Warren Beatty Biography

Oscar-winner Warren Beatty was one of the great young Hollywood leading men of the 1960s before becoming a writer, director, producer… and a key figure in one of the biggest Academy Award blunders of all time.

Warren Beatty got his start as a standard young heartthrob, making a splash opposite Natalie Wood in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass. But he morphed into something more complicated, playing handsome antiheroes in complex movies like Bonnie and Clyde (1967, with Faye Dunaway), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, also with Keith Carradine), and Shampoo (1975).

He began writing and directing, and won an Academy Award for directing Reds, a sprawling 1981 movie about the Russian Revolution (co-starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson). Beatty also earned a reputation as an off-screen heartbreaker, dating a long string of leading ladies, including Madonna, with whom he candidly appears in Truth or Dare (1991). In 1991 Beatty married actress Annette Bening, his co-star in the gangster movie Bugsy (1991).

His 1998 movie Bulworth (co-starring Halle Berry and Don Cheadle) was a political satire that seemed to echo Beatty’s outspoken political views, opinions he was later to voice during a brief flirtation with a run for president in 2000. After a long hiatus he returned in 2016 as writer, director and producer of Rules Don’t Apply, a romantic comedy-drama in which he played Howard Hughes.

The next year he was involved in a major Academy Awards ceremony blunder, when he and Faye Dunaway, presenting the award for best picture, opened the envelope and announced the wrong winner: La La Land. The mistake was corrected minutes later amid chaos on live TV, with the award given to Moonlight instead. The accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCooper quickly took the blame for the mix-up, admitting that Beatty and Dunaway had been given the wrong envelope.