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Until Warren Beatty settled down and married Annette Bening a few years back, an event that had women around the world beaming with approval as if the Earth's last truly wild beast had finally been domesticated, his chief sin in the eyes of the public may have been knowing all too well how to look at a woman -- how to look at her and really see her. Over the course of his career, Beatty became romantically involved with everyone from Natalie Wood and Julie Christie to Diane Keaton and Madonna, and in the process earned one of Hollywood's most enduring reputations as a womanizer. But it's entirely possible that he was at heart an unrepentant serial monogamist: The two are not necessarily the same thing.

Beyond speculating about Beatty's personal life -- no one can really know the truth of it anyway, except the people involved -- it's safe to surmise that Beatty earned his reputation as a man who can't resist women at least in part by the kind of attention he lavished on his partners on-screen. Actors, of course, act. A screen kiss is not a substitute for a real one; the most penetrating gaze of longing doesn't necessarily denote real-life passion.

But if the only evidence a movie audience has of an actor's heart is what we see on-screen, then Beatty has probably opened his more honestly, and more nakedly, than any actor of his generation. When his eyes light on Faye Dunaway in "Bonnie and Clyde," it's as if the world has suddenly opened up around him -- the exact opposite of locking an object of desire up in the shackles of appraisal and assessment. Or as Beatty's George, the perpetually lovestruck hairdresser in "Shampoo" explains, or doesn't explain, in a tumble of half sentences that add up to a shattering helplessness, "I go into the shop, and they're so great looking, you know? And I'm doing their hair, and they feel great, and they smell great. Or I could be out in the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight or go into an elevator or ... there's a beautiful girl -- I mean, that's it, it makes my day. I mean, makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever."

When the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences decided to honor Beatty with the Irving G. Thalberg Award, which he'll take home from the Oscars ceremony Sunday, it's pretty unlikely they were thinking of his reputation as an ace girl-watcher. The award is not so much designed for actors (Clint Eastwood, who won it in 1994, is the only other recipient who's generally best known as an actor); it's given to directors and producers to recognize a lifetime body of work. Even though Beatty may be most frequently thought of as an actor, his work in other capacities has earned him the lion's share of his Oscar nominations. He's been nominated 14 times, and only four of those nominations have been for best actor. (He's won one award: best director in 1981 for "Reds.")

But for people who take the academy's decrees with a grain of salt -- and ideally that should encompass every moviegoer with half a brain -- this particular award could well be considered a way of acknowledging not just Beatty's overall sense of vision but his distinct and radical guiding sensibility, a sensibility that has fueled his ambitions and inspired a remarkable and uncompromising slate of mainstream movies.

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At the astonishing age of 30 he produced and starred in Arthur Penn's 1967 brutal and exquisite masterpiece "Bonnie and Clyde," a picture that rattled and thrilled audiences at the time and still cuts deep. And in 1998 he produced, wrote, directed and starred in the flawed but fascinating "Bulworth," in which he brandished his politics unabashedly, decrying in particular the fact that drug traffic represents the only vitality and growth in our inner-city economies.

You could call it brazen and self-aggrandizing for one man to pour so much money and energy into a movie that seems to exist chiefly as a personal political statement -- but then, it's not all that common for a successful Hollywood type to pour much of anything into making a political statement, even though there are plenty who have the means to do so. Actors are in the same game as politicians: Popularity means everything. Beatty had much more to lose by making a political picture than he had to gain.

Beatty is that rarest of creatures: A longtime lefty who didn't change his tune once he started to make real money. "Bulworth" suffers now and then from a slightly shaky focus, but in the end it's blazingly passionate. And even if it presaged Beatty's timid flirtation with the idea of running for president, which culminated in an op-ed piece for the New York Times last year and fizzled anticlimactically not long after, it can't be viewed even in retrospect as any sort of slick promo. Beatty sank his heart too deep into "Bulworth" for it to be slick in any way. It's hilarious at times, but by the end it feels brushed with deep tones of despair and melancholy -- and who ever wins votes with that?

Next page | "Bulworth" was made by a man who's completely comfortable with who he is