Burton Leon Reynolds (jr.) was a man's man. And when he wasn't being a man's man, he kept himself busy being a woman's man, in fact he was such a woman's man it comes as no small suprise he even found the time to make movies. Reynolds acting career developed after a car accident stopped his on-the-ascent college football career and forced him to focus on his studies where he was cast in various plays and obviously found a love for the trade. It's unclear exactly when he found a love for the moustache however. His first television appearance in the series riverboat (1960-61) found him bare lipped, a trend which continued for most of that decade while he worked in television and mostly b-grade films concurrently. 1969 however was quite a momentous year for Burt seeing him unveil his moustache for the first time in the spaghetti western 100 Rifles. It wasn't the same moustache that we have all grown to love (these things take time) but rather an early slightly angled prototype. Over the next few years and subsequent movies his moustaches waxed and waned, but his propensity for acting in spaghetti westerns coupled with the fact that pretty much everyone back in the wild west had a moustache or facial hair of some sort meant that more and more people came to associate Burton as "that guy with the moustache" so invariably it came to stick. Reynolds starred in a number of highly succesful screwball comedy's such as Canonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit both of which had a number of diminishingly succesful sequels and afterwards he subsequently became typecast in this sort of role for the remainder of his career. Given that the films for which Reynolds received most critical acclaim for, "Deliverence" and "Boogie Nights" saw him appear sans moustache (bare lipped in Deliverence and with a goatee in Boogie Nights) it is not unfair to wonder if audiences would have taken him more seriously had he not become so synonomous with his upper lip hair.

In recent years Reynolds has been known to fluctuate between his trademark moustache and a more genteel old man's goatee.