The Bandit's Back

By RICHARD CORLISS

Strike a flirtily nude pose for a women's magazine. Have a happily public affair with a TV chanteuse 19 years your senior. Tease your screen machismo in lightning banter with Johnny Carson. Make a lot of middling pictures in fast cars. Be an early victim of AIDS rumors. Just about die.

No actor would have mapped out this road to celebrity. But jaunty, reckless Burt Reynolds followed it, becoming the No. 1 box-office attraction for five straight years (1978-82) and, quite possibly, the zeitgeist star of his generation. You know what? This still is his generation. Last week, the day before he turned 62, Reynolds copped an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the porno patriarch in Boogie Nights.

He is pleased to bask in autumnal sunlight. But in the fifth decade of a career with more bumps than the Nagano mogul course, he still feels twinges from old war wounds: from turning down the Terms of Endearment role that won Jack Nicholson an Oscar, from the rage that occasionally blurred his judgment, from folks who left in droves during the bad times. They've returned now. "And I just say, 'I know you always loved me,'" he notes. "Because in this business you have to do that."

As Boogie Nights auteur Paul Thomas Anderson says, Reynolds was more than "the coolest guy on the planet"; in Deliverance and Starting Over, "Burt also had great chops as an actor." The athletic grace, caged intensity and wounded dignity are on display in Boogie Nights, but so is Reynolds' status as '70s icon--once tarnished, now burnished.

From his Cosmo spread to the affair with Dinah Shore and his rancorous separation from Loni Anderson, Reynolds has been a tabloid fave. "Amazing, isn't it?" he asks. "I should be in a jar at Harvard. Even when I could not get a job, I was still front-page. And I wondered why no one thought, 'If he can sell these rags, maybe he can still sell a movie ticket.'"

He got the AIDS sticker when he dropped to 140 lbs. after breaking his jaw making City Heat. He became addicted to painkillers, went off them cold turkey--and fell into a coma. The medics thought he was dying. "I saw that famous light. And you know, I didn't want to come back. Then someone said, 'If you die, they'll say you died of AIDS.' And I came back."

Now he's back in style, with a loving fiance (Pam Seals, former manager of a cocktail lounge) and a resurgent career. "I'm finally choosing a role for the right reason. It's not about the location--Jamaica? I'll take it--or the leading lady. It's about the words. I know I'll never be No. 1 again, but I'll be a working actor. And this time, I'll be a grownup. It's time. We have a saying in the South: 'No man's a man until his father tells him he is.' Well, mine never told me, and that was a problem. But my son did."

It was in 1993, when Reynolds tried to tell his adopted son Quinton that he and Anderson were separating. "We went for a walk on the beach and I--I couldn't get to it. He looked at me and said, 'Daddy, the dance is over.' And I said, 'That's right. We started out dancing together, we still loved each other, but one goes to this side and one goes to that.' And he said, 'You're a man. It'll be all right.'"

Even for Burt Reynolds--once and forever movie star, icon and damn fine actor--there are things in life besides an Oscar.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York