Burt Reynolds Is 75 and Just the Right Age to Play Antonin Scalia

Seventies superstud Burt Reynolds turns 75 years old today.  He was born in Lansing, Michigan on this day in 1936. 

(Exactly one month before the birth of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Reynolds could play Scalia in a film about the rise of the Tea Party, couldn’t he? Maybe in Jack Horner mode?)

Burt Reynolds was a one-off: there haven’t been too many mustachioed, tough-but-whimsical sex symbols in Hollywood before or since. (Errol Flynn, maybe? Tom Selleck, sure, but Reynolds had a darker side.)

Still, Reynolds is clearly recognizable as a subset of the “charming rogue” star type, and good for him. That’s a grand movie type.

Here’s a great shot from his heyday, with Farrah Fawcett on the set of the 1981 film The Cannonball Run. He played J.J. McClure, which is such a Burt Reynolds character name.

From the Who2 blog:

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