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Ned Petty, who made an indelible first impression on Deliverance before turning into noteworthy efforts in Nashville, Network and Homicide: Life on the Street has passed away as one of the most respected actors of his era. He was 83 years old.
His daughter, Blossom Betty, told the Hollywood Reporter that Betty died Sunday of natural causes at his Los Angeles home.
The Kentucky native also portrayed Lily Tomlin’s husband, the honest attorney in Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975), the slippery Miami District attorney in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) and elicited laughter as Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) the stuttering sidekick Otis in the movie Superman (1978) and its 1980 sequel.
On TV, Betty was at her best like Det. Stanley “Big Man” Bolander on NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street and as a chaplain dedicated to an American soldier (Martin Sheen) in his final hours in the grim 1974 NBC film The Execution of Private Slovik.
Betty had a deep basso singing voice, and his goal as a teenager was to have a career in musical theater. One of his rare performances came as a leading man as the great Irish tenor Joseph Locke in Hear My Song (1991).
The horrific survival saga Deliverance (1972), directed by John Boorman, starred Betty, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ronnie Cox as they take a trip to hill country to raft in a river.
Petty said he doubted he would share the photo when he sat with Bormann, his assistant, and their wives for lunch in New York. As a veteran of the local theater, he has never participated in a feature film.
“There was a very attractive lady [the wife of Boorman’s assistant] Sitting next to me to my left, he recalls in a 1992 interview with CBC, “And I spent all the time giving my best…I was terribly married. [but still] Terrible flirt.
“I was totally heels, and I think that’s what John Boorman liked. He said he thought I was the rudest person he had ever met.”
The rescue, of course, is made infamous for its uncut 10-minute male rape sequence (“Squeak like a pig!”) in which Betty, as short-stature businessman, Bobby Tripp, is the victim. It is a sight that is difficult for viewers to bear.
Years later, the New York Times invited Petty to write an article on rape for the newspaper’s opening section. ‘Bottom line [of his piece] The bad news, he said, is that a man would rather be a rapist than sympathize with a rape victim.
In Reynolds’ other stars, Betty portrayed lawless mayor J.C. Connors in White Lightning (1973) and Gator (1976) and country singer-songwriter in WW and Dixie Dancekings (1975). The two also worked together on Stroker Ace (1983), Switching Channels (1988) and on ABC’s 1989 episode of B.L. Stryker.
In Network (1977), directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, Petty only spent one day on set and was seen on screen for less than six minutes. However, few could argue that he deserves his one and only Academy Award nomination for his lead performance as Arthur Jensen, the standout man from UBS’s parent group who convinces broadcaster Howard Bell (Peter Finch) to see things his way.
“I have interfered with the forces of primordial nature, Master Bell, and I will not possess them!” Jensen blower in a dimly lit meeting room.
Betty, who often played the southern yoke and easily did comedies and dramas, never seemed to have any regrets about not having more leading roles. “It’s a bigger problem than it’s worth,” he once told People magazine. “I feel sorry for the people in the position of stars – it’s unnatural.”
Ned Petty was born on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a peddler who installed a fire hydrant system for small-town officials. He said his voice broke when he was 10, and he sang at quads and at Baptist revivals and weddings as a teenager.
Betty graduated from Eastern High School in 1955 and then won a scholarship to attend Transylvania University, a private Christian school, in Lexington, Kentucky; While in college, he was making a living by working as a butcher.
When he was 19, he got a singing role in the play Wilderness Road. “It was an open-air play about the two counties in Kentucky in the Civil War—one had a lot of slave owners, the other was a severe abolitionist,” he told the Chicago Tribute in 1992. gave me some [speaking] lines.”
This experience made him addicted to acting, and in 1957 he joined the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia. (Ernest Borgnine, Hume Cronin, and Larry Linville also performed there early in their careers), touring around the country and performing.
This was followed by a stint in Washington with the Arena Stage Company, where he appeared in the original production of The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. He eventually made his Broadway debut in the play after it arrived in New York in 1968.
Around this time, Betty also got a job as a bank robber on an FBI training movie.
He told Backstage in 2001, “About a year later, my arrest began. If I go to a small town somewhere, I’ll be arrested. I’m serious. That’s how cops work. They’re used to seeing pictures of bad guys. If they see you and know you’re Bad guy, they arrest you. And that lasted for a little while, until I started getting to know you as a movie actor.”
Betty sure was known after surviving. He went on to play a thief turned field marshal in John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), a rob salesman in Silver Streak (1976), the father of a terminally ill child in Promises in the Dark (1979), the head of a spy organization American in Hopscotch (1980) and father of an unexpected soccer hero in Rudy (1993).
His autobiography has also included John Cassavetes’ Mikey and Nicky (1976), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Gray Lady Down (1978), Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), Radioland Murders (1994) He had a game (1998), Cookie’s Fortune (1999) with Altman again, Just Cause (1995), Spring Forward (1999), Thunderpants (2002) and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), and was the voice of Lotto’s beloved pranksters in Toy Story 3 (2010).
Betty also starred as a former Marine in charge of DC’s community center in the short-lived 1977-78 sitcom Szysznyk and played John Goodman’s father in a recurring role on ABC’s Roseanne.
The actor returned to theater and Broadway in 2003 to portray Big Daddy in the revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, won a Drama Desk Award, and then spent over a year touring in a Showboat production.
Survivors include his fourth wife, Sandy, and his children Blossom, Doug, twins Charles and Lynnes, Wally, John, Thomas and Dorothy.
Duane Berg contributed to this report.
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