The swaggering, starlet seducing, smokey eluding bandit himself was the guest of honor Saturday night at the Lake Worth Playhouse’s 60th anniversary commemoration.

It was a return to his roots for Burt Reynolds, 76, who was just a college student when he started acting in plays that included performances at the historic playhouse on Lake Avenue. Saturday night was his first public appearance since he suffered a bout of influenza that landed him in the hospital late last month, according to a playhouse spokeswoman.

Dressed in a white tuxedo with a black shirt open at the neck, the iconic movie star may have looked a little thinner than normal, but his signature mustache and wisecracking smile were the same as ever.

“I think this validates all the hard work that all these people have put in to keep this place here,” said Lois Richman, a Lake Worth native who once paid just 9 cents to see movies at the playhouse.

Saturday’s event, dubbed the Diamond Jubilee, included a grand red carpet entrance, complimentary cocktail hour, silent auction, dinner reception, dancing and performer showcases. Tickets were $150.

Reynolds, who met and took pictures with party attendees backstage, was given a lifetime achievement award by the playhouse — the first it has ever awarded. He was scheduled to give a short speech, but didn’t do so before deadline for this story.

“It’s such an honor four him to come back here,” said playhouse artistic director Jodie Dixon-Mears.

The charismatic Reynolds was born in Georgia, but moved with his family to Riviera Beach when he was 10-years-old, according to his profile at the Florida Artist Hall of Fame, in which he was inducted in 1993. He made a name for himself early as a football star at Palm Beach High School and then at Florida State University where he attended with a football scholarship.

Injuries derailed that career path, only to open another. While taking classes at Palm Beach Junior College, now Palm Beach State College, Reynolds was lured into acting by renowned local teacher, Watson B. Duncan III.

Reynolds’ first Academy Award nomination came from his role in 1972’s “Deliverance.” In 1974, he played a former football player down on his luck in “The Longest Yard,” a Golden Globe Award winner for Best Motion Picture.

But it was his boastful, knight-in-shining armor charm as Trans Am-driving Bo “Bandit” Darville that made a new generation of girls swoon.

Reynolds has returned to act in, or produce, plays at the Lake Worth Playhouse and Palm Beach State College over the years. In 1961, he directed and appeared in “A Sound of Hunting,” a wartime drama that was touted as presented in the “air conditioned” Palm Beach Junior College auditorium.