Robert Redford, film’s quintessential leading man and activist, dies at 89

NEW YORK – Robert Redford, the quintessentially handsome leading man and Oscar-winning director whose career spanned six decades, died early on Sept 16 at his home in Utah. He was 89.

His death, in the mountains outside Provo, was announced in a statement by chief executive Cindi Berger of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, The New York Times reported. She said Redford died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.

Redford’s megawatt smile, blue eyes and mop of strawberry-blonde hair made him one of Hollywood’s most bankable leading men for half a century.

But he also undeniably had real talent, both as an actor and as a director.

As an actor, his biggest films included Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969), with its loving look at rogues in a dying old west, and All The President’s Men (1976), about the journalistic pursuit of president Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate era.

In Three Days Of The Condor (1975), he was an introverted CIA code-breaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game.

The Sting (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.

Redford was one of Hollywood’s preferred leads for decades, whether in comedies, dramas or thrillers.

Studios often sold him as a sex symbol. His body of work as a romantic leading man owed a great deal to the commanding actresses who were paired with him: Jane Fonda in Barefoot In The Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973), and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985).

“Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes.”

He took to directing in his 40s and won an Academy Award as director for Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family’s disintegration after a son’s death. The movie won three other Oscars, including for Best Picture.

“I’ve spent most of my life just focused on the road ahead, not looking back,” Redford said in the acceptance speech for his 2002 honorary Oscar. “But now tonight, I’m seeing in the rearview mirror that there is something I’ve not thought about much, called history.”

Redford studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before making his Broadway debut in Tall Story in 1959.

Four years later, he starred in Neil Simon’s romantic comedy Barefoot In The Park, a role he would bring to the screen in the 1967 film adaptation.

His breakthrough arrived in 1969 with Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, in which he played the outlaw Sundance Kid opposite Paul Newman, a performance that helped cement his place in Hollywood.

“I was being put up for Butch Cassidy because I’d done the comedy. But that part didn’t interest me,” Redford told Collider in 2019. “What interested me was the Sundance Kid because I could relate to that based on my own experience and particularly my own childhood and feeling like an outlaw most of my life.”

In 1972, The Hot Rock and The Candidate both provided solid roles before a string of films that made him a superstar: Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Sting (1973) and The Way We Were (1973).

Subsequent starring roles included The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days Of The Condor (1975) and All The President’s Men (1976), which racked up eight Oscar nominations, losing the top award to Rocky.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he transitioned into more mature roles, from the middle-aged baseball player of The Natural (1984) to the free-spirited big game hunter in Out Of Africa (1985), the callous rich gambler in Indecent Proposal (1993) and the mystical animal trainer in The Horse Whisperer (1998).

Sundance and the reluctant activist

Perhaps Redford’s most enduring influence came not on screen but behind it, as a restless champion of independent film.

In 1981, he organised the Sundance Institute, a non-profit organisation devoted to fostering new cinematic voices. Three years later, he assumed control of a modest film festival in Utah, rechristening it under the institute’s banner soon after.

The Sundance Film Festival swiftly evolved into a world stage for film-makers working outside the Hollywood mainstream. Its reputation soared in 1989 when Steven Soderbergh debuted Sex, Lies And Videotape, a breakthrough that cemented Sundance as a launchpad for the daring and unconventional.

Over the years, it became the proving ground for directors like Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, David O. Russell, Ryan Coogler, Robert Rodriguez, Chloe Zhao and Ava DuVernay.

Redford bristled at being called an activist, a word he considered too strident. Yet his record left little doubt.

In 1970, he led a successful fight against a proposed six-lane highway through a Utah canyon, the same winding road where, he once admitted with amusement, he had collected eight speeding tickets in a Porsche Carrera.

Five years later, his opposition to a coal-fired power plant in southern Utah brought harsher backlash: He was hanged in effigy, a sign pinned to the dummy reading, “I’m a Star. I Made My Money.”

The plant was never built; the land would later be designated a national monument.

“I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.”

‘Getting in trouble’

Charles Robert Redford Jr was born on Aug 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California.

His parents, who did not marry until shortly after his birth, were Charles Redford, a milkman who later became an accountant for Standard Oil, and the former Martha Hart.

In the early 1950s, the family moved to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

In interviews for a 1998 profile in the New Yorker, Redford recalled the valley of the time as “a big oven with nothing in it” and said he “spent my time wanting to leave. So it was sports and getting into trouble. And cruising and getting into trouble”.

One of his classmates at Van Nuys High School was child star Natalie Wood, with whom he would appear in Inside Daisy Clover (1965).

Using the skills he displayed decades later in The Natural, Redford won a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado. He lasted just a year there.

He then worked for a while in the California oil fields before using his savings to travel to Europe, where he engaged his love of painting by studying art in Paris and Florence.

He returned to the US to enrol at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he discovered his passion for acting.

Four children

In 1958, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen, with whom he would have four children.

One of them, a baby boy named Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959. Another son, James, a film-maker, died in 2020. Their other children are Shauna, a painter, and Amy, an actor.

The couple divorced in 1985. In 2009, Redford married his long-time companion Sibylle Szaggars.

Late in his career, Redford directed civic-minded films reflecting his political interests.

These included Lions For Lambs (2007), starring Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, which took a critical view of the US government’s military pursuits in the Middle East, and The Company You Keep (2012), which offered a sympathetic view of 1960s counterculture revolutionaries.

Redford told Time in 2011 that he was “passionate” and “political”, but added: “I am not a left-wing person. I’m just a person interested in the sustainability of my country.”

Redford earned renewed acclaim for one of his final works, All Is Lost (2013), in which he played a stranded, unnamed and mostly silent yachtsman adrift at sea.

Though denied an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, Redford said he loved that the film “gave me the chance as an actor to go back to my roots”. REUTERS, BLOOMBERG, NYTIMES