Vale Robert Redford - Tom Ryan remembers a star and a force for good in film culture

Remembering Robert Redford (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025)

 

An abridged version of Tom Ryan’s post below first appeared in Melbourne’s Age in 2004. It’s published here in its original form, with a few editorial additions, by way of a reminder of why Robert Redford was such a significant presence in 20th century cinema.

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In a little less than three years, Robert Redford will be 70. 70! And in most of the films he’s made over the past decade, including his new one, The Clearing, age has clearly left its mark. The guy still looks good, but now there’s always the qualifier, and it’s a killer: “for his age”. For those of us who’ve grown up with the image of the smiling, smooth-faced Sundance raising a bemused eye-brow and exchanging crackerjack quips with Paul Newman’s Butch irremovably fixed in our brains, this is a jolting reminder of mortality. Ours as well as his. 

In my pantheon of male screen idols, he rates somewhere between Cary Grant and Daffy Duck, exuding the former’s cool, urbane glamour and rising far above the latter’s manic befuddlement with the world. I’ve never met him, or even seen him in person, but he’s been part of my life, a constant presence in that inner space ruled by memory and desire, for a very long time.

I’ve seen all but a couple of the films he’s made as an actor since his big-screen debut in War Hunt (1962), and the six he’s made as a director, starting with Ordinary People, for which he won the Best Director Oscar in 1981. I’ve read most of the rare interviews he’s granted to the media and I’ve also watched a few of the dozen or so TV chat shows on which he’s appeared, most notably the Parkinson one during the 1980s to which he brought a healthy dose of modesty that only enhanced the Golden Boy aura that has built up around him over the years. [ed.: see An early interview with Michael Parkinson]

Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People (1980)

So who is Robert Redford? Is there any connection between him and the kinds of characters he’s played? Is it possible to probe the screen persona and find anything more than a mirage? Does the man born Charles Robert Redford, Jnr., in Santa Monica on August 18, 1937, have anything in common with the characters he’s played over the years: the mysteriously aloof strangers, the outlaw types, the hollow men, the world-weary lovers, all adorned by his unquestionable charisma? 

Can we learn something about him from the cheeky grin he wears in Barefoot in the Park (1967), a role which he carried from an 11-month stint on Broadway opposite Elizabeth Ashley to the screen with Jane Fonda? Or from the malaise that underscores his characterisation of the kidnapped business magnate in The Clearing?

It’s impossible to know. All such a survey can do is sketch the parameters of the persona. An object of desire who generally turns out to be unattainable. A man of action who’s always equally at home with reflection. A figure simultaneously mythic and human, heroic and vulnerable, impossibly good-looking and surprisingly flawed. In short, a distinctive collection of potentially fascinating contradictions that his mere presence carries with it, and that filmmakers can use however they wish. 

Redford, The Candidate (1972)

Some of his most rewarding parts have been the ones which have turned the Golden Boy persona against itself. There are several examples --- including The Candidate (1972), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976) --- each of which transforms the agent of the American Dream into a site of anxiety. In a 1980 interview in Rolling Stone, he says, “I’m interested in what’s wrong in what appears to be perfect,” succinctly pinpointing his preference as an actor for films prepared to look past surface appearances. 

Redford’s acting method, what David Downing memorably describes, in his 1982 book about Redford, as “over-understatement”, places him in the tradition of actors whose performances have less to do with their emotive flexibility than with a dramatic minimalism. The silent, melancholy look he gives to Helen Mirren before he heads off to work at the start of The Clearing says more about the state of their marriage than any extended scenes of exposition or expanded emoting could ever have revealed. 

Redford is a fully-fledged, card-carrying veteran of the less-is-more school. He’s not like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, all fine actors who operate by different methods, who have their own ways of doing things. Redford will never chew the scenery. Never. He prefers to quietly exist within it, to gently nudge us towards an appreciation of his characters rather than allowing them to loudly declare themselves.

Dustin Hoffman, Redford All the President's Men (1976)

For some, like David Thomson in The Independent a couple of months ago, this has always been a sign of his “uncertainty” as an actor. For others, like director Sydney Pollack, who was cast alongside Redford in War Hunt and who has directed him seven times, it’s an indication of his strength. “In my opinion, he's one of the best movie actors we've ever had in America. He's never doing nothing, but he does often hold something back, which, for me, only makes him more interesting.”

Pollack’s description of Redford as an actor might well also apply to his performances as a public figure outside the films in which he appears. There’s absolutely no reason to presume that the Robert Redford who occasionally steps away from his privacy and into the public eye is any less of a character than the ones he plays on screen. The difference is that he’s played here by someone who shares his name (whereas Cary Grant, for example, was played by Archibald Leach). 

There’s much that’s consistent in the picture he constructs of himself and his world in interviews. This Robert Redford is thoughtful, but distant. He values his privacy, and would much rather be off alone in the Utah wilderness than attending some Hollywood premiere, or giving an interview. Both are situations in which he’s required to perform: to play Robert Redford. “I never aimed to be a sex symbol, a classical actor, a box-office draw, or any of those things,” he says in Downing’s book. “I just did my job, went home and put myself as far away from the movie-star thing as I could.”

Park City, Utah

Nevertheless, he’s been prepared to speak up, to make himself available when the occasion demands, whether it’s on behalf of his beloved Sundance Institute, which he established as a haven for independent filmmakers in 1981, or for the various environmental causes for which he’s long been a spokesman. He’s always worn his liberal principles on his sleeve, but laughed at the idea that he might go into politics.

Bringing a sense of humour to his public persona, he’s also proclaimed a disinterest in examining his motivations, describing himself as the antithesis of Woody Allen: “Some people have psychoanalysis. I have Utah.” His guardedness has always been at odds with the tell-all impulse --- or at least the make-it-all-up one --- of those celebrities who thrive on tabloid attention. And, inasmuch as it’s been possible for him to do so, he’s kept his personal life a secret. 

Still, it hasn’t been an entirely private one. His marriage at 21 to Lola Van Wagenen ended in 1985. The couple had four children, one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. They’re now also grandparents. Since the divorce, Redford’s name has been romantically linked (as they say) with Debra Winger, Sonia Braga and costume designer Kate O'Rear. Newspaper reports suggest that, although he’s currently in a “happy relationship” with German artist Sibillye Szaggars, the pair will --- after the style of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir --- continue to live apart.

Yet no matter how he goes about presenting himself as a public figure, Redford is always subject to the whims of a media for whom he is fair game. Some of what emerges about him, he’s able to control. Most of it he’s not. And he would seem to be at least partially responsible for a number of the revealing contradictions that have emerged. 

The eminently photogenic Redford has always said that he hates the way he’s treated as a walking photo opportunity. In 1988, he elaborated to Esquire on the dangers of fame: “The bad part is that you become an object. And there are three dangerous stages to that: One, people start treating you like an object. Two, you start behaving like an object. And three, you become one. That’s terminal.”

Yet at the same time, he’s usually been prepared to take time out to pose for Annie Leibowitz’s admiring camera, or for the covers of the publications in which these interviews have appeared. Clad in smart executive suits or designer leisure gear, he’s at least arrived at Stage Two.

He’s also long been talking about abandoning acting. Downing quotes him as planning to call a halt to this part of his career soon after The Way We Were. “I am retiring from films, definitely,” he announced. “Not right away, but semi-gradually; by or before the mid-1980s, I won’t be an actor any more.” In his defence, though, it needs to be pointed out that actors often talk like this, toying with the idea of giving it all away, but really only looking for reassurance. They are a breed forever beset by insecurities, constantly looking over their shoulders at the new stars on the rise, fearful that their time is up. Just like the champion skier Redford played in Downhill Racer. So his indecision here might be put down to an occupational hazard. 

Redford directs Carlos Riquelme, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988)

But it’s very curious to see someone who’s been such a champion of independent filmmakers remain so close to the mainstream in his choice of projects for himself, especially as an actor but also as a director. Of all the films he’s been creatively associated with, only two, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) and A River Runs Through It (1992), both of which he directed, can be described as even vaguely “independent”. The recently completed An Unfinished Life, which has been directed for Miramax by Lasse Hallstrom and in which he co-stars with Jennifer Lopez, appears unlikely to provide an exception.

And while he might be a political liberal, he otherwise appears to be extremely reserved in his tastes, leading Downing to dub him a “conservative rebel”. Aside from The Milagro Beanfield War and Quiz Show (1994), none of the films he’s directed reflect anything like a risk-taking personality. Perhaps his latest project, Aloft, the story of two men tracking the flight path of the North American peregrine falcon, which is scheduled to go into production later this year, will open up new directions.

What he’s been unable to control have been the increasingly personal, sometimes ageist putdowns of his work on-screen and as a director. Equally hurtful must be the sneers at his life away from the camera. In the book, Hollywood Interrupted - Insanity Chic in Babylon, co-authored by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner and published earlier this year, he’s described (along with Susan Sarandon) as “a bloviating bleeding heart”.

And the view of him that emerges through Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind’s fascinating tell-all history of the rise and fall of the American independent film movement during the 1980s and ’90s, is of a man who is not only “cautious by nature and almost paralysed by perfectionism” but occasionally duplicitous. Through the course of the book, also published this year, Sundance becomes a dream destroyed by Redford’s prevarications and by its movement ever closer to the values that hold sway in Hollywood.

There’s a considerable irony in the fact that while Redford has gone to considerable lengths to shun media attention, his image has acquired a life of its own. The criticism of his achievements over the past 40 years --- as an actor, a director, the force behind Sundance, an environmental activist, a liberal spokesman on behalf of a better America --- is starting to seem over the top. Few can match his contributions to American film on camera and behind the scenes over the past 30 or 40 years. Maybe it’s time to give the guy a break. 

 

"it gives me character"...

Redford on cosmetic surgery: “Everyone in Tinseltown is getting pinched, lifted and pulled. It's becoming a sick obsession. They lose some of their soul when they go under the knife, and they end up looking body-snatched. So what if my face is falling apart? I don't give a damn. Anyway, it gives me character.”

 

Redford on George W. Bush: “I think President Bush is pretty well a puppet for the interests behind him. He and the Vice-President come from the oil business, which gave them the money to get elected. What are they going to do, talk about solar energy?” 

 

Redford on America (in 2018): I am very much an American. I love my country. And because I love it, I’m obsessed with what it can be and what it’s not. Right now is the most dangerous time that I can remember in my life. I don’t know when our fundamental principles that have made us enviable and good have been so threatened by our own leaders. I think that the limitations of the current American administration and the arrogance, the narrow-mindedness, the ideological fanaticism – it’s all about as dangerous as it gets.

 

Redford on his career: The only sad thing I feel regarding my career is that I came in at the end of an era in theatre, in the very last stages of the great playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. And I came in at the end of live television, which I thought was fabulous. It was so edgy. It was like being in a play without rehearsal time. You just had to go out there and open, and cameras would move around you in this frenzy. A camera would tip over and you’d have to pretend it didn’t happen. People panicked, they were sweating. It was great.

 

William Goldman on Redford: “You may think of Robert Redford as a force of nature, but if Marlon Brando or Steve McQueen or Warren Beatty had said yes to the part of the Sundance Kid, Redford might have remained what one studio executive told me he was when talk of his hiring first came up: ‘He’s just another California blond --- throw a stick at Malibu, you’ll hit six of him.’”

 

Peter Biskind on Redford: “With a few exceptions the people who do best at Sundance, and last the longest, are the ones who refrain from playing the Bob game, who are blessed with egos modest enough to be satisfied with basking in his reflected glow, rather than aspiring to shine themselves.”

 

Paul Newman on Redford: “If we’re to join forces again, they'll have to do it soon. We've talked about it for ages, but now we mean to do something about it, before I get too old to learn my lines. But I won't accept a film that has me playing his dad.”

 

J.C. Chandor on working with Redford for All Is Lost (2013): “Redford, through his non-verbal communication genius, is able to communicate complex emotional thought like nobody else. When we were in the editing room, my editor and I realised that, within three takes of any one sequence, he would have given us twice what lesser actors with line deliveries would have given us: all non-verbal. What he was able to do was go from fear to perseverance and show you his thought process in bringing himself down from the fear. You actually see him working through that progression. The way he was able to do it so subtly is not something I’m sure I’ll ever work with again.”