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Warren Beatty
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Spouse
Annette Bening
(12 March 1992 - present) 4 children
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
One of the screen's most charismatic leading men, Beatty belied his "pretty boy" status by producing, directing, and occasionally cowriting a handful of challenging and even noncommercial films. The younger brother of actress Shir ley MacLaine, he participated in amateur theatrics while just a young boy. Beatty attended college for a year before dropping out to study acting with Stella Adler. He appeared on stage and in TV productions (including a recurring role on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" in 1959-60) before making his feature-film debut in Splendor in the Grass (1961). His dark, brooding good looks and elusive manner made him particularly effective as a cynical opportunist. After working in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (also 1961), All Fall Down (1962), Lilith (1964), Mickey One (1965), Promise Her Anything and Kaleidoscope(both 1966), Beatty hit paydirt with his performance as Depression-era bank robber Clyde Barrow in the ground-breaking gangster saga Bonnie and Clyde (1967, with Faye Dunaway in the distaff lead), which he also produced. Beatty's antihero spin on the sociopathic Barrow helped endear the film to youthful, rebellious, anti-authoritarian audiences of the turbulent late 1960s; the movie was an enormous success, and secured Beatty Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Picture.
Offscreen for several years, Beatty returned to star in The Only Game in Town (1970, a flop), Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), $ (aka Dollars 1972), The Parallax View (1974), and the uncharacteristic comedy The Fortune (1975) before tackling another "personal" production, Shampoo (also 1975), the story of an amoral Southern California hairdresser, which he also produced and cowrote; it was a big box-office hit and earned him an Oscar nomination for his and Robert Towne's screenplay). Beatty, who by this time had established a reputation as a slow, deliberate worker and perfectionist, took three years to fashion his next starring vehicle, Heaven Can Wait (1978), an updated remake of 1941's Here Comes Mr. Jordan that he produced, starred in, cowrote with Elaine May and codirected with Buck Henry. Heaven his third movie costarring Julie Christie, snagged Academy Award nominations for Beatty in all four capacities.
Beatty's next film was his most unusual: Reds (1981), an epic, romantic drama of the Russian Revolution, costarred him as real-life American journalist/idealist John Reed, opposite Diane Keaton (with whom he was then linked offscreen). It again earned him Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Director; he won in the latter category. He subsequently took another long sabbatical, returning to the screen in the ill-fated (and ill-advised) comedyIshtar (1987), costarring with old friend Dustin Hoffman for director Elaine May, another old friend. A bomb of legendary proportions, it drew critical fire, but otherwise had little effect on Beatty, who executiveproduced The Pick-up Artist that same year for writer-director James Toback.
Beatty raised eyebrows by purchasing screen rights to the "Dick Tracy" comic strip, which he brought to the screen in 1990.Dick Tracy was a highly stylized but ultimately (and perhaps deliberately) two-dimensional adventure that costarred Beatty with pop singer Madonna. Its success reestablished his box-office potency, and his rumored romance with Madonna reconfirmed his appeal to tabloid journalists. (He was also seen, briefly and uncomfortably, in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare But some critics felt that for all his versatility behind the camera, Beatty's performances had become monotonous; his John Reed was not much different from his Dick Tracy. The actor finally broke the mold with Bugsy (1991), a Toback-written biopic of gangster Bugsy Siegel that featured his most forceful and effective screen performance to date. Perhaps, relieved of having to write or direct, he could concentrate solely on his work in front of the camera; the result was an Academy Award nomination. His fiery scenes with leading lady Annette Bening were apparently not entirely the result of great acting, however; she soon announced that she was pregnant, and Beatty, Hollywood's most notorious bachelor, married her. They subsequently starred in a remake of Love Affair (1994). |  |
