(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros)
Hollywood stardom can often be a fleeting thing, and while Burt Reynolds spent half a decade ruling the roost as the biggest and most bankable actor in the United States, he gradually slipped further and further down the industry pecking order once his reign was over.
Thanks to Smokey and the Bandit, Semi-Tough, The End, Hooper, Starting Over, Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run, Sharky’s Machine, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Reynolds was named the most valuable drawing card in the business for five consecutive years between 1978 and 1982.
Coupled with his work in movies like Deliverance and The Longest Yard, he was firmly entrenched on the A-list. However, turning down Terms of Endearment and Star Wars would haunt him in the following years after a string of poor choices, flop films, and rampant financial mismanagement saw him become increasingly obsolete.
Reynolds was America’s number-one movie star at his peak, bar none. However, looking at the names of those who topped that same list before and after him, it’s easy to see why he lamented his downfall. The only other actors other than Reynolds to reach the summit between 1972 and 1986 were Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Sylvester Stallone.
His mainstream career was nowhere near as lengthy or successful as any of those three, and he could see it coming. The downside of being placed in such an unwinnable position is that he felt there were only two options, and each of them had the potential to do more harm than good in the long run.
“He wants to be considered a fine actor, but he’s afraid he won’t be able to cut it,” one of his acting students told The New York Times in 1981. “But he’s also afraid to keep doing Smokey, so he hedges his bets. It’s a middle ground between Smokey, whom he does to a tee, and a serious film, say, Midnight Cowboy, which he’s afraid he might not be able to do.”
Reynolds was concerned that if he kept making the types of action comedies that had made him a household name, then he wouldn’t be offered more serious, interesting or dramatic parts. Conversely, he was also aware that his reputation as the star of so many action comedies made those serious or interesting dramatic parts harder to come by in the first place, and he was also nervous about gambling on a risky project outside of his wheelhouse that could dent his star power.
It was an existential crisis to which there was no easy answer, although it goes without saying which road Reynolds took. He was rendered an afterthought less than a decade after he’d climbed to the mountaintop, and outside of his Academy Award-nominated turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, he never came close to reclaiming his former position.
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