Warren Beatty

Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty at the 1990 Academy Awards
Born	Henry Warren Beaty March 30, 1937 (1937-03-30) (age 73) , U.S.
Occupation	Actor, director, producer, screenwriter
Years active	1957–present
Spouse	Annette Bening (1992–present)

Warren Beatty (pronounced /ˈbeɪti/, BAY-tee;^[1] born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director.

Early life and education

Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia's Bellevue neighborhood. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a Nova Scotia–born drama teacher, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, a public school administrator, and a real estate agent.^[2][3] Beatty's grandparents were also teachers. The family was Baptist.^[4][5] His father moved the family from Richmond to Norfolk, Virginia, and then to Arlington, Virginia, where he became a middle school principal. The family also lived in Waverly, Virginia, in the 1930s. Beatty's sister, three years his senior, is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine.

Beatty was a star football player at Washington-Lee High School, in Arlington, Virginia. Encouraged to act by the success of his sister, who had recently established herself as a Hollywood star, he decided to work as a stagehand at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., during the summer prior to his senior year. This enabled him to establish contact with a few famous actors. Upon graduation from high school, he turned down 10 football scholarships to enroll in drama school.

He studied acting and directing at the Northwestern University school of drama. While at Northwestern, he appeared in the annual Dolphin show. He is a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. He dropped out after his freshman year to enroll in the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City. By the age of twenty-two, Beatty had appeared in about forty Off Broadway productions. He garnered a best actor Tony Award nomination in 1960 for his performance in William Inge's drama A Loss of Roses. It was to be his only appearance on the Broadway stage.

Military service

Under his original name of Henry W. Beaty, Warren Beatty enlisted in the California Air National Guard on February 11, 1960.

On January 1, 1961, Beatty was discharged from the Air National Guard due to physical disability. He was also simultaneously discharged from the United States Air Force Reserve. Since he served on inactive duty only, Beatty was not awarded any military decorations.^[6]

Career

The handprints of Warren Beatty in front of The Great Movie Ride at Walt Disney World's Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park.

Beatty started his career making appearances in television series such as Studio One (1957), Playhouse 90 (1959), and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). He made his film debut under Elia Kazan's direction and opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass (1961). The film was a box office success and Beatty was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the category Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama. Subsequently he appeared in several films which went relatively unnoticed. Then, at age 30, he achieved critical acclaim and power as a producer and star of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

Warner Bros. had such little faith in Bonnie and Clyde, they decided to give Beatty 40% of the gross box office receipts instead of a flat fee, expecting it to be a major flop. The film made $70 million within six years.

Because of his work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Beatty is generally regarded as the precursor of the New Hollywood generation, which included such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.

Afraid of being typecast as a milquetoast leading man, and still smarting over the What's New, Pussycat? debacle, where he was outmaneuvered by Woody Allen and eventually forced to leave the production, Beatty produced Bonnie and Clyde as a means of controlling the projects he was involved with. He hired the untested writers Robert Benton and David Newman, as well as director Arthur Penn, and controlled every facet of production, including cast, script and final cut of the film, as he would throughout the rest of his career, be it as producer/director or only as producer. It should be noted that in Bugsy it was Beatty, the producer, who had final cut on the film, not Barry Levinson, the director.

Bonnie and Clyde became a blockbuster and cultural touchstone for the youth culture of the era. The film, along with Easy Rider, marked the beginning of the so-called “New Hollywood” era, where studios gave unprecedented freedom to filmmakers to pursue their own idiosyncratic vision.

Subsequent Beatty films include McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Parallax View (1974), Shampoo (1975), and Heaven Can Wait (1978). These last two films made forty-nine and eighty-one million dollars respectively, and gave Beatty box-office power. He used this power to make Reds (1981), an historical epic about the Communist journalist John Reed who observed the Russian October Revolution – a project Beatty had started doing research and some filming for as far back as 1970.

Beatty is one of the few people to receive Oscar nominations in the Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay categories for a single film. This feat is all the more impressive since Beatty achieved it twice—in 1978 for Heaven Can Wait, where he won none of the awards; and again for Reds in 1981, where he won the directing award. He received Best Picture and Best Actor nominations for both Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Bugsy (1991), and received Best Original Screenplay nominations for Shampoo (1975) and Bulworth (1998).

After a six-year hiatus following Reds, Beatty starred alongside Dustin Hoffman in 1987's big-budget film Ishtar. It was critically panned and is regarded as one of the biggest box office bombs in film history. In 1990, he bounced back when he produced, directed and starred (alongside his Ishtar co-star Hoffman) in the title role as the comic strip character Dick Tracy in the film of the same name. The film was one of the highest grossers of the year and also the highest-grossing film in Beatty's career to date.

In 1991, he starred as the real-life gangster Bugsy Siegel in the biopic Bugsy which was critically acclaimed and made almost fifty million dollars at the U.S. box-office. His next film, Love Affair (1994), failed to do well. In 1998 he wrote, produced, directed and starred in the political satire Bulworth which was critically appreciated and earned him another nomination for Best Original Screenplay. In 2001, he appeared in his last film to date, Town and Country, which became the second-largest money loser of any movie ever made (after The Adventures of Pluto Nash) based on contemporary dollars lost:^[7] it was made on a budget of approximately USD $90 million, but earned only $6.7 million domestically. Since then, Beatty has not acted in any films but has expressed interest in returning to cinema.

In 2006, Beatty was named Honorary Chairman of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, succeeding Marlon Brando. In 2007, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded Beatty the Cecil B. DeMille award, presented at the Golden Globe ceremony by Tom Hanks. Beatty was honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008.

Beatty is on the Board of Trustees at The Scripps Research Institute.

Tribune lawsuit

In May 2005, Beatty sued Tribune Co. for $30 million in damages, claiming he still maintains the rights to Dick Tracy. Beatty received the rights in 1985 and claimed that Tribune moved to reclaim them in violation of various notification procedures. There was talk of a sequel, and Beatty did express interest in reprising the part, but the sequel was sidelined by unexpected legal disputes. In March 2009, Tribune filed suit against Beatty, saying that Beatty had "made no productive use" of the rights for over a decade, causing them to revert back to Tribune.^[8]

Political work

A longtime activist in various liberal political causes, Beatty has, at various times, been extremely active in the presidential politics of the Democratic Party. In 1968, he hit the campaign trail for the first time, supporting Senator Robert F. Kennedy's bid for his party's presidential nomination. His involvement in the senator's campaign, which included stump speaking and fundraising, was cut short when Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan on the same night that he won a crucial primary in California.

Four years later, Beatty joined the campaign of Senator George McGovern as an advisor. As part of the so-called "Malibu Mafia," a group of Hollywood celebrities who were part of the candidate's "inner circle," Beatty gave McGovern's campaign manager Gary Hart advice about the handling of public relations and was instrumental in organizing a series of rock concerts which raised over $1 million for the senator's campaign.

In 1984, and again in 1988, Beatty was to play a similar role in Hart's own presidential campaigns. Hart, who had, by that time, become a senator himself, had become friends with Beatty during the 1972 campaign and the relationship had grown closer during the intervening decade. After Hart's second campaign imploded over allegations that he had committed adultery with a former beauty queen named Donna Rice, a mutual friend of the two explained why they were so close: "Gary always wanted to have Warren's life and Warren always wanted to have Gary's. It was a match made in heaven."

Beatty in the White House with first lady Nancy Reagan and Diane Keaton, 1981

Beatty seriously considered becoming a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination during the summer of 1999 . After it became clear that the only two contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination were to be Vice President Al Gore and former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Beatty made it generally known that he was dissatisfied with the two choices and began to drop hints that he might be willing to seek the nomination himself. After meeting with several powerful liberal activists and influential Democratic operatives, including pollster Pat Caddell, who had worked previously for Hart, McGovern, California governor Jerry Brown and President Jimmy Carter, and adman Bill Hillsman, who had worked on the campaigns of Senator Paul Wellstone and Governor Jesse Ventura, Beatty announced in September 1999 that he would not seek the nomination. However, he continued to be courted by members of a different political party, the Reform Party, who were looking for an alternative to Pat Buchanan, a conservative who had switched parties after losing the Republican Party's presidential nomination for the third time in a row. Despite frequent entreaties by Governor Ventura, real-estate magnate Donald Trump, and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, Beatty refused to enter the race and Buchanan eventually won the Reform Party's nomination.

Despite his decision not to seek the presidency in 2000, Beatty intimated that he might still run at a later time, telling reporters that he would do so if he thought he "could make an impact on the debate". As California governor Gray Davis' popularity with California voters dropped, Beatty campaigned against the 2003 special election. He was the keynote speaker at the California Nurses Association's 2005 convention, and recorded radio ads urging voters to reject Governor Schwarzenegger's ballot proposals. The propositions were defeated at the ballot box, increasing speculation that Beatty might run against Schwarzenegger in the 2006 election. But, in early 2006, Beatty announced he would not seek the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Beatty's anticipated run for president in 2000 was lampooned by Gary Trudeau in his strip Doonesbury.

Personal life

Beatty has had relationships with singers Madonna,^[9] Cher,^[10] Carly Simon,^[9] Michelle Phillips,^[9] actresses Natalie Wood^[9] and sister Lana Wood,^[11] Julie Christie,^[9] Leslie Caron,^[9] Joan Collins,^[9] Diane Keaton,^[9] Isabelle Adjani,^[9] Mary Tyler Moore. ^[9] and supermodel Stephanie Seymour.^[12]

In 1989, he recorded the duet, "Now I'm Following You" with Madonna for her 1990 album, I'm Breathless.

After years of dating many famous women, he married Annette Bening on March 10, 1992, with whom he co-starred in the film Bugsy. They have four children: Stephen Ira Beatty (born as Kathlyn Elizabeth Beatty on January 8, 1992), Benjamin MacLean Beatty (born August 23, 1994), Isabel Ira Ashley Beatty (born January 11, 1997) and Ella Corinne Beatty (born April 8, 2000).

Filmography

References

Further reading

• Ellis Amburn, The Sexiest Man Alive : A Biography of Warren Beatty, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, 2002. ISBN 0-06-018566-X
• Suzanne Finstad, Warren Beatty : A Private Man, Random House, Inc., New York, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4606-8
• Peter Biskind, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, 2010. ISBN 978-0743246583

External links

• Warren Beatty at the Internet Broadway Database
• Warren Beatty at the Internet Movie Database
• Warren Beatty at Allmovie
• Warren Beatty at Yahoo! Movies