The actor Ned Beatty died of natural causes on Sunday at the age of 83 years old. A prolific character actor who scarcely left an audience untouched over his four decades on screen, Beatty is best remembered for a series of films which continue to define American cultural life and the shifting cinematic landscape of the seventies. Between 1972 and 1976, he starred in Deliverance, Nashville, All the President’s Men, and Network which all received Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards.
A singer in gospel and barbershop quartets in his youth, Beatty spent more than a decade working in the theatre in Washington and around his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky before getting his big break on screen. That came with Deliverance in 1972, a runaway thriller about a canoe trip gone awry, which shocked audiences through its graphic depiction of the rape of a novice hunter played by Beatty.
In Robert Altman’s musical comedy Nashville, Beatty played the lecherous lawyer Del Reese with an air of quiet desperation. In All the President’s Men he portrayed the Floridian investigator Martin Dardis, who exposed a crucial link between the Watergate burglars and the campaign to reelect President Nixon. And in the satirical drama Network he found the splendour in Paddy Chayefsky’s script, with a scabrous performance as a communications executive forced to explain the corporate takeover of America to the beleaguered news anchor played by Peter Finch. For his part in Network, Beatty received his sole Academy nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Beatty featured in the cult disaster comedy The Big Bus, added to the dense paranoia as the hitman Kinney in Mikey and Nicky by Elaine May, then embraced one of his most popular roles as Otis in Superman, the bumbling henchman of the arch-villain Lex Luthor. He was directed by John Huston in Wise Blood, by Steven Spielberg in the war comedy 1941, and by Joel Schumacher as the director made his theatrical debut with The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
In the late eighties he played the corrupt police captain in the neo-noir thriller The Big Easy, and had bit-parts in a number of spoof comedies including the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. In 1991 he played the Irish tenor Josef Locke in the charming comedy Hear My Song, and was nominated for a Golden Globe. He subsequently featured in the screwball homage Radioland Murders and in the sports dramas Rudy and He Got Game.
In the meantime Beatty had steadily built his resume on television. From the mid-seventies he appeared in episodes of M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, and every crime drama or police procedural running, including Kojak, The Rockford Files, Hawaii Five-O, and Murder, She Wrote. In 1979 he starred alongside Carol Burnett as a couple fighting for justice following the death of their son in Vietnam. Friendly Fire was watched on ABC by an audience of 64 million, and went on to win four Emmy Awards.
In 1985 he starred in the pilot of the rebooted anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and from 1989 he held the recurring role of Ed Conner in the hit sitcom Roseanne. Lead roles in the CBS projects Szysznyk and The Boys meanwhile petered out. Then between 1993 and 1995, Beatty made a major contribution to television as the gruff detective Stanley Bolander, one of the original leads in the gritty procedural Homicide: Life on the Street.
Ned Beatty returned to the role of Stanley Bolander for Homicide: The Movie in 2000. He reunited with Robert Altman as part of an ensemble cast in Cookie’s Fortune, starred opposite Liev Schreiber in the independent drama Spring Forward, and played the congressman Doc Long in the final film by Mike Nichols, the light biographical drama Charlie Wilson’s War.
In 2001, Beatty was back on stage under the guise of Big Daddy, in a West End revival of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When the revival moved to Broadway in 2003, Beatty and Margo Martindale drew praise for their performances, with Beatty in the words of The New York Times managing to convey ‘the monstrous, exhilarated egotism of a man who believes he has outrun death’.
He returned to television in episodes of CSI and Law & Order. Among his final film roles, Beatty played opposite Woody Harrelson in the police scandal drama Rampart, and assumed the villainous voice behind the plush pink teddy bear Lotso in Toy Story 3. Beatty was married four times with eight children, and marked his retirement from acting in 2013.
