Henry Warren Beatty[a] (né Beaty; born March 30, 1937) is an American actor and filmmaker. Credited with ushering New Hollywood in the late 1960s,[8] Beatty's career has spanned over six decades and he has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, including four for Best Actor, four for Best Picture, two for Best Director, three for Original Screenplay, and one for Adapted Screenplay – winning Best Director for Reds (1981). Beatty is the only person to have been nominated for acting in, directing, writing, and producing the same film, and he did so twice: first for Heaven Can Wait (with Buck Henry as co-director), and again for Reds.[b]

Eight of the films he produced earned 53 Academy nominations. In 1999, he was awarded the Academy's highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award. Beatty was nominated for 18 Golden Globe Awards, winning six, including the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2007. Among his Golden Globe–nominated films are his screen debut Splendor in the Grass (1961), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Shampoo (1975), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Reds (1981), Dick Tracy (1990), Bugsy (1991), Bulworth (1998), and Rules Don't Apply (2016), all of which he also produced. Director and collaborator Arthur Penn described Beatty as "the perfect producer", adding, "He makes everyone demand the best of themselves. Warren stays with a picture through editing, mixing, and scoring. He plain works harder than anyone else I have ever seen."[9]

Early life[edit]
Henry Warren Beaty was born on March 30, 1937, in Richmond, Virginia. His mother, Kathlyn Corinne (née MacLean), was a teacher from Nova Scotia. His father, Ira Owens Beaty, studied for a PhD in educational psychology and was a teacher and school administrator, in addition to working in real estate.[10] His grandparents were also teachers. The family was Baptist.[11][12] During Warren's childhood, Ira Beaty moved his family from Richmond to Norfolk and then to Arlington and Waverly, then back to Arlington, eventually taking a position at Arlington's Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in 1945. During the 1950s the family resided in the Dominion Hills section of Arlington.[13] Beatty's older sister is the actress, dancer and writer Shirley MacLaine. His uncle by marriage was Canadian politician A. A. MacLeod.

Beatty became interested in movies as a child, often accompanying his sister to theaters. One film that had an important early influence on him was The Philadelphia Story (1940), which he saw when it was re-released in the 1950s. He noticed a strong resemblance between its star, Katharine Hepburn, and his mother, in both appearance and personality, saying that they symbolized "perpetual integrity".[4] Another film that influenced him was Love Affair (1939), starring one of his favorite actors, Charles Boyer. He found it "deeply moving", and recalled that "[t]his is a movie I always wanted to make."[4] He remade Love Affair in 1994, starring alongside Annette Bening and Katharine Hepburn.

Among his favorite TV shows in the 1950s was the Texaco Star Theatre, and he began to mimic one of its regular host comedians, Milton Berle. Beatty learned to do a "superb imitation of Berle and his routine", said a friend, and often used Berle-type humor at home. His sister's memories of her brother include seeing him reading books by Eugene O'Neill or singing along to Al Jolson records.[4] In Rules Don't Apply (2016), Beatty plays Howard Hughes, who is shown talking about and singing Jolson songs while flying his plane.[14]

MacLaine noted — on what made her brother want to become a filmmaker, sometimes writing, producing, directing and starring in his films: "That's why he's more comfortable behind the camera ... He's in the total-control aspect. He has to have control over everything."[4] Beatty doesn't deny that need; in speaking about his earliest parts, he said "When I acted in films I used to come with suggestions about the script, the lighting, the wardrobe, and people used to say 'Waddya want, to produce the picture as well?' And I used to say that I supposed I did."[15]

Beatty was a star football player at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington. Encouraged to act by the success of his sister, who established herself as a Hollywood star, he decided to work as a stagehand at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. during the summer before his senior year. After graduation, he was reportedly offered ten college football scholarships, but turned them down to study liberal arts at Northwestern University (1954–55), where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Beatty left college after his first year and moved to New York City to study acting under Stella Adler at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. He often subsisted on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and worked odd jobs, including dishwasher, piano player, bricklayer's assistant, construction worker, and, relatively briefly, a sandhog.[16]