He was part of a generation of film actors (Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, et al.) who came to prominence in the 1960s. But even when he reigned as Hollywood’s most popular leading man, Robert Redford wanted something more. To that end he stepped behind the camera and won a Best Director Academy Award for his debut feature. Not one to rest on his laurels, he would go on to establish a groundreaking institute dedicated to nurturing independent filmmakers. Redford’s remarkable 60-plus-year career as a stage, TV, and screen perfomer/director/producer ended this week when he passed away at 89.
A native Californian, Charles Robert Redford, Jr. was born in Santa Monica in 1936. After graduating Van Nuys High School in 1954, he briefly attended the University of Colorado, then spent time wandering around Europe. Redford came back to New York City, studying art at the Pratt Institute and acting with the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His first Broadway gig came in 1959’s Tall Story. One year later, he’d reprise the role–and make his screen debut–alongside Jane Fonda in the college basketball comedy’s film version.
By the mid-1960s Redford was a familiar stage presence, appearing in such Broadway shows as Sundays in New York and Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. TV audiences saw the young actor in Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Untouchables, among other series. Film success, however, was a little slower to achieve. Robert co-starred with Mike Connors and Alec Guinness in the 1965 WWII comedy Situation Hopeless … But Not Serious, and later that year he won a Best New Star Golden Globe Award for playing Natalie Wood’s bisexual actor husband in Inside Daisy Clover. Redford and Wood reunited in 1966 on This Property Is Condemned, the first of seven pictures he would make for director Sydney Pollack. He was once more opposite Fonda, plus Marlon Brando, that same year in Arthur Penn’s The Chase.
Redford and Fonda had box office success in 1967 when they played the leads in the movie adaptation of Barefoot in the Park. Robert’s breakout turn, however, came two years later in the “buddy western” Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. While Paul Newman had been ready to play Cassidy, the role of Sundance was first offered to Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, and Warren Beatty before director George Roy Hill settled on Redford. Audiences loved the chemistry between the outlaw pair, and at the BAFTA Awards Redford beat out his older co-star for a Best Actor award.
Throughout the 1970s Robert was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. 1972 saw him play a frontiersman in Jeremiah Johnson; an idealistic young politico in The Candidate; and a would-be jewel thief in The Hot Rock. Hill reteamed Redford and Newman ’30s con artists looking to outfox a mobster (Robert Shaw) in 1973’s Best Picture Oscar-winner, The Sting. Also in ’73, the actor co-starred with Barbra Streisand as a mismatched couple falling in and out of love in the nostalgic romance The Way We Were.
He took the title role in Paramount’s 1974 filming of The Great Gatsby, and was a CIA researcher caught in a deadly conspiracy in 1975’s Three Days of the Condor. For America’s 1976 bicentennial, Redford and Dustin Hoffman co-starred as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose writings helped topple the Nixon White House, in All the President’s Men. 1979 found him back with Jane Fonda in the modern-day western/romcom The Electric Horseman.
1980 marked a sea change in Redford’s movie career, as he took an acting break to direct Ordinary People. Based on Judith Guest’s novel, the emotional drama of a family in crisis took home four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (Redford remains one of only six people to win Best Director for their debut feature). Despite the film’s financial and critical success, the neophyte filmmaker fell into a state of depression in the early ’80s. His first marriage collapsed, and he wouldn’t direct another picture until 1988’s The Milagro Beanfield War.
Looking for an outlet for his artistic ambitions, Redford helped found the Sundance Film Festival in 1978 and Sundance Institute in 1981. While the Park City, Utah festival struggled in its first years (Robert remembered standing out in front of the town theater handing out flyers to passersby) it steadily caught the movie world’s attention and helped introduce such talents as Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and others. The Sundance Institute works to encourage independent and indigenous filmmakers, musicians, and theatre projects.
Redford’s on-screen work rate slowed down in the next two decades. His ’80s appearances included a reform-minded prison warden in Brubaker (1980); a baseball prodigy haunted by tragedy in The Natural (1984); a big game hunter in Colonial Africa in Best Picture Oscar-winner Out of Africa (1985); and an ambitious Manhattan ADA in Legal Eagles (1986).
’90s audiences saw him leading a squad of computer hackers in the early cyber-thriller Sneakers (1991); offering married couple Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson a million dollars to spend one night with Moore in Indecent Proposal (1993); running a Miami TV station and falling for news anchorwoman Michelle Pfeiffer in Up Close & Personal (1996); and sharing his method of equine training with an injured young rider (Scarlett Johansson) and her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) in The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed. Two more popular ’90s dramas–1992’s A River Runs Through It and 1994’s Quiz Show–were directed by him as well.
In 2001 Robert returned to the “big house” for the prison-based drama The Last Castle and to the CIA for Spy Game. He again directed himself in the 2007 Afghan War-centered drama Lions for Lambs and in another political thriller, 2012’s The Company You Keep. Redford had the screen all to himself in 2013’s All Is Lost, a one-man tale of a sailor trying to keep his damaged boat afloat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The following year he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a traitorous S.H.I.E.L.D. official in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, while he set out to hike the Appalachian Trail with pal Nick Nolte in 2016’s A Walk in the Woods.
After announcing that his title turn in the 2018 drama The Old Man & the Gun would be his performing swan song, Redford later took back the declaration, but his final film roles would be a cameo in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame and voice work in the oddball 2020 anthology Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia. A cameo in this year’s Season Three premiere episode of the AMC series Dark Winds proved to be his last acting appearance. Redford passed away in his sleep at his Utah home on September 16th.
“I’ve spent most of my life just focused on the road ahead, not looking back,” the film legend shared in his 2002 honorary Oscar acceptance speech. “But now tonight, I’m seeing in the rearview mirror that there is something I’ve not thought about much, called history.” Rest assured, Mr. Redford, that your place in cinematic history is well secured.