Ned Beatty, who has died aged 83, was one of Hollywood’s finest character actors for four decades, and yet he will probably still be best remembered for his film debut in which he was urged to “squeal like a pig” while being sexually assaulted by a sadistic hillbilly in the Georgia backwoods.
Beatty, short and stocky, gave a superb performance as Bobby Trippe, one of a quartet of big-city chums whose canoeing weekend on a wild river turns into a nightmare of survival in John Boorman’s fierce thriller Deliverance (1972).
Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, both established stars, were already cast in the film when they, together with the British director Boorman, went to a theatre in Washington to check out Beatty and Ronny Cox, neither of whom had appeared on the big screen before.
They were performing together on stage in The Pueblo Incident, about the seizure of a US spy ship by North Korea in 1968. The quartet for Deliverance was now complete.
The film was, unusually, shot in sequence and when it came to the rape by a leering mountain man (Bill McKinney) egged on by his toothless fellow hillbilly (Herbert ‘Cowboy’ Coward), Boorman brought in several additional cameras.
He knew Beatty, stripped to his underpants and grovelling in the dirt on all fours, was unlikely to give him a second (or third or fourth) take.
According to Beatty: “The scene wasn’t going to be particularly physical the way it was written. But when we came up to start to getting ready to actually doing it, Mr Boorman said: ‘I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe this guy is gonna drop his laundry and sort of give into this. I want you to run.’ I said: ‘Fine, I’ll run.’”
The actual “squeal” line was not in the script, but was suggested by one of the crew on the day, although Beatty did once claim its authorship. Years later, he would contribute movingly to a newspaper article on sexual assault about his feelings of being “a rape victim” as a result of his experience on the film.
Beatty made a huge impact in his debut, but it was not until five years later — after small but juicy roles in award-winning films including Robert Altman’s Nashville in 1975 and Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men in 1976 — that he earned his first and only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor.
The nod came for his role as a cynical corporate “suit” in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1977), writer Paddy Chayefsky’s scathing satire on American television and all its diabolical works.
The memorable film’s most quoted line probably still remains “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more”, uttered by Peter Finch as the deranged former television anchorman, Howard Beale.
Born on July 6, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, Ned Thomas Beatty was a performer from the age of 10, singing in gospel choirs and barbershop quartets.
He started his acting career in regional theatre, eventually ending up on Broadway at the back end of the 1960s in an acclaimed production of Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander.
Beatty appeared in more than 70 films as well as endless hours of television drama.
Probably his biggest hits were Superman (1978) and its first sequel, in which he played the bumbling Otis, assistant to Gene Hackman as megalomaniac villain Lex Luthor, and Toy Story 3 (2010), in which he brilliantly voiced the — on-the-surface — genial Lotso, a stuffed pink bear who turns out to have serious personal “issues”.
He starred in Ronald Neame’s globe-trotting spy caper Hopscotch, the story of contemporary Scottish life Restless Natives, and the Frederick Forsyth adaptation starring Michael Caine, The Fourth Protocol.
In 1991 Hear My Song earned Beatty a Golden Globe nomination for his role as the reclusive Irish tenor Josef Locke.
Ned Beatty was married four times — finally, from 1999, to Sandra Johnson — and had eight children, including four with his first wife, Walda, whom he divorced in 1968.
© Telegraph Media Group Ltd (2021)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
