Robert Redford, Hollywood Icon, Oscar-Winning Director and Indie Patriarch, Dies at 89
Robert Redford, the Hollywood golden boy and Sundance Film Festival founder who starred in such movies as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
The Way We Were and
All the President’s Men — and who won an Academy Award for directing
Ordinary People — died Tuesday. He was 89.
Redford died in his sleep at his home outside Provo, Utah, his longtime publicist, Cindi Berger, confirmed to
The Hollywood Reporter.
The actor-producer-director, a four-time Academy Award nominee and honorary Oscar recipient, was one of the few truly iconic screen figures of the past half-century, the avatar of a certain kind of all-American ideal who nonetheless took a dyspeptic view of his country in several notable dramas including
Downhill Racer (1969),
The Candidate (1972),
Three Days of the Condor (1975) and
All the President’s Men (1976).
He brought his good looks, ineffable charm and romantic appeal to heroes as well as antiheroes, from one of the outlaws in
Sundance Kid to the Nixon-toppling journalist Bob Woodward in
All the President’s Men to the well-meaning but naive political contender Bill McKay in
Candidate. His sheen often contrasted with the jaundiced view of his pictures, particularly in the ’70s films that remain among his best; but he could use his appeal to equal and devastating effect in romance, notably opposite Barbra Streisand in
The Way We Were (1973).
Behind the California-kid surface was a darker and more complicated figure. The very definition of a Hollywood star, he nonetheless saw himself as an outsider and spent much of his time living away from the epicenters of the industry — including at the Utah skiing resort that he turned into the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival.
He made his onscreen debut in a 1960 episode of ABC’s
Maverick. Three years later, he earned an Emmy nomination for his work on an installment of the ABC anthology series
Alcoa Premiere and starred in a memorable Broadway production of Neil Simon’s
Barefoot in the Park (directed by Mike Nichols), which he later filmed alongside frequent collaborator Jane Fonda.
After the play, Redford turned down a number of high-profile roles, including the lead in Nichols’
The Graduate (1967). “I was suddenly Mr. Focus,” he told Callan. “Eleanor Roosevelt and Noël Coward dropped by. Natalie Wood came backstage. Bette Davis summoned me to her suite at the Plaza.” Ingrid Bergman gave him advice he took to heart: “Do only good work.”
Redford’s early movies also included his debut,
Tall Story (1960), and
Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which won him a Golden Globe as best new star. He was a star, but not a superstar. That changed in 1969 when he appeared as the Sundance Kid opposite Paul Newman, taking a role that had been offered to Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen.
“The studio didn’t want me,” he recalled. “It all depended on Paul, and I met him and he was very generous and said, ‘Let’s go for this.’ He knew I was serious about the craft. That’s what brought us together, and we became friends, and our friendship turned out to be very similar to our relationship in both
Butch Cassidy and
The Sting” — the 1972 follow-up to
Butch Cassidy that won the Oscar for best picture.
He followed
Butch Cassidy with
Downhill Racer (1969),
Jeremiah Johnson (1970) and
The Candidate, about a U.S. Senate contender who is the perfect front man but then seems lost when he faces the prospect of governing. “What do we do now?” he asks in the movie’s famous last line. Years later, Redford toyed with making a sequel, to be written by Larry Gelbart. “The truth is so awful,” he told Maureen Dowd of
The New York Times in 2003, “but in its own horrible way, it’s entertaining.”
With
Downhill Racer, he became a producer and through his Wildwood Enterprises developed
All the President’s Men, based on the Watergate book by Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (Curiously, Redford had met President Nixon as a teenager and said he got “a creepy vibe” from him.)
He had met Woodward and Bernstein in Washington before their book was finished and paid $450,000 for the film rights, then was disappointed in William Goldman's script, which he heavily rewrote with director Alan J. Pakula after turning down Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s adaptation.
The drama, also starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, was a monument to dramatic realism, so serious in its attempt to capture the truth that the production took bags of trash from the real-life
Post offices and used the papers on the set. Pakula shot an astounding 300,000 feet of film, which was reduced to 12,300 in the final, 2-hour, 18-minute movie.
The film almost had a different ending: “Pakula,” notes Callan, “wanted to show TV footage of Nixon’s resignation and the famous defiant farewell wave on the steps of the helicopter on the White House lawn.” Redford resisted. “I told Alan again and again, ‘This isn’t about Nixon. It’s about journalism.’ ” They compromised by showing a teletype machine ticking away, announcing Nixon’s decision.
Four years after
President’s Men, Redford tried his hand at directing with
Ordinary People (1980), based on Judith Guest’s novel and adapted by Alvin Sargent. It was an intimate family drama that Pakula regarded as subliminal autobiography. “When I read it,” he noted, “I said, ‘Oh, I get it.’ The novel is about parental tyranny … Bob is moving some furniture here. He is co-opting the novel’s dysfunctional family for his father’s or his own and investigating himself at a critical time.” Redford denied that.
The finished picture, wrote critic David Thomson, “came as an impressive surprise to the public and the Academy. It was observant, heartfelt and full of anguished performances. And it was appreciated that Redford was concentrating on the script and the actors and directing with stylistic restraint and professional anonymity. The surprise now may be that
Ordinary People won best picture and the Oscar for best director when Martin Scorsese’s
Raging Bull was among its rivals.”
Redford’s other films as a director included
The Milagro Beanfield War (1988),
A River Runs Through It (1992),
Quiz Show (1984) — for which he received another Oscar nom —
The Horse Whisperer (1998),
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and
The Conspirator (2010).
None of his later movies as an actor equaled those of the late ’60s and ’70s, even though many were hits. They included
The Natural (1984),
Out of Africa (1985) — another Academy Award best picture — and
Indecent Proposal (1993). In all, Redford’s naturalism was so convincing, his acting so skilled, it almost disguised his talent; he never won an acting Oscar.
Redford’s later films included
Spy Game (2001) and the Marvel superhero movies
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and
Avengers: Endgame (2019). Despite his advocacy for indie film, he preferred studio movies and only later embraced independent vehicles such as
All Is Lost (2013) and
A Walk in the Woods (2015).
He kept working steadily, even relentlessly, playing news anchor Dan Rather in
Truth (2015) and a widower who falls for his neighbor (Fonda) in
Our Souls at Night (2017), all the while maintaining his involvement with Sundance; indeed, he only stepped down as the public face of that organization in 2019. That was almost two decades after the Academy had awarded him an honorary Oscar and slightly more than two years after President Obama had given him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His final on-screen appearance came earlier this year in an uncredited cameo on the AMC series
Dark Winds, on which he was an executive producer.
The 'Butch Cassidy' and 'All the President's Men' actor, Oscar-winning director and Sundance founder was "always about breaking the rules," he said.
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