Warren Beatty has 14 Oscar nominations across acting, writing, directing and producing
Few film careers look like Warren Beatty's Academy Award record: four nominations for Best Actor, four for Best Picture, two for directing and four for screenplays. He won Best Director for Reds. He admits why he spread himself so widely: even as a young actor he wanted control of everything.
He was born Henry Warren Beaty on March 30, 1937, in Richmond, Virginia, into a Baptist family of teachers. His mother came from Nova Scotia; his father studied educational psychology and worked in schools and real estate, moving the family around Virginia before settling in Arlington. His older sister became the actress Shirley MacLaine, who adjusted the spelling of their mother's maiden name for her stage surname.
Movies gripped him early, often on trips with his sister. Watching The Philadelphia Story on its 1950s re-release, he thought Katharine Hepburn resembled his mother in looks and character. Love Affair, from 1939 and starring Charles Boyer, moved him so much that he always wanted to make it; he finally remade it in 1994 with his wife Annette Bening, and Hepburn herself appeared. As a teenager he did a sharp Milton Berle impression, read Eugene O'Neill and sang along to Al Jolson records.
His Broadway debut in William Inge's A Loss of Roses in 1960 earned a Tony nomination, and his first film role came in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass in 1961. Oscar-nominated performances followed as the outlaw Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde, a quarterback sent to heaven too soon in Heaven Can Wait, the journalist John Reed in Reds and the gangster Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy. He also directed, produced and starred in Dick Tracy and the political satire Bulworth, and played Howard Hughes in Rules Don't Apply in 2016.
MacLaine has said her brother feels most at ease behind the camera because he needs total control. Beatty agrees, recalling that on early films he offered opinions on scripts, lighting and costumes until people asked whether he wanted to produce the picture too, and he replied that he supposed he did. His honours include the Thalberg Award in 1999, Kennedy Center Honors in 2004 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008.
Source: Warren Beatty
