Burt Reynolds

Television came first and it came for a long time: three seasons on Gunsmoke, then his own series in Hawk and Dan August, neither of which lasted, then leads in Navajo Joe and 100 Rifles. None of it made him a star. Deliverance did, in 1972, and the strange thing about that film in his filmography is how unlike the rest of it he is in it, all coiled competence and no wink at the camera.

What he did with the fame afterwards was invent a persona and then work it like a trade. The moustache, the laugh, the sense that the audience was in on the joke: Smokey and the Bandit, White Lightning, Gator, Hooper, The Cannonball Run, Stroker Ace. A surprising number of them are about driving, and Hooper is about stunt performers themselves. The formula wore out the way formulas do, and the late 1980s left a run of thrillers and misfires nobody remembers.

The last act is the interesting one. He won a Primetime Emmy for a sitcom lead, took a supporting part in Citizen Ruth, played David Dilbeck in Striptease, and by the 2000s was selling his own legend as a character actor: Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard, and the coach in the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard, a film in which he had played the lead thirty-one years earlier. That double credit is the whole career in miniature. He died in 2018.