Although he may be just as well-known for the 30 years he spent playing Casanova in real life, it's Warren Beatty's work on celluloid that has snagged him one of Hollywood's highest honors.

The actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker has been tapped to receive the 36th American Film Institute Life Achievement Award next year. Past recipients have included Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery and Al Pacino.

Beatty, 70, will be feted at a black-tie gala June 12 in Los Angeles; the ceremony will later be televised that month on USA.

"Warren Beatty has charmed moviegoers as a dynamic leading man from his first moment on screen and continues to do so today," said Howard Stringer, chair of the AFI Board of Trustees. "He is also a master filmmaker—a writer, producer and director of such artistry and influence that his movies—from Bonnie and Clyde to Reds—have left an indelible mark on the cultural legacy of American film."

According to the board's criteria, the honor should go to "one whose talent has in a fundamental way advanced the film art; whose accomplishment has been acknowledged by scholars, critics, professional peers and the general public; and whose work has stood the test of time."

Done, done and done.

After cementing his leading-man status opposite Natalie Wood in Elia Kazan's 1961 tearjerker Splendor in the Grass, Beatty dove into a series of meaty roles, finally earning his first Oscar nomination in 1968 for his iconic role as bank robber Clyde Barrow in the genre-crossing, taboo-busting Bonnie & Clyde, also the first film Beatty produced.

The glamorous yet artfully gritty treatment of violence in Bonnie & Clyde helped usher in a new wave of humorous brutality and moral ambiguity in cinema—done not just for shock-and-awe, but in the name of the craft.

And they're still talkin' about it after all these years. On Aug. 12, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott credited the film with legitimizing "the connoisseurship of violence, which does not present itself as an appetite for cheap thrills, but rather as a taste for the finer things."

Although the groundbreaking film drew mixed responses, it was nominated for a best picture Oscar, won for cinematography and supporting actress Estelle Parsons, and merited a 9,000-word review from critic Pauline Kael which, even if it wasn't a resoundingly positive review, signified the movie's importance.

Beatty's roles in the 1970s included the simpleminded brothel proprietor John McCabe in Robert Altman's anti-Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, his first collaboration with onscreen and off-screen love Julie Christie; the swing-tastic hairstylist George Roundy in Shampoo, again with Christie; journalist Joseph Frady, who's caught up in a deadly government conspiracy in The Parallax View; and football star Joe Pendleton, who's mistakenly plucked from Earth by an overzealous angel but given another shot at life in the body of a murdered millionaire in Heaven Can Wait, which garnered Beatty his second Oscar nod for acting.

Overall, Beatty has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards for acting, writing, directing and producing. He won a little gold man for directing the 1981 drama Reds, in which he played a radical American journalist caught up in Russia's Communist revolution in the early 20th century. Beatty also produced the film and penned the screenplay.

His most recent nomination came for his original screenplay for Bulworth, which he cowrote with Jeremy Pikser, in 1999.

In 2000 Beatty was presented with the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work. He received the comparable Cecille B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes in January, 45 years after the Hollywood Foreign Press named him its Most Promising Newcomer.

Over the years Beatty was linked to, among others, Christie, Diane Keaton, Cher, Brigitte Bardot, Candice Bergen, Goldie Hawn, Leslie Caron, Liv Ullman, Carly Simon and Madonna. The legendary lothario finally settled down in 1992, tying the knot with Bugsy costar Annette Bening, with whom he has four children.