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Warren Beatty (born Henry Warren Beaty; March 30, 1937) is an American Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning actor, producer, screenwriter and director.

 

Beatty started his career making appearances in television series such as Studio One (1957), Playhouse 90 (1959), and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). He made his film debut under Elia Kazan's direction and opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass (1961). The film was a box office success and Beatty was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the category Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama. Subsequently he appeared in several films which went relatively unnoticed. Then, at age 30, he achieved critical acclaim and power as a producer and star of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

Because of his work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Beatty is generally regarded as the precursor of the New Hollywood generation, which included such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese.

Afraid of being typecast as a milquetoast leading man, and still smarting over the What's New, Pussycat? debacle, where he was outmaneuvered by Woody Allen and eventually forced to leave the production, Beatty produced Bonnie and Clyde as a means of controlling the projects he was involved with. He hired the untested writers Robert Benton and David Newman, as well as director Arthur Penn, and controlled every facet of production, including cast, script and final cut of the film, as he would throughout the rest of his career, be it as producer/director or only as producer. (It should be noted that, in Bugsy, it was Beatty, the producer, who had final cut on the film, not Barry Levinson, the director.)

Bonnie and Clyde became a blockbuster and cultural touchstone for the youth culture of the era. The film, along with Easy Rider, marked the beginning of the so-called New Hollywood era, where studios gave unprecedented freedom to filmmakers to pursue their own idiosyncratic vision.

Subsequent Beatty films include McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Parallax View (1974), Shampoo (1975), and Heaven Can Wait (1978). The last two films gave him box-office power, making forty-nine and eighty-one million dollars, respectively. He used this to make his long in the works (he had started doing research and some filming as far back as 1970) Reds (1981), an historical epic about the Communist journalist John Reed who observed the Russian October Revolution. Beatty is one of the few people ever to receive Oscar nominations in the Best Picture, Actor, Directing and Writing categories from a single film. This feat is all the more impressive since Beatty achieved it twice. He was nominated for all four awards for his film Heaven Can Wait (1978) but won none of them; he was nominated a second time for all four awards for his film Reds (1981), winning the Directing Award. Beatty received additional nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor in both Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Bugsy (1991). He was also nominated two other times for Best Original Screenplay: in 1975 for Shampoo and in 1998 for Bulworth.

After a six year hiatus, he returned in 1987 starring alongside Dustin Hoffman in the big-budget Ishtar, which was critically panned and is regarded as one of the biggest box office bombs in film history. In 1990, he bounced back when he produced, directed and starred in the title role as the comic strip character Dick Tracy in the film of the same name. The film was one of the highest grossers of the year and was also the highest-grossing film in Beatty's career to that point. He failed to repeat the box-office success of Dick Tracy in subsequent films.

In 1991 he starred as the real-life gangster Bugsy Siegel in the biopic Bugsy which was critically acclaimed and made almost fifty million dollars at the U.S. box-office. His following film Love Affair (1994) failed to do well. In 1998 he wrote, produced, directed and starred in the political satire Bulworth which was critically appreciated gaining him another nomination for Best Original Screenplay. In 2001, he appeared in his last film to date, Town and Country, which became the second-largest money loser of any movie ever made (after The Adventures of Pluto Nash) based on contemporary dollars lost: it was made on a budget of approximately USD$90 million, but earned only $6.7 million domestically. Since then, Beatty has not acted in any films but has expressed interest in returning to cinema.

In Los Angeles on June 12, 2008, Beatty was honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award, along with his peers and friends present. This ceremony was aired on USA Network in July 2008.