Oscars honour for Beatty

Multi-talented: Beatty's an actor, producer, writer and director.

Hollywood star Warren Beatty is to receive an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in filmmaking.

The 62-year-old actor, director and producer will be presented with the prestigious Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award at the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on March 26.

Screen partners: Annette Bening with husband Beatty in 1991's Bugsy.

Academy president Robert Rehme said: "In discussing this award for Warren, our governors stressed his passion for film, for getting it just right, and his courage in producing pictures that many other producers might have considered too dangerous to try."

Beatty won a best-director Oscar for Reds in 1981 and is the only person to be nominated for Oscars as a producer, director, writer and actor in the same film - a feat accomplished twice, for Reds and for Heaven Can Wait in 1978.

Political ambitions

Beatty created a buzz in Hollywood and Washington last year when he hinted that he would consider running for US President - a notion he has since dismissed.

His most recent movie, Bulworth - a political satire which he directed, produced, co-wrote and starred in - received an Oscar nomination for writing in 1998.

Of the nine films Beatty has produced, he has won best picture Oscar nominations for four of them - Bonnie and Clyde, Heaven Can Wait, Reds and Bugsy.

He has also received actor nominations for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Bugsy (1991) and an original screenplay nomination in 1975 for Shampoo.

Hollywood honour

The Thalberg award was established in 1937 - the year of Beatty's birth - to honour those whose films "reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production".

It was named after former MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, one of Hollywood's first whiz kids, who died of pneumonia in 1936 at the age of 37.

Former recipients of the award include Darryl Zanuck, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B, DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Warner, Clint Eastwood, Billy Wilder, Ingmar Bergman and George Lucas.