[HWBL]

Source: E! News
E! News - Warren Beatty's Honor of a Lifetime - Warren Beatty | Annette Bening

Warren Beatty's Honor of a Lifetime
by Natalie Finn

Although he may be just as well-known for the 30 years he spent
playing Casanova in real life, it's Warren Beatty's work on celluloid
that has snagged him one of Hollywood's highest honors.

The actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker has been tapped to receive
the 36th American Film Institute Life Achievement Award next year.
Past recipients have included Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock,
Elizabeth Taylor, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery
and Al Pacino.

Beatty, 70, will be feted at a black-tie gala June 12 in Los Angeles;
the ceremony will later be televised that month on USA.

"Warren Beatty has charmed moviegoers as a dynamic leading man
from his first moment on screen and continues to do so today,"
said Howard Stringer, chair of the AFI Board of Trustees. "He is
also a master filmmaker—a writer, producer and director of such
artistry and influence that his movies—from Bonnie and Clyde to
Reds—have left an indelible mark on the cultural legacy of American
film."

According to the board's criteria, the honor should go to "one
whose talent has in a fundamental way advanced the film art;
whose accomplishment has been acknowledged by scholars,
critics, professional peers and the general public; and whose
work has stood the test of time."

Done, done and done.

After cementing his leading-man status opposite Natalie Wood in
Elia Kazan's 1961 tearjerker Splendor in the Grass, Beatty dove
into a series of meaty roles, finally earning his first Oscar nomination
in 1968 for his iconic role as bank robber Clyde Barrow in the genre-
crossing, taboo-busting Bonnie & Clyde, also the first film Beatty
produced.

The glamorous yet artfully gritty treatment of violence in Bonnie
& Clyde helped usher in a new wave of humorous brutality and moral
ambiguity in cinema—done not just for shock-and-awe, but in the
name of the craft.

And they're still talkin' about it after all these years. On Aug. 12,
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott credited the film with legitimizing
"the connoisseurship of violence, which does not present itself as an
appetite for cheap thrills, but rather as a taste for the finer things."

Although the groundbreaking film drew mixed responses, it was
nominated for a best picture Oscar, won for cinematography and
supporting actress Estelle Parsons, and merited a 9,000-word
review from critic Pauline Kael which, even if it wasn't a resoundingly
positive review, signified the movie's importance.

Beatty's roles in the 1970s included the simpleminded brothel
proprietor John McCabe in Robert Altman's anti-Western McCabe
& Mrs. Miller, his first collaboration with onscreen and off-screen
love Julie Christie; the swing-tastic hairstylist George Roundy in
Shampoo, again with Christie; journalist Joseph Frady, who's caught
up in a deadly government conspiracy in The Parallax View; and
football star Joe Pendleton, who's mistakenly plucked from Earth
by an overzealous angel but given another shot at life in the body
of a murdered millionaire in Heaven Can Wait, which garnered Beatty
his second Oscar nod for acting.

Overall, Beatty has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards for
acting, writing, directing and producing. He won a little gold man
for directing the 1981 drama Reds, in which he played a radical
American journalist caught up in Russia's Communist revolution in
the early 20th century. Beatty also produced the film and penned
the screenplay.

His most recent nomination came for his original screenplay for
Bulworth, which he cowrote with Jeremy Pikser, in 1999.

In 2000 Beatty was presented with the Academy's Irving G.
Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work. He received the
comparable Cecille B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes in
January, 45 years after the Hollywood Foreign Press named him
its Most Promising Newcomer.

Over the years Beatty was linked to, among others, Christie, Diane
Keaton, Cher, Brigitte Bardot, Candice Bergen, Goldie Hawn, Leslie
Caron, Liv Ullman, Carly Simon and Madonna. The legendary lothario
finally settled down in 1992, tying the knot with Bugsy costar
Annette Bening, with whom he has four children.

Actually, I believe he was nominated 14 times for an Oscar.....