So the other day, Burt Reynolds was talking about the intricacies of Shakespeare’s famous “To be or not to be” speech with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.

And just the image of the Bandit deconstructing Hamlet with a former kilt-wearing professional wrestler-turned-actor is so surreal that you almost don’t need to hear the rest of the story. But like all of Burt Reynolds’ stories, it’s a good one.

“He calls me ‘Coach,’ which is his way of saying I’m old,” Reynolds begins, leaning back in a chair in the cavernous billiard room of his Hobe Sound home along the Intracoastal Waterway. “He had to learn the ‘To be or not to be’ speech, and asked me ‘What does this mean?’ And I said, ‘It means, should I be or not be? Should I stay and not fight? You can take up arms and it’s over. The rest takes time and courage.’ ”

Suddenly, you get the feeling that Reynolds, the famously hard-charging movie star, isn’t talking about acting anymore.

“What Roddy told me is that wrestling is about exploding, but that acting is about imploding,” he says.

So, in Reynolds’ life, did he make a habit of staying and not fighting, or was he more likely to take up arms?

He smiles, thoughtfully.

“I fought,” he says. “And I learned how much more important it is to implode rather than explode.”

At 73, that’s a lesson Reynolds says he’s finally got down pat. And the staying and not going part? For the moment, the Michigan-born, Riviera Beach-raised movie star says there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

Even during the years that he was lighting Hollywood on fire with a winning combination of charm, intensity, sex appeal and God’s most perfect mustache, Burt Reynolds’ heart was right here in the Jupiter area.

First, he had a ranch and movie studio, then the former Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre and Burt Reynolds Institute of Theater Training. Now, it’s the Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum, which sits under the bridge at Indiantown Road and U.S. 1.
And just a hop, skip and quick jaunt north in a speedy Trans-Am is Valhalla, his lush, Mediterranean-style estate.

Within the past two years, he’s quietly renewed his ties to the place where he grew up as a high school gridiron hero and son of a local police chief, and first got the acting bug under the tutelage of college professor Watson B. Duncan.

Not only is he living here full time, but he’s thrown his creative power behind new ventures at the museum, such as the Burt Reynolds Institute of Theater and Film, where he teaches master classes, and a new troupe, the Under-The-Bridge-Players, which has a slate of theater productions planned for this season. Reynolds himself will kick it off this week with staged readings of William Luce’s Barrymore, about legendary stage and film actor John Barrymore.

Even though he’s got some movie projects that might take him away temporarily, The Bandit is back.

“I love the area. I get top billing here behind Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman and the biggest country singer on the planet — Alan Jackson,” he says. “These people (are proof) that I was right about it. They could live anywhere in the whole world, and they live here. It’s very calming to have an oasis to go to.”

And it seems to agree with him, because he looks good — thinner, fitter, his famous mustache now peppered with salt.

“I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in. I feel great,” he confirms, and when he says he’s healthy, he means completely.

Recently, he revealed that he’d spent time in West Palm Beach’s Hanley Center to treat his addiction to prescription painkillers following back surgery, the result of his long years of rough and tumble acting. It was immediately the talk of the media.

What was “misunderstood,” Reynolds says, is that it was his idea to be so open about the experience, which included about a month of treatment. Perhaps Reynolds wanted to avoid a repeat of all the rumors that dogged him in the ’80s, when his jaw was busted on a movie set and he went through years of searing pain and weight loss and had to deny malicious rumors of AIDS.

“I thought it would be inspirational to people” to talk about this addiction, which is cleared up even though back pain remains a constant. “I got hundreds of letters from people. But if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn’t have admitted it.”
Well, at least it seems to have worked, right?

“If there was a pill to make you look like you’re in shape,” he says, wryly, “that would be the pill to take.”

Reynolds has been back in the area from L.A. for about 20 months, “the longest that I’ve been here,” and is committed to the point that he’s risked the wrath of the British royal family by turning down an audience with Queen Elizabeth, who was interested in screening a British-made film Reynolds recently completed called A Bunch of Amateurs.

“I might not be able to go back to England now. They wanted me to come over,” he says. “But I told them ‘I’ve turned down other queens in my life, and I’m turning down this one, too.’”

Ahem. So what was so important that he’d risk permanent exile from Great Britain, or, at least, permanent removal from the Royal Christmas card list?
“I was busy teaching.”

In Norse lore, Valhalla is the heaven where slain warriors spend eternity. Driving into Reynolds’ Valhalla is a similarly peaceful experience, a lush, green escape from the busy highway outside the gates of his 12,500-square-foot estate, which takes its design cues from Spain rather than Scandinavia.

Drive down a narrow, tree-lined lane until you get to what appears to be a one-story home with a tiled driveway and curved Spanish roof. But this building, into which you could fit a modest single family home, is just the warm-up to the main home, that sits, majestic, at the end of the drive.

Today, Reynolds and his adorable half pit bull, half black lab, Precious, are greeting visitors in the smaller building, which houses the aforementioned billiard room. It’s decorated, like most people’s rec rooms, with art and photos of friends.

The difference is that you probably weren’t friends with Ella Fitzgerald, Muhammad Ali and Groucho Marx.

Even in the days that he was hobnobbing with his fellow stars, Reynolds says he always felt connected to the area. He didn’t just become a cheerleader for Jupiter — he brought his famous friends, like the late Charles Nelson Reilly, back to teach acting classes here, and brought Hollywood in the form of his ’80s detective series, B.L. Stryker.

“I know so many actors who’ve had a lot of success, but you don’t know anything about their towns,” Reynolds says. “Me, I never shut up about it.”

If Valhalla is Reynolds’ oasis of solitude, his mansion in Beverly Hills was the scene of the party, where at any time Ella might be playing. At one time, his neighbors included such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, who once knocked on Reynolds’ door during a party “and said ‘It’s Barbra Streisand. I want some sugar,’” he says. “I actually gave her some. She really just wanted to come in.”

Who could blame her? For five years, Reynolds was the biggest box office star in the country, and it seemed to all the world that his life was a constant party. “It was as much fun as it looked,” he confirms.

Yet, it was also “one of the loneliest times of my life. I was number one at the box office with no one to share it with. Going home after everyone’s been screaming and yelling is very revealing. Being famous is like being an orange that everyone’s torn the peelings off. … It was very quiet at the top of the mountain.”

He says that even though he had a longer run at the top than most, he thought he was prepared for that run to end. “I thought you slip to number two,” he says. “I didn’t know you slip to 63rd.”

And the ironic thing, Reynolds says, is that you don’t immediately realize “that you’re 63rd, until you get offered 63rd money.”

At the time, Reynolds said, he was still a student of explosion, a skill he’d learned as a football player at Palm Beach High School and Florida State University, and that he was planning to use when he was drafted by the Baltimore Colts until he was injured.
The struggle and loneliness of his early career, and his journey to finding his true self, is partially what drew him to the one-man show Barrymore, which he will give a staged reading of beginning Thursday at the museum.

He believes that he and the late actor had a lot in common. Both became famous as young men, shooting stars with their pick of projects, the love of the crowds and the ladies, and, unfortunately, of the life that comes with it.

“He was a shooting star who did flame out,” Reynolds says. “The life lesson is that everyone gets a chance. It’s what you do with that chance. (Our careers) were very similar, in the early parts. What happened to me was that I had an addiction. Thank God I beat mine. He didn’t. So he beat himself up. You know, he once said ‘All of my marriages were bus accidents.’”
Reynolds waits a beat.

“That’s something I’m gonna steal.”

Reynolds can’t compete with Barrymore in number of marriages, clocking only two to the late legend’s four. But he’s been known for his luminous love life, nonetheless, including girlfriends Sally Field, Dinah Shore and Chris Evert, and wives Judy Carne and Loni Anderson, mother of his only child, Quinton.

From the sound of it, Quinton learned introspection at a much earlier age than his father.
“When I separated from his mother, he was 4 or 5, and I went to the beach with him. And he said, ‘I know you want to talk to me about something. I know you have to be by yourself for a little while.’ It was so amazing. … When my friends were around, I’d be worried about the language.

Once I had some friends of friends over from out of town, and Quinton saw what was going on and said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to go play.’ Later he said, ‘(I left) because I knew you were upset.’”

Quinton, now a 21-year-old college student and maitre’d in Los Angeles, gets back to Florida when he can. “He misses it here, but he’s really a California kid,” his father says. “He’s been a wonderful kid, never caused me a minute’s trouble.”

At this point in his life, Reynolds doesn’t seem to be holding onto a lot of regrets, although he wishes he’d done more directing. “I had a chance to do that after the success of Sharky’s Machine, and I could’ve gone that way. I could have gotten to the position where I could have put some projects together, but I wasn’t getting the pick of the projects,” he says.

Again, there’s a lesson from John Barrymore, or at least from a line in the play about him.

“He says, ‘There’s a time in every actor’s life when all the stars are aligned, and you have a moment where you have to make a decision. If you don’t it’ll pass you by.’”
So this time, then, is about enjoying the life and the gifts that he’s got. He’s still acting, now that he’s feeling better, and he’s set to do a movie with Peter Bogdanovich.

The director wrote it specifically for him. It’s about the owner of a down-on-its-luck Old West theme park, where some wise guys accidentally shoot a guy, “so people start coming to the park, hoping that it happens again,” Reynolds says.

But when that is over, and the crew’s packed up to go back to Hollywood or New York, Reynolds is going back to the little museum under the Indiantown Road bridge, to sit on the stage and try to share the things he’s learned.

And no matter what the box office brings, he says he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

“I do it because you’re helping people,” he says. “The thing that I do best is teaching, then acting, then directing. I’m really enjoying this. In Hollywood, you’re as good as your last work. It’s like ‘Didn’t you used to be Burt Reynolds?’ And it’s like ‘Yes, but I think I still am.’”