Warren Beatty Gets the Star Treatment at AFI Awards

Getty Images

Actor-filmmaker Warren Beatty was feted by the American Film Institute last night at Hollywood's famed Kodak Theater, but it wasn't all hosannas, as several generations of actors showed up to see the star receive the 36th annual Lifetime Achievement Award, People reports.

"It's ironic that I'm here for the 'movies-that-bombed' portion of the evening," joked Dustin Hoffman, who appeared with Beatty in legendary box-office flops Ishtar and Dick Tracy. Referring to the bestowing as the "one-foot-in-the-grave" award, longtime Beatty pal Hoffman cracked, "Ishtar shall rise again!"

Fellow Hollywood liberal Jane Fonda revealed that, when she first met Beatty in the '50s,  "I thought he was gay. He was so cute, and all his men friends were gay and brilliant. He had a way of collecting really brilliant gay men friends. And he liked to play piano in a piano bar—I mean, what were the odds he was straight? Shows you how dumb I was."

As for the honoree, Beatty heaped praise upon his wife, Annette Bening, and his big sister, wacko actress Shirley MacLaine. "I can thank the movies for leading me to you," he told Bening, to whom he's been married since 1992. He credited MacLaine as "the person who set an example that I could do anything in life I wanted to do."

Bulworth costar Halle Berry tipped her hat to "the greatest white rapper of the past 15 years."

How sweet—no wonder the ladies couldn't get enough of him back in the day.

Other luminaries on hand: hyperactive director Quentin Tarantino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey Jr. and former president Bill Clinton, with whom Beatty has no doubt had many interesting conversations, political and otherwise.