Art Directors Guild Honors Warren Beatty

Variety reports that Warren Beatty has been named the recipient of the The Art Directors Guild's Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award.  Not undeserving of the nod, only Beatty and Orson Welles have received Academy Award nominations as an actor, director, writer and producer on the same film, an achievement Beatty did with Heaven Can Wait and Reds.  Beatty will be presented with the prize on February 13 at the Beverly Hilton.

Past recipients of the Cinematic Imagery Award include Allen Daviau, Clint Eastwood, Blake Edwards, Terry Gilliam, Ray Harryhausen, Norman Jewison, John Lasseter, George Lucas, Frank Oz, Steven Spielberg, Robert S. Wise and Zhang Yimou. 

Beatty made his foray into performance as a stagehand at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. After studying drama at Northwestern University for one year, he came to New York City to study with Stella Adler at the Actors Conservatory.  He would perform in over 40 productions off-Broadway and regionally before landing on Broadway in William Inge's "A Loss of Roses," for which he received a Tony nomination and a Theatre World Award in 1960.

Beatty made his film debut under Elia Kazan's direction and opposite Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass (1961). The film was a box office success and Beatty was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in The category Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama. He achieved critical acclaim and power as a producer and star of Bonnie and Clyde which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.
Because of his work on Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty is generally regarded as the precursor of the New Hollywood generation, which included such filmmakers as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. Subsequent Beatty films include Bugsy, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Parallax View, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, Bulworth, Dick Tracy, and Town and Country.

In 2006, Beatty was named Honorary Chairman of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, succeeding Marlon Brando. In 2007, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded Beatty the Cecil B. DeMille award, presented at the Golden Globe ceremony by Tom Hanks. Beatty was honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008. Beatty is on the Board of Trustees at The Scripps Research Institute.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.