Whenever an older, revered icon of the film industry dies, there are plenty of testimonials and remembrances written about that person. But it’s sad that we only take the time to fully appreciate these people’s brilliance after their passing. Hence, The Greats, a new biweekly column that celebrates cinema’s living legends.
There are plenty of lazy assumptions people make about actors. They’re attractive but shallow. They’re self-conscious about being valued for their appearance, so they try to show how smart they are, which only makes them seem dumber. All they really want to do is direct. From almost the beginning of his career, Warren Beatty has grappled with these preconceptions. Incredibly handsome but also exceedingly driven, he has long fought to be more than just another pretty face, and in the process, he’s shown other actors how they can control their Hollywood destiny. He’s been mostly out of view for the last 20 years, and yet he remains a model of the ambitious modern-day actor/producer/screenwriter/director.
Born Henry Warren Beatty in March 1937, he played football in high school, attended Northwestern’s Speech and Drama Department (which included alumni like Charlton Heston), and headed off to New York when he was 19. Soon, he was doing television dramas like Playhouse 90, encouraged in part by his older sister, Shirley MacLaine, who had earlier moved to New York to pursue acting. “I needed money, and I wasn’t that good a piano player,” Beatty recalled to biographer Peter Biskind about his early interest in performing. “It began to occur to me that I could make money acting and that I could find in the theater a tool for expressing myself.”
Beatty found that tool in A Loss of Roses, a William Inge play that cast the up-and-comer as an angry young Midwesterner trying to please his widowed mother and falling in love with a local actress. The 1959 play lasted about three weeks in New York, but Beatty received a Tony nomination. Around the same time, he had earned a recurring role on the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. He had boyish good looks, but critics noticed he had real skill as well. It’s little surprise that movies would beckon.
In the history of cinematic acting debuts, Beatty’s turn in Splendor in the Grass is one of the more notable. Written by Inge and directed by Elia Kazan, the 1961 romantic drama concerned a Romeo and Juliet¬¬-like love between Bud (Beatty) and Deanie (Oscar-nominated Natalie Wood) amidst the backdrop of societal sexual repression. A sensation, Splendor in the Grass captured the young Beatty as the star he would become. As praised by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, Beatty was “an amiable, decent, sturdy lad whose emotional exhaustion and defeat are the deep pathos in the film.” But it’s telling that even back then, Beatty aspired to more. “Except that he talks like Marlon Brando and has some small mannerisms of James Dean,” Crowther continued, “Mr. Beatty is a striking individual.” As Biskind explained in his Beatty biography, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, Beatty wanted to emulate the taciturn, mumbly style of those young stars—he wanted to be considered an actor of their caliber.
Crowther would reenter Beatty’s story six years later, this time not to praise but to bury. Wanting more control over his career, Beatty (who would go on to appear in films like All Fall Down, Lilith and Mickey One) decided that he wanted to start producing, which would allow him to have more say in the material he made. He happened upon Bonnie and Clyde, about Depression-era gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Inspired by the French New Wave, Beatty and screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton first went after directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard before landing on Arthur Penn, who turned the film into a very irreverent but also very sober and critical portrait of youthful rebellion and self-absorption. (You can still see its echoes in movies like Spring Breakers.)
Beatty, who wasn’t yet 30, was the film’s star and champion, having to defend the movie’s shocking-for-its-time violence against wary studio heads and skittish critics—most notably, Crowther, who famously eviscerated the movie from his exalted perch at the Times, declaring it, “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy” and a “blending of farce with brutal killings [that] is as pointless as it is lacking in taste.” But rescued by other critics, like The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, Bonnie and Clyde became a generational touchstone, earning 10 Oscar nominations (including nods for Beatty for Best Picture and Best Actor) and helping to give rise to the antiestablishment adventurousness of Hollywood in the 1970s.
That decade prominently featured Beatty, who was using his star power and beautiful countenance to be part of films that subverted expectations. He teamed up with director Robert Altman for 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one of the great Westerns, in which Beatty played the brash, luckless John McCabe, who arrives in the sleepy town of Presbyterian Church with plans to establish a brothel. But this cocky, fast-talking man soon meets his match in the form of Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an English madam who has far more experience running a whorehouse than he does. What follows is a melancholy love story and a pessimistic look at the American Dream as McCabe watches his grand aspirations crushed by powerful businessmen and deadly gunmen.