Yes, but could he act?
As a nation mourns former US president Ronald Reagan, many in Hollywood are recalling his days as a film actor who was more likely to lose the girl than get her, a man often typecast in the role as the hero's "best buddy."
As far as the heads of Hollywood studios were concerned, Reagan was a second-ranked B-movie performer who had to wait until he reached the White House before he finally landed a real A-list role.
When studio head Jack Warner heard that Reagan was thinking of running for governor of California, he quipped, "No, no. Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend."
That was, of course, Hollywood's take on him, never realizing that while he may not have been a great movie actor, he was a first-class student and used many of the skills he honed in films for his bigger career later on.
Movie historian David Thomson calls Reagan's switch to politics "the greatest career move in the history of entertainment."
"He could learn lines overnight; even when he forgot them, he spoke naturally in movie-ese ... His walk across the White House lawn, his cupping of a deaf ear to catch questions, his humble `Well...' -- these strokes became epic," said Thomson in his film reference book The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
He added "For eight years, he played `Mr President, That's Me,' amassing more camera time than anyone else in the Actor's Guild and deftly feeding the lines and situations of Warner Brothers in the 1940s back into world affairs."
Some of Reagan's most famous lines and antidotes could be traced to long-forgotten magazine articles or to films he appeared in, including his outraged "I paid for this microphone" quip during a debate that helped him win the New Hampshire primary in 1980.
The late New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson once spent hours in the Library of Congress trying to find where Reagan got his first-hand account of a touching conversation between two World War II fighter pilots crashing to their death.
It was either a movie or a footnote in a magazine article, but Reagan told the story with an actor's ability to convince you that he was in the cockpit with the doomed men.
Reagan reached Hollywood in 1937 and launched a career that saw him do mostly best-buddy roles in a succession of second-ranked movies with names like Angels Wash Their Faces, The Santa Fe Trail, Brother Rat and a Baby, Million Dollar Baby, The Voice of the Turtle, The Girl From Jones Beach and Tugboat Annie Sails Again, along with about 50 others.
If there was a girl to lose, he was your man, said Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss in a review of Reagan's film career in a special issue on the ex-president.
He lost Bette Davis to George Brett in Dark Victory, Olivia de Havilland to Errol Flynn in Santa Fe Trail and, according to Corliss, he also lost a role in a film tentatively titled Everybody Comes to Rick's but later renamed Casablanca -- winner of the Best Picture Oscar and one of the most popular films ever.
Some have wondered what would have happened if he had gotten that role and become a major star.
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