R.I.P. Ned Beatty

[Big Magilla]

That's an interesting website, though.

[dws1982]

The website Not Starring mentions that Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Gene Hackman all turned down the Howard Beale role, but doesn't mention anything about another actor being cast in the Beatty role.

Surely there's a record of it somewhere though?

[Big Magilla]

A bit more from IMDb.:

"Ned Beatty was brought in as a last-minute replacement of Arthur Jensen. Sidney Lumet claimed that the actor originally cast in the part could not comprehend the tone of the screenplay, and played up the madness and absurdity in the "the world is a business" speech to Howard Beale. Beatty however understood that the monologue needed to be delivered with persuasion and truth."

Does anyone know who the actor was that he replaced? I can't find it anywhere.

[danfrank]

Interesting tidbit from Wikipedia on Beatty’s only Oscar-nominated role:

“Ned Beatty was cast as Arthur Jensen on the recommendation of director Robert Altman after the original actor failed to live up to Lumet's standards. Beatty had one night to prepare a four-page speech, and was finished after one day's shooting”

[mlrg]

Ned Beatty was born in 1937. So, was Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beatty. I can't shake the feeling that we're about to hit a changing of the guard.

So was Anthony Hopkins and Jane Fonda, although in her case she looks 15 years younger

Really? I'd say Jane Fonda looks like someone her own age, grasping tight to cosmetics trying to look younger. (And I say that as a nearly five-decade fan.)

I don’t know if you have an Instagram account but if you do, and happen to follow her, you could tell that she really doesn’t look her age. And in some of her posts she’s wearing little or no make up.

Barbra Streisand on the other hand…

[Big Magilla]

There was a weird incident, I'd guess early 80s, where he was accused of anti-Semitism by someone. Google search doesn't turn up anything on it, but I wonder if any oldsters (which at this point is mostly Magilla) remember it. He had to go on with, I think, Rona Barrett, and do a full denial/grovel. There don't seem to be any gaps in his film/TV resume, so apparently it didn't inflict a lot of damage, but it stuck out with me.

Sorry, I have no knowledge of that.

Two things I find interesting about Beatty that no one has mentioned:

1) He was married four times. He had two children each with wives wives number one in the 1960s, number two in the 1970s, and number three in the 1980s. He had none with his fourth wife who he married in 2000 and was with the longest.

2) He supported Jesse Jackson in the 1988 Presidential election.

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
I always thought he more deserved a nomination for Deliverance than Network, but it's not like anyone on the 1972 slate was easily bumped.

Unless Al Pacino was bumped to lead as the Golden Globes listed him.

I'm actually a bit surprised to find that the Golden Globes had a very different lineup: Joel Grey won, James Caan was nominated (but not Robert Duvall), and other nominees were James Coco for The Man of La Mancha, Alec McCowen for Travels with My Aunt, and Clive Revill for Avanti! Eddie Albert co-won the National Society of Film Critics Award for The Heartbreak Kid (with Joel Grey) with Robert Duvall and Barry Foster/Frenzy as runners up. Robert Duvall won at New York with Eddie Albert and Robert Shaw/Young Winston as runners up. And Pacino and Grey tied at the National Board of Review. And the BAFTAs were... a whole different story that year with a weird timetable of releases and nominations for Max Adrian for The Boy Friend and Ralph Richardson for Lady Caroline Lamb competing with Ben Johnson/The Last Picture Show and Robert Duvall.

That's a lot of contenders. Not one of these groups made room for Beatty.

[Mister Tee]

Ned Beatty was born in 1937. So, was Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beatty. I can't shake the feeling that we're about to hit a changing of the guard.

So was Anthony Hopkins and Jane Fonda, although in her case she looks 15 years younger

Really? I'd say Jane Fonda looks like someone her own age, grasping tight to cosmetics trying to look younger. (And I say that as a nearly five-decade fan.)

[Mister Tee]

As dws notes, this guy just dropped in from nowhere, in Deliverance. And, suddenly he was in so many important movies -- Nashville, All the President's Men, Network. And then Superman, which I assume did his wallet more good than all those Oscar movies combined. He was a definitional character actor.

I always thought he more deserved a nomination for Deliverance than Network, but it's not like anyone on the 1972 slate was easily bumped.

I wasn't all that wild about Hear My Song -- it was too wee for my tastes -- but my mother adored it.

There was a weird incident, I'd guess early 80s, where he was accused of anti-Semitism by someone. Google search doesn't turn up anything on it, but I wonder if any oldsters (which at this point is mostly Magilla) remember it. He had to go on with, I think, Rona Barrett, and do a full denial/grovel. There don't seem to be any gaps in his film/TV resume, so apparently it didn't inflict a lot of damage, but it stuck out with me.

[Jefforey Smith]

Sad news.

I'm casually associated with Transylvania U. here in Lexington, Kentucky judging with their speech & debate program since 1992.

Beatty attended this university yet didn't graduate.

I was just playing Beatrice Straight's Oscar clip. Afterwards, the camera pans to her co-star & fellow nominee Beatty in the audience.

RIP.

[dws1982]

Of course Beatty was once young, and because this is the way things progress, we can safely assume he went through grade school and high school, but he seems like one of those people who just dropped onto the earth middle-aged.

When he made his debut in Deliverance, he was in his mid-30's, he seemed at least a decade older, and In Nashville he was basically my age, but I would swear he was about fifty.

He was a good actor. Always a welcome presence. Reportedly could be a bit moody and difficult to work with at times. When his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof production opened on Broadway (after he had done it in London with a different cast), Beatty received personally great reviews, and should've won the Tony easily, but his younger castmates (Jason Patric and Ashley Judd) had gotten bad reviews and Beatty was reportedly quite vocal backstage and in a few theater district bars about what he considered to be their lack of professionalism. Tony nominations came out, and Margo Martindale got nominated, but Beatty was left off. Looking at his IMDb, he had mostly retired around 2013, but it would've been nice to see him get one of those late-in-life roles like Brian Dennehy's in Driveways. I remember seeing him in a late episode of Law & Order where he played a judge with dementia and he was excellent in it. He was also excellent in the first few seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street, which is not the easiest show to watch these days (mostly due to music rights and the way those were cleared back in the day). There was one episode, and I'll probably end up dragging out the DVDs to find it, that ended with a scene with his detective character at a bar, talking to the bartender (played by John Waters in a cameo) about his marriage and subsequent divorce, and it becomes clear at some point during the scene, without him saying it, that the memory is still too raw and too painful and that maybe he and his wife never really even loved each other but it was something he had never quite admitted or verbalized. It ultimately ends with his character quietly singing "Love Me Tender" to himself at the bar. I haven't seen the scene in well over 15 years, but I've never forgotten it.

[Big Magilla]

Ned Beatty may be best known for Deliverance and Network, but his best performances were in Friendly Fire and Hear My Song.

Friendly Fire was a 1979 TV movie that won four Emmys and three other nominations including those for Carol Burnett in the performance of her life and Beatty as the parents of a soldier whose death in Vietnam was covered up. Timothy Hutton's portrayal of their surviving son led directly to his casting in Ordinary People.

Hear My Song was given an Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles in 1991 earning Beatty a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of a long-missing Irish tenor who comes out of hiding from the taxman to sing one more time before disappearing again. Unfortunately, this comic gem is as hard to find now as Beatty's character was in it.

[mlrg]

Ned Beatty was born in 1937. So, was Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beatty. I can't shake the feeling that we're about to hit a changing of the guard.

So was Anthony Hopkins and Jane Fonda, although in her case she looks 15 years younger

[Sabin]

Ned Beatty was born in 1937. So, was Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beatty. I can't shake the feeling that we're about to hit a changing of the guard.

I'm surprised to learn that Ned Beatty's film debut was in Deliverance, which is probably the role he'll be remembered for, for better or worse. "Squeal like a pig." If not that, it's Superman. And younger generations know him as Lotso from Toy Story 3. It's telling that he retired from acting eight years ago and I had no idea. Ned Beatty was in about two movies a year for forty years. That's a solid career. I don't really feel like we've taken him for granted, but I'm glad there's a treasure trove of 1970s movies I've yet to take in (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Last American Hero, Mikey and Nicky) where I can still enjoy him.

It's nice that he has an Oscar nomination to his credit (Network) and that he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Big Daddy, a role he was born to play. That would seem to be the only award he won in his entire career.

[mlrg]

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