ROBERT REDFORD
(18 August 1936 – 16 September 2025)
In the annals of Hollywood history the name of Robert Redford, who has died aged 89, will figure high on the list. For over forty-five years he was a cornerstone in the US movie industry. Not content just to play the handsome leading man in popular films, he asked for more in a career that was to help build what could be thought of as just a branch of showbiz entertainment. Instead, with the foundation of the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute in Utah he encouraged independent filmmakers plus the pick of the world’s best or most interesting films, all of which helped to boost the artistic side of the movie making experience. For a director or actor to have their films shown at Sundance was reward enough. Redford began his film career as an actor but became a producer and a director as well and, with his Sundance Institute a force for good in world cinema.
Charles Robert Redford Jr was born in Santa Monica, California, to the accountant Charles Robert Redford Sr and his wife Martha. At Van Nuys High School, he claims to have been a bad student and was only interested in art and sport. After graduation he enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder, was expelled for drinking and then went to Paris to study painting. Back in the US, he joined the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and began to get small parts in theatre including Tall Story, a baseball romcom in which he reprised his role (uncredited) in the film version with Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda. His biggest break came in 1963 as the newlywed husband in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, the film of which he also subsequently made with Jane Fonda. Before the Neil Simon film he had made his big-screen debut in 1962 in War Hunt, set during the Korean War with budding directors Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola acting alongside Redford. Later Pollack was to direct Redford in seven movies.
It didn’t take Redford long to become a bankable star but, being worried about his image, he was careful not to only choose roles that were obviously aimed at the best-looking actors. He won a Golden Globe for Inside Daisy Clover, a cutting look at Hollywood with Natalie Wood, but he turned down Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate. Instead, he preferred the rough and tumble of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman in 1969. He liked the film so much he named his company after Sundance and even built the town of that name in Utah. He was on a roll with most of his acting parts such as the skiing drama Downhill Racer, the Western Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, and the comedy-dramas The Hot Rock and Little Fauss and Big Halsy, even though the last two were not that successful.
However, many of his films were productive including the political drama The Candidate, Pollack’s Western Jeremiah Johnson and the really big ones, The Way We Were and The Sting, the latter which gave Redford an Academy Award nomination. The Great Gatsby was one of his favourite projects because he loved the F. Scott Fitzgerald book so much. Butch Cassidy was a film for every kind of audience and it was the tenth highest grossing film of 1974. My abiding memory of his performance as the Sundance Kid was the scene when they have to decide whether to jump in the river or get shot. It’s that nod that Redford gives Newman after admitting he cannot swim that always gets to me, as if he’s emphatically saying believe me or not but “I can’t swim!” Another outstanding film was Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, about the Watergate scandal, with Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, which nabbed eight Oscar nominations, winning two.
In 1980 Redford turned to directing. Ordinary People was a glum portrait of a family falling apart following the death of a son. Redford really got the best performances from Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton. The film won four Academy Awards including one for Redford, his only Oscar win. Eight years later he directed The Milagro Beanfield War about a community in Mexico and their fights with developers. In 1992 he made A River Runs Through It, a period drama with Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt for which he received a Golden Globe. In 1994 he directed Quiz Show, an exposé of TV quiz scandals for which he was Oscar nominated as best director along with the film itself. He directed himself in The Horse Whisperer, made The Legend of Bagger Vance, a sports fantasy with Will Smith and Matt Damon, and produced and directed The Conspirator with Robin Wright as Mary Surratt, the only female conspirator to be executed. He then produced and directed himself in The Company You Keep (2012), a political thriller with Shia LaBeouf.
Other acting parts of note included Pollack’s Out of Africa with Meryl Streep (which won Oscars for best picture, director, screenplay, music, etc); Legal Eagles with Debra Winger; the controversial Indecent Proposal with Demi Moore; Spy Game with Brad Pitt; a solo performance by him in All Is Lost; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Truth with Cate Blanchett; The Old Man and the Gun as bank robber Forest Tucker (his last starring role); a remake of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon; and Avengers: Endgame (2019; the second highest-grossing film of all time), among many others. He was kept busy with his interests in the Sundance Institute and Festival, as well as supporting the environment, Native American rights and the Directors Guild of America. He received the National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton in 1996 and the Kennedy Centre Honours for his contribution to American culture in 2005. President Sarkozy presented him with the Legion d’honneur in 2010, and Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. He was given other awards including an honorary Oscar in 2002 for his lifetime’s work as an actor, while the University of Southern California named the Robert Redford Award for Engaged Artists in 2009 in honour of the actor’s achievements.
Robert Redford was married twice, first to the US historian and archivist Lola Van Wagenen in 1958 and they had four children, Scott, Shauna, David and Amy, but Scott died of sudden infant death syndrome aged two and a half months. Shauna is a painter, Amy an actress and director and James was a writer-director who died in 2020 aged 58. Following a divorce Redford married Sibylle Szaggars in 2009, with whom he had been in a relationship since 1996.
MICHAEL DARVELL