Ned Beatty, the Oscar-nominated character actor who in half a century of American movies, including Deliverance, Network and Superman, was a booming, indelible presence in even the smallest parts, has died.
After years in regional theatre, Beatty was cast in 1972′s Deliverance as Bobby Trippe, the happy-go-lucky member of a male river-boating party terrorised by backwoods thugs in Deliverance.
Ned Thomas Beatty was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Lexington, where he joined the Protestant Disciples of Christ Christian Church.
Beatty’s appearance in Network, scripted by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, was brief but titanic.