Warren Beatty - Biography

Last Editor: kjlsmom38				Warren Beatty Biography -   Name : Warren Beatty Birth name : Henry Warren Beaty Date of birth : March 30, 1937 Place of birth : Richmond, Virginia, U.S. Profession : Actor, director Height : 6' 2 Spouse : Annette Bening

Warren Beatty Trivia -

His political views expounded by the "new" Jay Bulworth in the movie 'Bulworth' (1998) are really his own. He is brother of Shirley MacLaine. He and his sister Shirley MacLaine attended Washington-Lee HS. He attended Northwestern University but dropped out after one year to study acting under the legendary Stella Adler. Got his big break opposite Natalie Wood in Elia Kazan's 'Splendor in the Grass' in the year 1961. He dated Natalie Wood briefly after her divorce from Robert Wagner in May 1962. He dated Leslie Caron, Joan Collins, Madonna and Diane Keaton. He was also responsible for the divorce case involving the dancer-actress Leslie Caron and the producer Peter Hall in the year 1966. He has four children with Annette Bening, whose name are Kathlyn, Benjamin, Isabel and Ella Corinne. He is the godfather of Melanie Griffith's son, Alexander. He received ten offers of football scholarship after graduating from high school. He turned them all down. Lives on famed "Bad Boy Drive" a.k.a. Muholland Drive in Beverly Hills, CA. Nicknamed so because its famed residents are bad boy actors Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and Beatty. He is uncle of actress Sachi Parker. He was rumored to have been the subject of Carly Simon hit, 'You're So Vain'. He has a photographic memory for phone numbers. He can dial a touch tone phone using the same hand technique as telephone operators. In the films he produces, he usually plays characters who lose something important by the end of the film. He is recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, along with Elton John, Joan Sutherland, John Williams, and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. He was an advisor on George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. Credited with founding the concept of a political fund-raising concert when he and his girlfriend Julie Christie backed the "Together with McGovern" concert in 1972 featuring Barbra Streisand, Carole King, James Taylor and even reuniting Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. He was nominated for Broadway's 1960 Tony Award as best supporting or featured actor (dramatic) for "A Loss of Roses", later filmed as The Stripper (1963) with Richard Beymer in Beatty's role. He directed 7 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Jack Warden, Dyan Cannon, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton, Al Pacino and himself (in Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Reds (1981). Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her performance in Reds (1981). Premiere Magazine ranked him as #29 on a list of the Greatest Movie Stars of All Time in their Stars in Our Constellation feature of 2005. He lived with Julie Christie from 1967 to 1973. A relative of his, on his mothers side, was the last sitting Communist member of the Canadian Parliament. Has produced two films that were nominated for Best Picture and had acting nominations in all four roles: Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Reds (1981). He is the only person to be nominated for 4 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Directing, Lead Actor & Screenplay) in the same year in two-times. First for Heaven Can Wait (1978), later for Reds (1981). His performance as Clyde Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is ranked #32 on the American Film Institute's 100 Heroes & Villains. Received the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at The 72nd Annual Academy Awards (2000) (TV), presented to him by his friend and neighbor Jack Nicholson. A political liberal, he personally campaigned for South Dakota Senator George McGovern in the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential primary in 1972. He was offered the role of Richard Nixon twice in his career. With Oliver Stone in "Nixon" (1995) and with Ron Howard in "Frost/Nixon" (2008). Has expressed interest in producing, directing and starring in a live action Pokemon movie, with himself playing the villain Giovanni, as Pokemon is his youngest's and second youngest's favorite cartoon. His two favorite cartoon characters are Daffy Duck (who is his all time favorite) and Johnny Bravo. Only three times in Academy Award history, the director-collaborators have been nominated for Best Directing: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961), Warren Beatty and Buck Henry for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men (2007).

Warren Beatty Detailed Biography -

Warren Beatty was born on March 30, 1937 at Richmond, Virginia. His birth name is Henry Warren Beaty. His father, Ira Owens Beaty, was a professor of psychology, as well as public school administrator and real estate agent. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne, was a Nova Scotia-born drama teacher. Ira Owens Beaty moved from Richmond to Norfolk, Virginia and then to Arlington, Virginia along with his family. There he became a middle school principal. Warren Beatty's sister, three years his senior, is the multi-award winning actress and writer Shirley MacLaine. Warren was a star football player at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia. He was ncouraged to act by the success of his sister. He decided to work as a stage technician at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., during the summer prior to his senior year. This brought him in contact of few famous actors. Warren studied acting and directing at the Northwestern University school of drama. While at Northwestern, he appeared in the annual Dolphin show. He was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity. He dropped out after his freshman year to enroll in Stella Adler's Conservatory of Acting in New York City. At the age of 22, Beatty appeared in about forty Off Broadway productions. He earned a best actor Tony Award nomination in 1960 for his performance in William Inge's drama A Loss of Roses. It was to be his only appearance on the Broadway stage. In his earlier years, Beatty was an unapologetic womanizer whose list of famous lovers included Joan Collins; Leslie Caron; Madonna; Julie Christie; Liv Ullmann; Brigitte Bardot; Carly Simon; Elle Macpherson; Diane Keaton; Goldie Hawn; Candice Bergen; Cher and Britt Ekland. Carly Simon is rumored to have written "You're so Vain" about him. Notorious for his alleged "love 'em and leave 'em" treatment of many of these women, an aging Warren had the tables turned on him by the sultry diva, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, who unceremoniously dropped Warren to pursue W. Axl Rose of rock band 'Guns N' Roses'. Soon after that, Warren settled down with Bening. The couple have four children. Warren Beatty got first major film role in the drama 'Splendor in the Grass' in 1961, as the confused Bud. But critics refused to take the ambitious Beatty seriously, and he strove to turn this around with his arty crime drama 'Mickey One' in 1965, directed by Arthur Penn, which got favorable notices but did not find an audience. Next he starred in a light-weight comedy 'Promise Her Anything' in 1965, along with the lovely Leslie Caron and the handsome, charismatic Beatty, already an aspiring Lothario, began an affair with his married co-star which was cited in Caron's divorce proceedings. Beatty teamed up again with Penn for the movie that would elevate his status in Hollywood, the classic 'Bonnie and Clyde' in 1967, in which he and co-star Faye Dunaway played the quirky outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The movie's powerful performances, strong direction and controversially graphic violence made it a huge hit, and Beatty finally found himself taken seriously. Over the next decade, Beatty starred in, produced and occasionally directed some of the most important films in Hollywood, some critically praised, such as 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller' of 1971. Warren's remarkable career suddenly stopped in the 1980s. In fact, he was absent from the screen for most of that decade, and when his next film after 'Reds' finally came, it was the extremely ambitious and legendarily disastrous. 'Ishtar' was one of the biggest film catastrophes of not only the decade, but all time. Warren's next movie 'Dick Tracy' was colorful and a box office success in the year 1990, but was greeted with tepid reviews. Following this came 'Bugsy', a biopic of the life of gangster and Las Vegas visionary Bugsy Siegel, which was another box office failure. Warren married his 'Bugsy' co-star, Annette Bening, and produced and starred with her in another costly disaster, 'Love Affair'. Warren revisited his "Ishtar" nadir with his expensive 2001 comedy 'Town & Country', which was both a box office and a critical disaster. Fortunately, in the midst of all this Warren's creative best resurfaced in 1998 with his 'Bulworth' in 1998, an arch political satire about a liberal California senator forced to resort to the right-wing politics of the day to retain his seat. Bulworth was a reminder that Warren was still capable of making movies that are remarkable, entertaining and successful.