Burt Reynolds: Hollywood star's 10 best loved films, from Smokey and the Bandit to Boogie Nights and Deliverance

Late actor a specialist in breezy Southern humour and wild car chases

Burt Reynolds, the charismatic Hollywood action star, has died, aged 82.

Best known for his acclaimed roles in Deliverance and Boogie Nights – and sleek jet-black moustache - the actor was an icon of 1970s masculinity, bringing a breezy “good ol’ boy” Southern charm to the screen, where he proved himself equally adept at playing redneck chancers and principled men of the law.

In tribute, here’s our selection of ten of Burt’s best.

10. Hooper (1978)

In this archetypal action caper from Hal Needham, Reynolds starred as Sonny Hooper, “the Greatest Stuntman Alive!”

Demonstrating his daredevil knack for death-defying leaps on the set of The Spy Who Laughed at Danger, Hooper develops a friendly rivalry with Jan-Michael Vincent’s up-and-coming Delmore “Ski” Shidski, which comes to a head when the project’s director Roger Deal (Robert Klein) plans a bridge jump set-piece that puts both men’s lives at risks.

9. Semi-Tough (1977)

Before becoming an actor, Reynolds had hoped to become an NFL star. While he never made the cut, he did get the chance to show off his handling here in this bawdy love-triangle comedy from Michael Ritchie.

The trailer frames it nicely: “It stars Burt Reynolds as Billy Clyde Puckett, a running back who lives for just two things... and one of them is football!”

Co-starring country music star Kris Kristofferson and Jill Clayburgh, this is as seventies as shagpile carpetting.

8. White Lightning (1973)

Very much in keeping with the Georges Jones hit that gave the film its title, Joseph Sargent’s moonshine adventure casts Reynolds in what would become a signature role, Gator McKlusky.

Our man is in jail in Arkansas when he is approached by the Feds with an offer to go undercover in the backwoods, his mission to expose illegal hooch also providing a chance to track down the crooked sheriff (Ned Beatty) who murdered his brother.

Speaking to The Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel in 1976, Reynolds called the movie, “the beginning of a whole series of films made in the South, about the South and for the South. No one cares if the picture was ever distributed north of the Mason-Dixon line because you could make back the cost of the negative just in Memphis alone. Anything outside of that was just gravy.”

7. Gator (1976)

This sequel to White Lightning marked Reynolds’s directorial debut and offered a welcome second helping for fans craving another round.

Again written by William W Norton, a renegade himself later convicted of gun-running, this time Gator is tasked with bringing down a corrupt politician.

In the opinion of cartoon super-spy Sterling Archer, a Reynolds completist, Gator is the superior of the two outings. The actor returned the compliment by appearing in Archer as himself in 2012 – dating Sterling’s mother.

6. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)

Reynolds and the glorious Dolly Parton were an inspired pairing in this highly entertaining musical from Colin Higgins, writer of Harold and Maude (1971), who had previously directed Dolly in 9 to 5 (1980).

Burt Reynolds with Charles Durning in The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas (Universal/Rex)

Parton is Mona Stangley, proprietress of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel doing a roaring trade thanks to the tacit approval of the local sheriff, Earl Ed Dodd (Reynolds), her long-time lover.

The chemistry between the leads is a total delight.

5. Cannonball Run (1981)

An actor who liked to work with his friends, Reynolds was again directed by Needham in this outlaw car chase caper based on the real cross-country pursuit from Connecticut to California.

Its all-star cast included Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, rat pack veterans Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr and even a young Jackie Chan.

Dean Martin, Roger Moore and Burt Reynolds in Cannonball Run (20th Century Fox/Golden Harvest/Kobal/Rex)

Despite poor reviews, the film was a box office hit in a year that also saw the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman II and spawned a sequel three years later, for which many of the original cast returned with Frank Sinatra and Shirle​y MacLaine along for the ride.

4. The Longest Yard (1974)

Another American football-themed outing, Reynolds here played Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a former professional quarterback fallen on tough times who ends up in jail and arranges a grudge match between his fellow inmates and the guards.

Shot on location in Georgia State Prison at Reidsville with the support of governor Jimmy Carter and occasional delays to accommodate cell block riots, the cast included several star football players making cameos, Green Bay Packer Ray Nitschke chief among them.

The film was remade in 2005 as an Adam Sandler vehicle, with Reynolds appearing again, this time as coach Paul Scarborough.

3. Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Perhaps the quintessential Reynolds outing - Smokey and the Bandit casts him as Bo Darville, a charming rogue using his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am to guide a big rig loaded with bootleg beer across state lines from Georgia to Texas, pursued by irate Sheriff Buford T Justice (Jackie Gleason).

The directorial debut of Needham, the film is packed with the sort of skillet-fried folksy humour and petrolhead stunt work that would become Reynolds trademarks.

He’s ably supported by a radiant Sally Field, as he would be in Hooper, and by another country music super star, Jerry Reed, author of such classics as “Guitar Man” and “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)” as well as the film’s theme, “East Bound and Down”.

A staple of the trucking subgenre of the American road movie, Smokey inspired two sequels. An out-take from the first, in which Reynolds repeatedly fluffs his lines, appears in the closing credits of Anchorman (2004) and offers a nice glimpse of the real man.

2. Boogie Nights (1997)

Reynolds was nominated for an Oscar for his late period supporting turn in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s porn industry drama, a sprawling Altmanesque ensemble piece also starring Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore and John C Reilly.

Although he didn’t win for his turn as director Jack Horner, the acclaim his performance attracted prompted something of a critical reassessment of Reynolds and a renewed appreciation for his smooth and sympathetic appeal.

Reynolds as Jack Horner in Boogie Nights (Rex)

The actor’s star had waned somewhat in the 1990s but he had a memorable, improvised cameo in The Player (1992) and did good-natured work in Henry Winkler’s family drama Cop and a Half (1993).

1. Deliverance (1972)

John Boorman‘s nightmarish tale of a group of wealthy city boys forced to fight for their lives after falling foul of predatory hillbillies on a rafting holiday in rural Georgia was one of the key films of the dawning New Hollywood.

Deliverance gave Reynolds his breakout role alongside Jon Voight and Beatty but Boorman and James Dickey’s screenplay offered an unstinting dissection of precisely the sort of tough guy masculinity Reynolds would later come to specialise in, making it something of a misleading introduction to his work.

From the “duelling banjos” scene to the brutal rape of Beatty’s character, Deliverance is an unforgettable experience with much to say about the cavernous divides in American society we still see today. Its themes were recently revisited in Matt Palmer’s superb Netflix drama Calibre.