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cause of death not released
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Date Posted: Mon. 06/14/21 3:03:24pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/arts/ned-beatty-dead.html
Ned Beatty, who during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades, earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” and gave a memorably harrowing performance as a weekend outdoorsman assaulted by backwoods brutes in “Deliverance,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by Deborah Miller, his manager, who did not specify the cause.
The beefy Mr. Beatty was not known as a leading man. In more than 150 movies and television projects beginning in 1972, he was almost always cast in supporting roles. But he was closely associated with some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.
His film credits also include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978) and its first sequel, the inspirational sports drama “Rudy” (1993) and the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” (1986).
He was a familiar face on television as well. He played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man,” on the series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” from 1993 to 1995. He was also seen in several episodes of “Roseanne,” Roseanne Barr’s hit sitcom, as Ed Conner, the jovial father of John Goodman’s character, Dan, and in episodes of “Law & Order,” “The Rockford Files” and other shows.
In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by the director Sidney Lumet and the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky in “Network,” the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s struggle for ratings in a tube-obsessed nation. His character, the mustachioed network executive Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue, which earned Mr. Beatty an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
In the scene, Mr. Beatty’s character summons Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the unstable anchorman who has just had an on-air meltdown, into the corporate boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera trained on Mr. Beatty, who is standing at the opposite end of a conference table lined with banker lamps, he unleashes a ferocious soliloquy. Mr. Beale has a lot to learn about the ways of the corporate world, he sermonizes.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” Mr. Beatty says, his voice roaring. “And you will atone.”
Mr. Beatty then modulates his delivery and asks, in a normal speaking voice, “Am I getting through to you?”
In the book “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies” (2014), written by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Beatty is quoted as saying that he had been intimidated by the length of the speech, but excited by the character and the film.
To get the filmmakers to commit to giving him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another movie offer for more money.
“I was lying like a snake,” he added. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.”
Mr. Beatty made his film debut in “Deliverance,” the 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoeing trip in rural Georgia turns calamitous. Stripped down to white underpants, his character, Bobby, is forced to “squeal like a pig” by a hillbilly before he is raped.
The line would go down in movie infamy.
“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me, since then?” Mr. Beatty wrote in a 1989 opinion piece for The New York Times with the provocative headline “Suppose Men Feared Rape.”
Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.
“I suppose when someone (invariably a man) shouts this at me I am supposed to duck my head and look embarrassed at being recognized as the actor who suffered this ignominy,” he wrote. “But I feel only pride about being a part of this story, which the director John Boorman turned into a film classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene about as well as it could be played.”
Mr. Beatty was born on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Ky., and spent much of the early part of his acting career in regional theater, including eight years at Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that he averaged 13 to 15 shows a year onstage at the start of his career and spent as many as 300 days performing.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Beatty played Big Daddy, the plantation-owner patriarch of a troubled Southern family, in the 2003 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which also starred Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He had earlier played the same role in the revival’s London production, for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award.
Candidly assessing his co-stars, Mr. Beatty said that Broadway had come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they did not have the acting chops to handle.
“In theater you want to go from here to there, you want it to be about something,” he said. “Stage actors learn how to do that. Film actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director wants them to do, and they never inform their performance with — call it what you wish — through-line, objective.”
Although Mr. Beatty was best known as a dramatic actor, he also gave noteworthy performances in several comedic roles.
In “Superman” (1978), he played Otis, the bumbling toady of the villainous Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who participates in Luthor’s interception of nuclear warheads but is most notable for his comic cluelessness. He reprised the role in “Superman II” two years later.
In 1986, he held his own opposite Rodney Dangerfield as the gushing and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School.” When he offers admission to Thornton Melon (Mr. Dangerfield), the owner of a chain of big-and-tall clothing stores, in exchange for the donation of a building, the head of the business school objects to the quid pro quo.
“But I’d just like to say, in all fairness to Mr. Melon here,” Mr. Beatty’s character responds, “it was a really big check.”
Mr. Beatty played many other small but significant roles, including the voice of Lotso, a teddy bear who turns evil, in “Toy Story 3” (2010). In “Rudy,” the 1993 movie about a University of Notre Dame walk-on football player who makes the team, he played the small but important role of Daniel Ruettiger, the title character’s blue-collar father. As he enters the stadium for the first time, he is overcome by the moment.
“This,” he says, “is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.”
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