Not sure if y’all have already posted this, but Burt Reynolds has died, age 82.

washingtonpost.com

Burt Reynolds, whose blend of Southern-fried machismo and wiseguy playfulness launched his worldwide celebrity in the 1970s, first as a freewheeling chat-show guest, then as a nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan magazine and finally as a Hollywood action star, died Sept. 6. He was 82.

His death was confirmed in a family statement provided by his manager, Erik Kritzer. Additional details were not immediately available.

Tire-screeching fare such as “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977) and “The Cannonball Run” (1981) largely bookended Mr. Reynolds’s reign as a top box-office draw and cemented his on-screen persona as a carefree man’s man with an arm around a lady and his foot on the gas pedal.

Off-screen, the mustachioed actor developed a reputation as a hard-drinking playboy whose charm alternated with a volcanic, hair-trigger temper. He made atrocious career decisions, propelled in part by a drug addiction and dramatic financial reversals. A low point was his excruciatingly public breakup and divorce from actress Loni Anderson in the early 1990s.

Critical plaudits and peer recognition appeared wildly beyond his grasp when, in the twilight of his professional life, he summoned a precisely calibrated performance in “Boogie Nights” (1997) as a 1970s movie pornographer with delusions of artistry.