Ned Beatty: News

This July 6th, actor Ned Beatty turns 72 years young. Ned Beatty may not be as familiar to moviegoers as, say, Gene Hackman or Harrison Ford. That's because he's largely been a supporting actor over the years, yet many of these roles are quite memorable.

To many moviegoers, Ned Beatty will forever be remembered as Otis, Lex Luthor's bumbling sidekick in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. To others, he's remembered as Bobby, the equally bumbling poor soul who has an unfortunate mid-river encounter in Deliverance. Me, though, I remember him not as a bumbling fool but as a tower of doom from his brief cameo in Network, when he gives Peter Finch a crash course in capitalism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AI8mC8XucY

Ned just finished working on the movie, "The Killer Inside Me", which wrapped in Tulsa, Oklahoma the last week of June. He and his wife Sandy are up in northern Minnesota spending time in their summer cottage "The Gnome Home" and have started the season off with a daily round of golf and working in the garden. The tomato plants already have flowers and a few tiny tomatoes. The flower gardens are bursting with color and Sandy is busy as a bee herself. The goldfinches are having a feast of niger seeds and fill the back yard with song and yellow, yellow everywhere.................. life is good.

"And if you think that Tennessee Ernie Ford's Sixteen Tons is the gold standard -- and if you are of A Certain Age, you know that you do -- wait until you hear character actor and Louisville native Ned Beatty's take. It's equal parts hypnotism and camp, and Beatty hasn't been this bravura since Paddy Chayefsky's Network."