The private superstar Warren Beatty turns 80

IT’S not the way Warren Beatty would have chosen to herald his 80th birthday.

Making a rare public appearance before hitting the milestone on March 30, he and his Bonnie And Clyde co-star Faye Dunaway presented the Best Film Oscar — to the wrong movie.

It wasn’t Warren’s fault, he’d been given the wrong envelope, but no doubt it reinforced his penchant for keeping a low profile.

As Beatty says: “I’d rather ride down the street on a camel than give an interview. On a camel, nude, in a snowstorm, backwards. During the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

And this desire for privacy is nothing new as his sister, actress Shirley MacLaine, admits that: “Even as a kid, Warren had a private world no-one could penetrate. He could shut everyone out.”

That said, since 1992 he’s been married to the actress Annette Bening, whom he met on the set of Bugsy and with whom he has four children he describes as “four small Eastern European countries that inhabit the house”.

Changed days, as Dustin Hoffman recalls from being on the set of Ishtar in Morocco with Beatty, his friend and co-star.

“I noticed what he was looking at, a person in a djellaba — that full head-to-toe outfit, like a bathrobe,” Hoffman says.

“You could barely make out it was a female. He just watched her until it seemed like she disappeared into the sand, and then tried to pick up where he left off.

“I said: ‘Warren, you’re so passionate about what we were talking about, yet then this girl walks by who you can barely see. I’m just curious. Is there any woman in the world that you wouldn’t make love to?’.

“He considered it, looking skyward for probably 30 seconds, and then he said: ‘No, there isn’t.’”

For a time, Beatty was known for high-profile love affairs reportedly among them Joan Collins — to whom he was briefly engaged — Julie Christie, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Carly Simon, Twiggy, Joni Mitchell, Jackie Onassis, Diane Keaton, Brigitte Bardot, Elle Macpherson, Cher and Madonna.

In one of several unauthorised biographies, the author calculated Warren worked his way through 12,775 women, a figure the former legendary Lothario just laughs at.

“If you stopped and thought about it, I’m now a married person of 24 years, and I believe in doing the right thing, and I’ve never been secretive that I had a rather religious youth, and that I didn’t begin this until late — you know, the age of 20,” he says.

“So I would have had to have been with something like three or four people a day, and nobody twice — ever!

“The people with whom I had serious involvements I’m still on very good terms with — always have been.”

Beatty has been making major motion pictures longer than anyone else alive.

For the record, Clint Eastwood — seven years his senior — runs a close second and actually has earlier credits, but those were for TV.

That means Beatty has been busy in Hollywood for more than six decades, earning 14 Oscar nominations and one win — Best Director for Reds, which he also co-wrote, produced and starred in.

His most-recent movie, last year’s Rules Don’t Apply, was the first he had directed since the 1998 political satire Bulworth, which he also wrote and starred in, and only the second film in which he’s appeared in that 18-year spell.

Asked why this film has taken so long, he says he’s had the luxury of not having the need, financially at least, to make movies.

Beatty admits: “I always say making movies is like vomiting. I don’t like vomiting. But there is a time when you say: ‘I’ll feel better if I throw up.’”

Despite being known variously as “the Prince of Hollywood”, “the Pro” and “Boss”, Beatty hasn’t exactly been prolific during his 60 years plus in Tinseltown.

He’s starred in just 23 pictures, directing five of those, but that choosiness saw him awarded the Academy’s highest honour, the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award, which honours a film-maker’s body of work.

Not bad for a former football star who didn’t set out to be an actor.

“I left Northwestern University after a year,” Beatty recalls, “and was in New York playing piano in a little bar on 58th Street, and I didn’t know whether to go back.

“Someone said: ‘You should go to Stella Adler.’”

She was Marlon Brando’s teacher.

“I said: ‘What is Stella Adler?’” recalls Beatty.

“That’s how much I knew. I got lucky. I was very young.”

Beatty was on his way, and reached Hollywood just as the old studio system was dissolving, signing a five-picture deal with MGM for $400 per week.

Warren’s impact was immediate as he made his big-screen debut in 1961’s Splendor In The Grass, opposite Natalie Wood.

It was a commercial and critical smash and saw the young actor nominated for a Golden Globe.

Six years later — still at the tender age of 28 — he cemented his stardom by producing and starring in Bonnie And Clyde.

That sparked a run of successes including Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds, the latter being nominated for 12 Oscars including no fewer than four for Beatty himself for Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay.

His last big hits came with Dick Tracy and Bugsy in 1990-91 — but it’s still been a stellar career.