Hollywood icon Burt Reynolds gone but not forgotten by his biggest British fan

AS Burt Reynolds tributes go, this takes some beating – sitting watching two of the late star’s best movies with the man himself.

That’s how 70s-obsessed comedian Mike Bubbins – who lives his life by the motto “What would Burt Reynolds do?” – tipped his hat to the Hollywood legend. Well, sort of.

“I’ve got a huge portrait of Burt on my wall and the day he died I took it down, put it in my living room and watched Smokey And The Bandit and The Longest Yard back to back with a bottle of Scotch and Burt Reynolds next to me,” says Mike, who will soon be on our screen in two new TV comedies.

“It was so weird. The week Burt died was the same week of the anniversary of my mum passing away three years ago but my phone rang more when Burt died.

“It kept pinging, ‘Are you all right, mate? It’s OK’ and then my wife’s phone started ringing, ‘Is Mike OK? I heard about Burt Reynolds!’

“He was my hero, 100%. It’s weird, you can’t explain it to people who aren’t really into somebody or something. They’re like, ‘How can you get upset at a film star dying?’.

“It depends on what they mean to you. I just loved watching his films, I loved seeing him being interviewed and his autobiography is just the best thing.

“It’s called But Enough About Me and that crystallises everything about the man.

“He was taught to dance by Gene Kelly, taught to act by Spencer Tracey and taught to box by Rocky Marciano and he has all these anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and Elvis but he’s not name-dropping. He was up there with those people.

“At one time he was going out with Dinah Shore, one of Sinatra’s exes and they were in this Italian restaurant in New York and Sinatra came in with his entourage.

“One of Frank’s heavies comes over and says, ‘Mr Sinatra would like you to join him for dinner’ but Burt says, ‘Tell Mr Sinatra that’s very kind but I’ll have a drink with him after, I’m having dinner with Dinah.’

“This happens a couple of times and Frank’s getting annoyed and after dinner the guy comes over and says ‘Frank wants to know if you want to play poker?’.

“Dinah says she’s going home but Burt says, ‘Everyone needs a Frank Sinatra story’ and goes to play poker.

“They haven’t started playing when a waiter comes in, this young Spanish kid, breaks a glass and gets berated by the owner.

“Sinatra stops the owner and tells the kid, ‘Get every glass in the place and bring them in here.’ He does this and Sinatra says, ‘Now smash ’em’ and gives the owner this huge wad of dollar bills and says, ‘Now listen, buy some new glasses and if this kid hasn’t got a job the next time I come in here, you haven’t got a restaurant.’

“At this point Burt stands up and when Frank asks, ‘Where are you going?’ Burt just says, ‘I’ve got my Sinatra story’ and leaves.”

Asked how his Burtmania started, Mike explains: “I remember watching Smokey And The Bandit as a kid and just loving it, loving the humour and the car chases and everything else.

“Also, I loved American football as a kid, watching it on Channel 4 and the first time I saw The Longest Yard, which was called The Mean Machine in the UK, starring Burt as a former player recruiting prisoners to play the guards, it just blew my mind.

“And when I started leaning back towards the 70s as I got older, if you loved the 70s and 70s films and 70s icons, he is the number one.

“When the internet got going and you could go back and watch all these old interviews, say with Johnny Carson, you realised just what an engaging bloke he was.

“To me, he was the ultimate man. A great sportsman, Burt was a very talented boxer and American football player.

“On Deliverance, the fella that taught him how to use a hunting bow said he was a crack shot immediately.

“He was also a good-looking fella, very charismatic, very funny, obviously a ladies’ man in his time. I loved the way he dressed, that twinkle in his eye and that self-assurance.

“He really was the bloke men wanted to be and women wanted to be with. A man’s man and a woman’s man all rolled into one but he never took that too seriously.

“In this business you work with people who’ve met your idols and I worked with this friend of mine who’s a comic who’d done a play in the 90s that Reynolds had done in America years before.

“And he told me they were just sat in the pub in London having a pint and Burt Reynolds walked in. He was just so nice, talking to them about the play.

“It wasn’t about him at all. He wanted to know what they were about, what was their story and to have that confidence not to blow your own trumpet all the time, that’s part of being the ultimate man.

“You speak to people who knew him and they all say he was interested in you and it must be so hard to be in that bubble where people want to kiss your backside 24 hours a day because you’re the richest actor in the world and not be a git but want to know what other people’s story is.

“I love the dichotomy whereby in front of the camera he’s got that glint in his eye and that cheeky smile, that cocky self-assurance, then off-screen he’s a bloke you want to have a beer with and who’d ask about your wife and kids.”

Reynolds was famed for his hairpiece and Mike laughs: “It was quite obvious he had one – look at Deliverance – and he said it was the studios at the time wanting a leading man to have a full head of hair.

“But this guy came up to him in New York and started taking the mick about him wearing a wig and so Burt said to him, ‘If you can take it off me, you can keep it.’

“He could back it up, too. He never lost a fight as a boxer and he did all his own stunts in his early films because he never thought he was a good enough actor, he wanted to provide value for money so they would book him again.”

On losing his icon aged 82, Mike says: “It’s that finality. You think, ‘I’m never going to meet him.’ I had this grand plan and every commissioning meeting I’ve ever been to, at the end I’d say, ‘I want to do a documentary and meet Burt Reynolds.’

“In comedy you’ve got to build up a profile to get that sort of thing but I reckoned if I could get one or two things up and running I could get the documentary made but the swine went and died on me just before they took off.

“I’ve just had a script commissioned by BBC1 in which a bloke lives his life by my motto, ‘What would Burt Reynolds do?’. I’ve got a show called Tourist Trap out soon and my series The Unexplainers has been commissioned and filmed so I’m still going to do it.

“But I know how TV works. My biggest fear is someone who hasn’t really got an interest in Burt will do it just for a pay day either from a jokey point of view or do a doc by numbers.”

Reynolds was a movie star in the days when that really meant something and Mike says: “We live in an age when people seem to be famous and I don’t know what they’re famous for.

“But Burt came from an age of if you were a movie star, you were a movie star.

“I like the fact he was the biggest movie star but he was a gentleman. It’s the same with Elvis, the other love of my life – my wife and my children excepted. He was the most famous entertainer ever but he was very humble, it was always, ‘Hello, sir, hello, ma’am.’

“People forget Burt was number one at the box office five years in a row. That’s never been done before or since, it’s hard to imagine how big a star he was.”