved to be a hit both with critics and the public. Beatty picked up Academy Award nominations as an actor, director, producer and writer for the project. At the time, he was the second person to receive nominations in these four categories for one film, following in the footsteps of Orson Welles and his work on Citizen Kane (1941).
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| Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty |
Later Career
A perfectionist about his work, Beatty has been known to shoot numerous takes of the same scene. He has a reputation for having a keen eye for details as well. His personality as a filmmaker is perhaps no more apparent than in one of his most ambitious works, the 1981 political epic Reds. In this lengthy, true-to-life film, Beatty starred as American journalist John Reed, who witnesses the rise of Communism in Russia in 1917 during the October Revolution and finds himself inspired by this new political movement. Along with Reed's love interest, political radical and journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), Reed tries to spread these ideals. It also featured vignettes from actual participants in the historic events detailed in the film.
Reds brought Beatty his one and only Academy Award win. In 1982, he took home the honor for Best Director. The remainder of the decade proved to be a disappointment for Beatty, however. He teamed up with Dustin Hoffman for the 1987 comedy Ishtar, which became one of the costly duds of its time. Modeled on the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope musical hits of the past, the film failed to find an audience.
Beatty turned to the funny papers for 1990's film adaptation of the popular comic strip Dick Tracy with Madonna and Al Pacino. The movie seemed to garner more attention for its soundtrack than its plot. Switching to the wrong side of the law, he earned much stronger reviews for his starring turn as gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1991's Bugsy. His future wife Annette Bening played his girlfriend Virginia Hill.
In 1998, Beatty returned to top form as a screenwriter and director with the political satire Bulworth. The film may not have been a box office hit, but it brought Beatty enormous critical acclaim. He played a senator who decides to actually tell the truth as he runs for reelection in the movie, which also features Halle Berry.
After his most recent film, 2001's Town & Country, came and went without much notice, Beatty stayed away from filmmaking for years. In 2011, reports circulated that he signed with Paramount Pictures for a new project. The Hollywood legend is set to write, direct, produce and star in this untitled effort. It's anyone's guess what kind of film it will be and what type of character he will portray. After more than 50 years in the business, Beatty has shown that he can tackle any genre and any role.
Personal Life
Since the beginning of his acting career, Beatty has been linked to numerous co-stars and other celebrities. Natalie Wood reportedly left her husband Robert Wagner for him. Beatty himself was engaged to actress Joan Collins around this time. He later had long-term relationships with actresses Julie Christie and Diane Keaton. Top stars, such as singer Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand and Madonna, also succumbed to his boyish charms.
Though he once called marriage a "dead institution," Beatty changed his mind in 1992 when he married Annette Bening. The couple has four children together, Stephen (born Kathlyn), Benjamin, Isabel and Ella.
Review of Peter Biskind's Warren Beatty biography, Star
By Charles MatthewsSunday, January 17, 2010
STAR
How Warren Beatty Seduced America
By Peter Biskind
Simon & Schuster. 627 pp. $30
It's bad to get a sinking feeling at the start of a book, but Peter Biskind gives the reader just that in his introduction. "Why Warren Beatty?" Biskind asks. "It's distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is." Beatty made his last movie, "Town & Country," nine years ago. And it has been 19 years since his last major film, "Bugsy," which was a critical success but a box office disappointment.
Since Beatty left the screen, his friend and contemporary Jack Nicholson has made half-a-dozen films. His rival Robert Redford is still acting on screen, as is Dustin Hoffman, with whom Beatty shared the ignominy of "Ishtar." His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, is still a working actress. Woody Allen, two years older than Beatty, continues to write and direct at the film-a-year pace he set three decades ago, and Clint Eastwood, seven years Beatty's senior, is perhaps the most successful actor-turned-director of our time. In 1994, former studio executive Robert Evans said, "How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde,Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That's batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you're sent back to the minors for that."
But Biskind is determined to persuade us that Beatty was "one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation." Biskind's earlier book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" was a chronicle of American filmmaking in the 1970s, an era heralded by Beatty's breakthrough movie, "Bonnie and Clyde," and he has been trying to get Beatty to agree to cooperate on a book for years. For this biography, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty's current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, "off limits." And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of most of Beatty's famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were "all afflicted with a contagion of silence." Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was "19 and ten months." That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps.
"Even the promiscuous feel pain," Beatty once said. If he had gone on to add that obsessive perfectionists cause pain, he would have summed up the twin themes of Biskind's book. Much of it is a chronicle of fighting and . . . an alliterative word most newspapers won't print. Biskind opens with a scene in 1959 at a Beverly Hills restaurant where Beatty, dining with Jane Fonda, gets his first look at Joan Collins. And so the account of Beatty's already well-chronicled sex life begins, and the reader who is so inclined can find plenty about what he did and whom he did it with, including not only the usual suspects -- Collins, Natalie Wood, Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Madonna and so on -- but also some unusual (and questionably documented) ones: Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
But Biskind clearly intends the sexual escapades to be a sideshow, despite the pre-publication furor they have kicked up. For him the main attraction is how Beatty's movies got made. And so he gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of Beatty's best films (among which Biskind includes -- in addition to the three mentioned by Evans -- "Splendor in the Grass,""McCabe & Mrs. Miller,""Reds,""Bugsy" and "Bulworth") along with disasters like "Ishtar" and "Town & Country." The trouble with behind-the-scenes stories is that there are a lot of rumors to sort through, and the sources have memories clouded by time, resentment, pride and occasionally illicit substances. For every allegation there's almost always a denial.
Biskind makes it clear that Beatty, "a self-described obsessive-compulsive," could be maddening to work with, even on his best films. Trevor Griffiths, hired to write the screenplay for "Reds," which Beatty took over from him, calls him "a brute" and "a bully." For "Reds," Beatty shot what one source estimates as 3 million feet of film -- enough for a movie two and a half weeks long -- and he worked a team of editors nearly to death. There are those who blame Beatty's flops on his extravagance, his meddling and his sometimes indecisive ways, but Biskind prefers to focus on directors -- Elaine May for "Ishtar," Glenn Gordon Caron for "Love Affair," Peter Chelsom for "Town & Country" -- who were unwilling or unable to collaborate effectively with Beatty.
Beatty holds an Oscar record for having twice been nominated as producer, director, writer and star, for "Heaven Can Wait" and "Reds." To date, the only other quadruple-nominee in Oscar history is Orson Welles, for "Citizen Kane." Beatty won only one Oscar, as director of "Reds," but the Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award as a producer, even though all but two of the films he produced were those he starred in. And in the end, it may be as producer that he deserves the most recognition. Richard Sylbert, a production designer who worked on many of Beatty's films, claimed that Beatty made the people who worked for him "dramatically better."
Beatty himself may yet be seen as either a visionary who deserves more respect or a man who never fully developed his talent. Jack Nicholson became perhaps the most successful actor of his generation by working with Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston and Martin Scorsese. But after his early movies with Elia Kazan ("Splendor in the Grass") and George Stevens ("The Only Game in Town"), the only first-rank director that Beatty worked with was Robert Altman, on "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." They fought bitterly, but it's one of Beatty's best performances and one of Altman's best films.
Beatty could still choose to make Biskind's book premature. He's 72, not too old to make the film he has long planned about Howard Hughes, or at least Hughes in his old age, which Biskind tells us "Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career." And much of Biskind's book deals with Beatty's political activities. He worked for George McGovern, who called him "one of the three or four most important people in the [1972 presidential] campaign," and Gary Hart. Arianna Huffington urged him to run for president in 2000. He wisely declined, but one wonders what might happen if Dianne Feinstein decides not to run again for the Senate. It's not like California is averse to actors going into politics.
Charles Matthews is a writer in Northern California and the author of "Oscar A to Z."
