#BurtReynolds #CannonballRun #TheBestLittleWhorehouseinTexas #TheLongestYard For today’s generation of moviegoers, Burt Reynolds may sound “kind of familiar,” as a Trader Joe’s cashier remarked yesterday. But in the 1970s and early ’80s, there was no bigger star in Hollywood. The actor died of a heart attack yesterday at 82. For five heady years, Reynolds and his string of unabashed “popcorn movies” like “Smokey and the Bandit” and its two sequels, saw him voted the nation’s top box-office star by exhibitors. Think of him as the Dwayne Johnson of his era: Proudly popular, unpretentious, witty, sexy and, yes, productive with two or three films a year. Reynolds was born in Lansing, Mich., on Feb. 11, 1936, and grew up in Florida, a sheriff’s son. A star football player at Florida State, he went to Tinseltown and scored a touchdown. He began in the late ’50s as a stuntman — whose rigors initiated a lifetime of self-medicating, pills for pain and for pep — then segued to TV...
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