Compared with the long roster of other masterworks he has brought to the screen, often as producer, writer and leading man, it was a flop, spurned by critics and audiences alike. It did, however, contain one line that today, especially, we might want to recall. “I’m not a kid, and I know now no amount of empty philandering is going to make me feel like one.”

It is fair to assume that this was delivered with a deal of selfawareness. Beatty, after all, has protected his position as an icon of Hollywood not only because of the impact of so many of his films, most notably Reds, Bugsy and Bonnie and Clyde, but also because of his long-running reputation as the lustful Lothario of Greater Los Angeles. Romancing the fairer sex was his other special talent, some used to say even his obsession. Keaton, indeed, has her own place in the long list of his erstwhile conquests.

That Beatty has mended his flirting ways should come as no surprise. First, there is the old news that he is a married man. He tied the knot with Annette Bening, his co-star in Bugsy, in 1992 and they live what appears to be an entirely contented life in their Hollywood Hills mansion, gleefully distracted by the demands of four children aged between 15 and six. There is also the small matter of age. Beatty, who, with generous flecks of grey, remains imposingly handsome, turns 70 today.

That even now we still linger on his womanising reputation seems a little unjust. He is the only person in Hollywood aside from Orson Welles to have received no fewer than four Oscar nominations in a single year. Actually, he pulled off that feat twice, garnering best picture, director, actor and screenplay nominations for 1978’s Heaven Can Wait and then for Reds, the swirling three-hour-20-minute drama set in early 1900s Russia seen through the eyes of the American left-wing activist John Reed and the love affair he had with the American reporter Louise Bryant, played, once more, by Keaton.

His extraordinary accomplishments were the reason that just this January Beatty was honoured with the lifetime achievement Cecil B DeMille award at the annual Golden Globes show. After receiving it from presenter Tom Hanks, he made his own selfdeprecating jokes about his advancing years. “Forget about Hanks,” he told the audience, “I’ve got bottles of moisturiser older than Tom Hanks.”

But if he remains identified as much as a Casanova as a genius of the cinema, he has no one to blame but himself. It was a rap that was compounded by some of the roles he chose for himself, not least in the sex-fuelled 1975 hit, Shampoo. With blow-dryer hanging suggestively from his waist, he cast himself as the quintessence of a swinging-Sixties, one-night-stand marathon man.

And so it is that any profile of Beatty must by default include a running order of his real or imagined female liaisons. They run from Keaton to Candice Bergen, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Elle Macpherson, Madonna, Michelle Phillips, Carly Simon and Natalie Wood, to name only a few.

Of the Carly Simon song, You’re so Vain, Beatty recently con-fessed, “Let’s be honest, that song is about me”.

Even as he approached this milestone birthday, Beatty did not exactly help himself when he allowed himself to be photographed earlier this month trying to sneak unnoticed from the back door of the Los Angeles nightclub Hyde, better known as the venue for the less-than-decorous adventures of the likes of Britney Spears, before she went into rehab, and Paris Hilton.

Beatty was “visibly ashamed” reported the Los Angeles gossip blog defamer.com, “trying to discreetly flee the B-lister-infested glory-hole with which he’d rather not be associated.” That other celebrity-driven website TMZ.com added of the incident in unkind tones: “Sure Beatty is Hollywood royalty, but he doesn’t quite register with the Paris Hilton Ashlee Simpson crowd.” Would Beatty even know who Simpson is?

Exactly what Beatty was up to inside, no one can say. But who can blame a man so close to becoming septuagenarian for wanting to see whether his powers of attraction had not entirely deserted him in the dark recesses of Hyde. “He still gets to flirt, just to see if he can,” noted Jeremy Pikser, a screenwriter and Beatty friend. “The seduction is there, there’s just no sexual pay-off.”

But the important point was lost in the paparazzi hullabaloo: Beatty was leaving the club alone. An empty arm would never have happened in the old days. And presumably he fled directly home to Ms Bening.

If there is credit due for the taming of Beatty’s appetites, surely Bening deserves it. He was 54 when they settled down together while she, now 48 and starring in the film Running with Scissors that opened yesterday in Britain, was just 33.

Paying tribute to her earlier this year, he noted: “She has a great capacity to be happy, which is a great gift to me and an even greater gift to her children.” And, talking this week to the Daily Express newspaper, he added: “For me, the highest level of sexual excitement is in a monogamous relationship. I would hate myself if I failed to live up to it.”

He also wants us to understand how fatherhood, which came to him so late, has changed his perspective on everything. Some, indeed, would say, that the sudden joy of home life and being a father has held him back from productivity in his other fields of interest, including making movies and exploring a possible excursion into politics. “It has caused me to get into the present tense, to try not to go too far into the future and not too long into the past. When they are making a trampoline out of you at six in the morning, that’s fun for me”.

Politics and Beatty may connect in some fans’ minds with his highly amusing 1998 satire Bulworth, which found him playing a disillusioned senatorial candidate who sabotages his own campaign by taking out an assassination contract on himself. Yet there were moments earlier this decade when Beatty appeared serious about trying for office in the real world. In 2000 he hinted at the possibility of a run for the White House – a staunch supporter of the Democrats, it was never a stretch to guess which party he would represent – and even last year there were rumours of him challenging Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace him as Governor of California.

None of that happened, nor has it escaped his admirers that over recent years his cinematographic output has dipped alarmingly as well. The contrast is sometimes made – and he raised it himself on stage at the Golden Globes – with the uninterrupted and still almost frenzied output of some of his peers, notably Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, both of whom also turn 70 this year, and Clint Eastwood who is an even more impressive 76. Wondering out loud whether they couldn’t just take things a little easier like him, he said: “I don’t know why they can’t just do what I ask them to do.”

Beatty, who in his very young years found himself overshadowed by his older sister Shirley MacLaine, first broke through under the direction of Elia Kazan in Splendor in the Grass, a film that in fact first brought him to the attention of the Golden Globes judges who declared him most promising newcomer. The year was 1962. Beatty has often credited Kazan with launching his career. When he received a controversial lifetime award at the Oscars in 1999, Beatty publicly defended Kazan against those who continued to spurn him for co-operating with a congressional committee exposing alleged communist sym-pathisers in the dark days of the McCarthy hearings.

There may have been no turning back for Beatty, whose films have also included Ishtar and Dick Tracy, but in truth, Beatty’s output has never been galloping. Years sometimes separate films. He has 12 Oscar nominations to his name but has only acted in 22 films in his career. “Truth is, I haven’t made a lot of movies,” he recently admitted. “In fact, I think somebody said about me that every single movie that I made from the beginning was a comeback.” The comeback joke is one of his favourites.

The slow pace might be attributed now to fatherhood and even domestic lethargy, but it is also no secret that Beatty has suffered always from an almost chronic need to over-analyse, second-guess and endlessly dissect almost every professional step that he takes. In the making of Reds, for example, he would sometimes makes his co-stars, Keaton and Nicholson, retake scenes before the cameras as many as 70 times before declaring himself satisfied.

“It was half-insane working on Reds because he was so engrossed in making a great movie,” Keaton later recalled. “I’ve never seen anybody work like Warren. The details! And the fact that he was tireless! He could never stop fine-tuning a scene.” Some of his films were in development for years before the actors were hired and filming even begun. Or they weren’t made at all.

Perfectionism is no bad flaw, however. Nor, some would say, is a natural affinity for the art of seduction. If we are struggling to find an inscription for his birthday card today, maybe choosing that line from Town & Country would be insufficient, even lame.

Let’s instead remember what Beatty declared to co-star Faye Dunaway in an opening scene of Bonnie & Clyde, a much more successful film, in the moments after they have robbed their first bank together. “I ain’t good. I’m the best!”