Somehow both rugged and smooth, embodying American values yet often turning up his collar against them, Robert Redford – who died on 16 September, aged 89 – was one of the biggest movie stars of the post-war period, as well as a stalwart, transformative supporter of independent film.
These two sides to his movie career seem strangely at odds, for many of the Young Turk directors his Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival heroically fostered were unlikely to want to cast him in many of their films. Square-jawed, blue-eyed and bronze-haired, with an impossible-to-resist grin and a limited range as a performer, Redford began work in front of the camera in 1960 and across four decades drew huge audiences, while often evoking a guarded, sceptical attitude to the very material he inhabited.
The Candidate (1972), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976) and Out of Africa (1985) were among the most polished of his films, almost all of which were in the “classical Hollywood” mould. Director Sydney Pollack, who specialised in the more thoughtful examples of this tradition, returned to him again and again, no doubt believing that screen acting is more about concealment than gushing revelation.
The famously blunt screenwriter William Goldman, who also worked with Redford repeatedly, praised him in his memoir. He invariably prospered when bouncing off more expressive co-leads, like Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and of course Paul Newman in the semi-comic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973).
Critics saw Redford more harshly, and he drew withering attacks from the likes of David Thomson and Pauline Kael – not least for his dry turn as The Great Gatsby, directed by Jack Clayton in 1974. Dorothy Parker’s put-down of Katharine Hepburn – “she runs the gamut of emotions from A to B” – might come to the minds of the unkind.
Yet no screen actor since has managed to plumb whatever depths there might be in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and Redford’s mystery-inside-an-enigma approach seems as good as any. It was one of the few times he ventured towards playing a dastardly character, and the picture – like so many of Redford’s choices – holds up against the odds. Generally, his tousled, outdoorsy looks and watchful performances seemed to embody a humanistic America, and in particular the American West, while his screen vibe was also that of a loner and outsider dismayed by the garrulousness and grasping of the society all around (for example, in The Natural, 1984).
His near-contemporary Clint Eastwood did that even more emphatically, and the two forged successful careers behind the camera – with Redford winning an Oscar for directing Ordinary People (1980), a stark story of family fracture caused ultimately by an uncaring mother. Quiz Show (1994) also won Oscar nominations. Redford, though, failed to develop the same run at directing as Eastwood has. A brooding unease with Hollywood, with ecological collapse, with the commercialisation of the Sundance Film Festival, even perhaps with his own life, seemed to pursue him to the end.
Robert Redford: 18 August 1936 – 16 September 2025
Add comment