One of the most fascinating characters in Hollywood history, Warren Beatty was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia on March 30, 1937. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (MacLean), was a drama teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada, and his father, Ira Owens Beaty, a PhD. of educational psychology, public school administrator, and real estate dealer, was from Virginia. His ancestry includes English and Scottish.
His mother gave up her profession to settle down in Virginia and raise a family, although it was never in doubt that Beatty and his sister, the actress and dancer Shirley MacLaine, would themselves be raised to pursue stardom - each was urged to be successful and achieve from a very early age.
Beatty attended high school in Arlington, Virginia and then Northwestern University, but, not to be outdone by his rising-star big sister, dropped out after his first year to study acting under the legendary Stella Adler. He found his first screen role, in the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis (1959), to be "ridiculous" and quickly abandoned it to work on the Broadway stage, the highlight of which was his Tony-nominated performance in "A Loss of Roses".
Beatty's first major film role came in the drama La fièvre dans le sang (1961), as the confused Bud. Critics refused to take the handsome young Beatty seriously, and he strove to turn this around with his arty crime drama Mickey One (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 (1965).
Beatty teamed up again with Penn for the movie that would elevate his status in Hollywood, the classic Bonnie et Clyde (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 John McCabe (1971); others prescient social commentaries, such as Shampoo (1975) which itself became an important event in popular culture; others were wonderful updates of Hollywood classics, such as Le ciel peut attendre (1978). He capped this all off with his hugely ambitious recounting of the American radical journalist John Reed's experiences in Bolshevik Russia, Reds (1981), for which Beatty, already nominated for acting Oscars several times, finally won as best director. Beatty was an intrinsic part of the renaissance of Hollywood in the 1970s, when films were being made every year that were important as well as successful.
Beatty's remarkable career stalled in the 1980s. In fact, he was absent from the screen for most of that decade, and when his next film after Reds (1981) finally came, it was the legendarily disastrous Ishtar (1987), one of the biggest film catastrophes of not only the decade, but all time. Beatty's next movie, Dick Tracy (1990) was colorful and a box office success, but was greeted with tepid reviews. Following this came Bugsy (1991), a biopic of the life of gangster and Las Vegas visionary Bugsy Siegel, which was another box office failure. Beatty married his co-star, Annette Bening, and produced and starred with her in another costly disaster, Rendez-vous avec le destin (1994). Beatty revisited his "Ishtar" nadir with his expensive 2001 comedy Potins mondains & amnésies partielles (2001), which was both a box office and critical debacle.
Fortunately, in the midst of all this bad news Beatty's creative best resurfaced in 1998 with his Bulworth (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. Disillusioned, Bullworth puts out a contract on his own life and while waiting to die decides to graphically show the ugliness that has become politics to the public, but his fatal plan is complicated when he falls for a beautiful young woman from South Central LA. Bulworth (1998) was a reminder that Beatty was still capable of making movies that are remarkable, entertaining and successful.
In his prime, Beatty was almost as famous for his love life as he was for his movie-making, having been connected with a galaxy of female celebrities, a who's who list reported to include Madonna, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani, Michelle Phillips, Leslie Caron, Natalie Wood, Lana Wood, Cher, Britt Ekland, Joan Collins, Maya Plisetskaya, Susan Strasberg, Candice Bergen, Morgan Fairchild, Raquel Welch, Kate Jackson, Mamie Van Doren, Bernadette Peters, Carole Mallory, Carol Alt, Christine Kaufmann, Christine Keeler, Jean Seberg, Barbara Harris, Barbara Hershey, Barbara Minty, Barbra Streisand, Juliet Prowse, Bebe Buell, Bitten Knudsen, Joyce Hyser, Jessica Savitch, Princess Margaret, Claudia Cardinale, Jane Fonda, Brooke Hayward, Mary Tyler Moore, Bianca Jagger, Connie Chung, Diana Ross, Diane von Fürstenberg, Diane Sawyer, Diane McBain, Diane Ladd, Diane Baker, Melanie Griffith, Elle Macpherson, Linda McCartney, Stella Stevens, Annette Stroyberg, Dayle Haddon, Judy Carne, Greta Chi, Robin Menken, Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Hubbard, Liv Ullmann, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Iman, Vanessa Redgrave, Janice Dickinson, Inger Stevens, Goldie Hawn, Dewi Sukarno, Marisa Mell, Samantha Eggar, Stacey Nelkin, Brigitte Bardot, Pat Cleveland, Margaux Hemingway, Joey Heatherton, Vanity, Serena, Jaid Barrymore, Joni Mitchell, Daryl Hannah, Jacqueline Kennedy, Christina Onassis, Maria Callas and Carly Simon. Notorious for his alleged "love 'em and leave 'em" treatment of many of these women, an aging Beatty had the tables turned on him by the sultry diva, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, who unceremoniously dropped Beatty to pursue Axl Rose of rock band 'Guns N' Roses'. Soon after that, Beatty settled down with Bening. The couple has four children.
Beatty has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including winning the Best Director Award and its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. He has been nominated for 16 Golden Globe Awards and won six, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award, which he received in 2007. Only Beatty and Orson Welles have been nominated for producer, director, writer and actor in the same film. Welles did it once (for Citizen Kane), and Beatty did it twice (for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).
