A wrecked knee and a car crash steered Burt Reynolds toward acting
Burt Reynolds planned to be a college football star until a knee injury and then a near-fatal car crash ended that. At a Florida junior college an English teacher heard him read Shakespeare and cast him in a play. Two decades later he was the most bankable film star in the world.
Reynolds grew up in Riviera Beach, Florida, where his father became police chief. At Palm Beach High he was an all-state fullback, and he chose Florida State over Miami, rooming with Lee Corso, later a well-known football broadcaster, in a friendship that lasted 64 years. He scored in his first college start, but in 1955 he tore cartilage in his knee during preseason training, and two months after surgery a collision with a stalled truck left him, at 19, with serious internal injuries.
While recovering he took classes at Palm Beach Junior College. His English teacher, Watson Duncan, directed a school play and gave him a lead after hearing him read in class, and Reynolds won the college's best actor award, which came with a summer-stock scholarship in New York. There Joanne Woodward helped him find an agent. Early breaks were patchy: one director turned him down for looking too much like Marlon Brando, and between jobs he washed dishes and worked as a bouncer.
Lew Wasserman signed him to Universal, remarking that anyone with his effect on women deserved a chance. Reynolds walked out of the series Riverboat after 20 episodes and paid for it with years of guest spots playing villains, which he later said taught him his craft. In 1962 he beat about 300 other actors to join Gunsmoke as a blacksmith, calling his three seasons there the happiest period of his life.
Deliverance in 1972 made him a film star, and Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 launched a long run of hits, several of which he directed. From 1978 to 1982 exhibitors voted him the top money-making star each year, a record Tom Cruise eventually beat. When the hits dried up he returned to television, winning an Emmy for Evening Shade, and in 1997 his turn as a film producer in Boogie Nights earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. He died in 2018.
Source: Burt Reynolds
