SHORT TAKES : Reynolds a Womanizer? No Way

Burt Reynolds, star of the CBS-TV series “Evening Shade,” says he was never the womanizer he portrayed in his early movies.

In fact, the real Burt Reynolds is closer to the warmhearted football star turned high school coach he plays on his show, Reynolds said in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Reynolds played the role of freewheeling, macho rogues in such films as “The Longest Yard,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Semi-Tough” and “Hooper.” But the actor said he was never a “cocky, womanizing jerk” in his personal life.

“I wasn’t married for a long time, and I dated some well-known women (Dinah Shore, Sally Field), but I wasn’t dating five at a time. If people think that’s what I was, it’s because I played those characters very, very well,” Reynolds said. He is married to actress Loni Anderson, and they have a 2 1/2-year-old son, Quinton.

Reynolds, 54, is thrilled Quinton is already a football fan, and he intends to encourage his son to become “anything he wants to be.”

“I hope he’s not an actor. It’s a field with so much rejection,” Reynolds said.