In the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan, Burt Reynolds had (almost) nothing to hide.

With his trademark bushy mustache topping his ever-present smirk and one of his hands strategically covering his private parts, Reynolds dared to bare - as he did most of his life.

He would call his Cosmo centrefold one of his greatest regrets, a decision which undermined the respect he had gained for his performance in Deliverance. But candor was his curse and his appeal as Reynolds, the handsome film and television star who died on Thursday at age 82, maintained an active and well documented public and private life. Sex symbol. Serious actor. Laughing stock. Gold mine. Comeback artist. Reynolds followed long and conflicting paths. He once joked that if you turned his career into a medical chart, it would look like a heart attack.

He starred in such critically acclaimed pictures as 1972's Deliverance and 1997's Boogie Nights and such commercial hits as Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run. He had a hit TV show in the 1990s with Evening Shade and, during his prime, was a perennial top draw at the movie box office.

He managed some of the industry's highest and lowest honors. He was nominated for an Oscar for Boogie Nights and won two Golden Globes and an Emmy. But he also was a frequent nominee for the Razzie, the tongue-in-cheek award for Hollywood's worst performance, and his name was often in the news whether he liked it or not. He had an acrimonious divorce from former TV star Loni Anderson in 1995, a high-profile romance with Dinah Shore and a long relationship with Sally Field. His first wife, Laugh-In star Judy Carne, criticised him often for not being supportive of her career.

Through it all he presented a genial persona, ever willing to mock his own failings, like turning down the role that went to Richard Gere in Pretty Woman or the chance to play James Bond when Sean Connery was holding out for more money.

"For a long time afterward I'd wake up in a cold sweat going, 'Bond, James Bond!'" he wrote in his memoir But Enough About Me, published in 2015.

An all-Southern Conference running back at Florida State University in the 1950s, Reynolds appeared headed to the NFL until a knee injury and an automobile accident ended his chances.

He dropped out of college and drifted to New York, where he worked as a dockhand, dance-hall bouncer, bodyguard and dish washer before returning to Florida in 1957 and enrolling in acting classes at Palm Beach Junior College.