Ned Beatty – the actor whose first film role in 1972’s Deliverance launched him on a long, prolific and accomplished career – has died at the age of 83.

Beatty’s manager, Deborah Miller, said he died on Sunday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles surrounded by friends and loved ones.

After years in regional theatre, Beatty was cast in Deliverance as Bobby Trippe, the happy-go-lucky member of a male river-boating party terrorised by backwoods thugs.

Obit Ned Beatty
Ned Beatty in 2007 (Gus Ruelas/AP)

The scene in which Trippe is brutally attacked became the most memorable in the movie and established Beatty as an actor whose name moviegoers may not have known but whose face they always recognised.

“For people like me, there’s a lot of ‘I know you! I know you! What have I seen you in?’” Beatty remarked in 1992.

Beatty received only one Oscar nomination, as supporting actor for his role as corporate executive Arthur Jensen in 1976′s Network, but he contributed to some of the most popular movies of his time and worked constantly, his credits including more than 150 movies and TV shows.

He was equally memorable as Otis, the idiot henchman of villainous Lex Luther in the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies and as the racist sheriff in White Lightning.

Other films included All The President’s Men, The Front Page, Nashville, and The Big Easy.

In a 1977 interview, he had explained why he preferred being a supporting actor.

“Stars never want to throw the audience a curveball, but my great joy is throwing curveballs,” he said.

“Being a star cuts down on your effectiveness as an actor because you become an identifiable part of a product and somewhat predictable. You have to mind your Ps and Qs and nurture your fans. But I like to surprise the audience, to do the unexpected.”

He landed a rare leading role in the Irish film Hear My Song in 1991. The true story of legendary Irish tenor Josef Locke, who disappeared at the height of a brilliant career, it was well reviewed but largely unseen in the United States.

Between movies, Beatty worked often in TV and theatre. He had recurring roles in Roseanne as John Goodman’s father and as a detective on Homicide: Life On The Streets.

On Broadway he won critical praise (and a Drama Desk Award) for his portrayal of Big Daddy in a revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, a role he had first played as a 21-year-old in a stock company production.

He created controversy, however, when he was quoted in The New York Times on the skills of his young co-stars, Ashley Judd and Jason Patric.

“Ashley is a sweetie,” he said, “and yet she doesn’t have a lot of tools.” Of Patric, he remarked: “He’s gotten better all the time, but his is a different journey.”

His more recent movies included Toy Story 3 in 2010 and two releases from 2013, The Big Ask and Baggage Claim. He retired soon after.

Ned Thomas Beatty was born in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Lexington, where he joined the Protestant Disciples of Christ Christian Church.

“It was the theatre I attended as a kid,” he told The Associated Press in 1992. “It was where people got down to their truest emotions and talked about things they didn’t talk about in everyday life. The preaching was very often theatrical.”

For a time he thought of becoming a priest, but changed his mind after he was cast in a high school production of Harvey.

He spent 10 summers at the Barter Theatre in Abingdom, Virginia, and eight years at the Arena Stage Company in Washington, DC. At the Arena Stage, he appeared in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and starred in Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman.

Then his life changed forever when he took a train to New York to audition for director John Boorman for the role of Bobby Trippe.

Boorman told him the role was cast, but changed his mind after seeing Beatty audition.

Beatty, who married Sandra Johnson in 1999, had eight children from three previous marriages.