(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros.)
Wed 1 October 2025 15:15, UK
Even though he could always be relied on to bring in more money at the box office than most, if not all, of them, Burt Reynolds would be the first person to admit that his long-term prospects suffered because his career dovetailed with those of countless all-time great actors.
Some of the names born within a decade or so on either side of him included Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Harrison Ford, so it’s an understatement to call his era a stacked field.
The majority of those names were either born in New York, studied there, or cut their teeth performing on stage in the ‘Big Apple’, as did Reynolds. He had a first-hand view of many aspiring stars who’d become his competition at the peak of ‘New Hollywood’, but an actor who didn’t reach the same heights as any of those mentioned above was singled out as the best he’d ever seen.
One thing most of those icons have in common is that if they were asked to name the most aspirational figure in the industry, they’d name Brando. That’s fair enough, when he transformed the profession forever and cast a shadow that still looms over acting today, but Reynolds wouldn’t dream of it when he and the famed method man weren’t exactly what anyone would call the best of friends.
Instead, he pointed toward Rip Torn. “I really believed Rip was the greatest young actor in New York, bar none,” he wrote in his memoir, My Life. “Every time he went up for a part, he made everybody else look like amateurs, including great actors like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, and George Peppard.”
Even when they both took their first steps into cinema in the early 1960s, Reynolds never wavered from his belief that Torn had the potential to become a generational talent. Unfortunately, there was a downside, with the Smokey and the Bandit headliner also describing his friend as “the most self-destructive actor I ever saw walk onto a stage,” something that carried through to the movies.
Torn had a long and successful career that yielded an Academy Award nomination and a Primetime Emmy win from nine nominations, but he never truly proved himself as leading man material. He was a prolific character actor, sure, but he never took the next step that Reynolds and everyone else who rose to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s did, and a large part of it was his self-destructive nature.
The difference is that while many of Reynolds’ peers and contemporaries became timeless, recent generations probably know Torn best from Men in Black or Dodgeball, not his ‘New Hollywood’ pomp. Attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer when making Maidstone did his reputation no favours, and neither did Dennis Hopper’s claims that he’d been threatened with a knife on the Easy Rider shoot.
It didn’t stop him from enjoying six decades as a working actor across film, television, and theatre, but if Torn had lived up to the potential Reynolds believed he had, he might have been a superstar.
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