Warren Beatty Is Back — So Is Old Hollywood

After virtual radio silence for 15 years, Warren Beatty, now 79, is returning to the big screen in a film focusing on the life of famed billionaire and recluse, Howard Hughes. The legendary actor has the leading role and directs the movie, titled “Rules Don’t Apply.”

It’s a story Beatty has reportedly been developing for 40 years — going back to a time when the actor stayed at the same hotel as the peculiar entrepreneur and became fascinated by him.

“I’m so awed by Warren Beatty as a director, I forget what an unbelievable actor he is.”

As a leading man, Beatty swam through his Hollywood golden years — he was George Clooney before there ever was George Clooney. He headlined hits including “Heaven Can Wait,” “Bugsy” and “Bonnie & Clyde.” He earned countless fans for both his charm and his lavish, Hollywood lifestyle — something that still makes news.

Beatty even moved behind the camera with great success. His 1981 feature, “Reds,” won him the Academy Award for Best Director and was nominated for Best Picture. He also directed the 1990 box office success, “Dick Tracy,” famously co-starring Madonna.

After directing the 1998 picture, “Bulworth,” and taking on a high-paying role in the 2001 flop, “Town & Country,” Beatty disappeared from public life. Staying away from the camera, interviews, and filmmaking, Beatty has been living a relatively quiet life with his wife, actress Annette Bening — who has a role in “Rules” — and four children: Stephen, 24; Ben, 22; Isabel, 19; and Ella, 16.

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“I always knew I wanted to have children. I wanted to do it well, and I wanted to do it with someone who felt the same way,” Beatty recently told AARP The Magazine about focusing on raising kids late in life. He added that they are “by far the best thing that happened to me.”

Beatty is now back to charming the media and doing what he does best — making movies. “Rules Don’t Apply,” which has been in active development since 2011 with Paramount Pictures, will make its premiere at the AFI Fest tonight in Los Angeles and debuts in theaters on Nov. 23.

“Rules” follows an ambitious young actress (Lily Collins) and a young entrepreneur (Alden Ehrenreich) who find young love in 1950s Hollywood. However, both come from deeply religious families and work under the reclusive and strange Howard Hughes, who prohibits relationships between employees and whose growing peculiarities present their own challenges for the two.

Beatty is earning big praises with early reviewers. “I’m so awed by Warren Beatty as a director, I forget what an unbelievable actor he is. His performance in @RulesDontApply is amazing,” tweeted actor James Woods after seeing the film.

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“I wanted to do a story about a girl who comes from being the Apple Blossom Queen of Winchester, Virginia, and a boy who is a Methodist from Fresno, who is under the same religious influences that I was raised in. I wanted to do a story about that young man and that young woman that also deals with money and misogyny in late-1950s Hollywood,” Beatty told Variety about the film, saying it is less of a “biopic” of Howard Hughes than many might be expecting.

It may seem Beatty is making a return to film to simply breathe life into his decades-long obsession with telling a Hughes story, but “Rules Don’t Apply” could be a new beginning for him.

And he makes no excuses for his absence. As he told Variety, “Something happened called ‘living.'”