AFI to honor Warren Beatty

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Sourche: Variety.com
AFI to honor Warren Beatty - Entertainment News - Variety.com

AFI to honor Warren Beatty
Actor to be given life achievement award

“Warren Beatty has charmed moviegoers as a dynamic leading man
from his first moment onscreen,” said AFI board chairman Howard
Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. “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.”

Beatty will be feted June 12 at AFI’s annual gala dinner in Los Angeles.
Highlights from the ceremony will be telecast on USA.

Beatty’s long and varied career began in 1959 with a role on TV sitcom
“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” He made his Broadway debut the
following year in “A Loss of Roses,” earning a Tony nom. His bigscreen
entry came in 1961 opposite Natalie Wood in Elia Kazan’s “Splendor in
the Grass.”

Beatty moved into multihyphenate territory as producer and star of
1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” which earned an Oscar nom for best pic
and an actor nod for him. Beatty, the brother of actress Shirley
MacLaine, won the director Oscar for 1981’s “Reds” and garnered
best picture noms for “Reds,” “Heaven Can Wait” and “Bugsy.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored Beatty
with its 1999 Irving Thalberg Award.

This year’s AFI life achievement honoree was Al Pacino.

Source: The Associated Press via Google News
The Associated Press: Beatty Honored With AFI Career Prize

Beatty Honored With AFI Career Prize

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Warren Beatty had two words to describe his
reaction at learning he would receive the American Film Institute's
career honor: "Concealed weepiness."

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the institute announced Thursday
that the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and actor would be
honored as the 36th recipient of its life-achievement award.

Beatty, 70, said he was told about the honor while heading with
wife Annette Bening to an AFI anniversary lunch.

"It's a very good feeling. It's always nice to be accepted," Beatty
told The Associated Press before the lunch. "I'm very happy to be
part of and am actually quite proud to be a member of the film
community."

The AFI award will be presented next June 12.

Beatty won the best-director Oscar for 1981's "Reds," which also
earned him a best-actor nomination. He had three other nominations
as best actor for "Bonnie and Clyde," "Heaven Can Wait" and "Bugsy."

Never a prolific filmmaker or actor, Beatty has not starred in a movie
since 2001's flop "Town & Country" and has not directed since 1998
's "Bulworth." Beatty said he does have a new film that he is writing
and directing nearly ready to go, but would not discuss details.

"I'm on the verge right now. I approach it always from somewhat a
combination of excitement and dread," said Beatty. "I find if I yak
too much about it, it gives me a good excuse to put it off. For me,
'right on the verge' can mean decades."

Gotta love a man who knows his own shortcomings!

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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.....