In Memoriam
An extraordinarily talented actor and activist who wasn't exactly hard to look at.
I’m genuinely shocked that I had to type “Robert R” before Wikipedia knew which Robert I wanted, and IMDb made me type “Robert Re.” Oh, he should also be on the homepage, but I’ll give that time; I just got the news myself. But a man with a career like his, going back as far as his did, should be better noted. I went with the image of Butch and Sundance because that’s how he should be memorialized, but there are possibly dozens of things I could have chosen, stretching from Perry Mason to the MCU, though he actually started on an episode of Maverick that I don’t think I’ve seen yet.
Redford was about as all-American as it gets. His family ancestry was from Ireland, Scotland, and England, by way of New York, Texas, and Connecticut. He was born in Santa Monica, grew up in Van Nuys, spent considerable time in Texas. He had a mild case of polio as a child, in the pre-vaccine days. He started college, but he developed a large enough drinking problem to get kicked out. He bummed around Europe for a while, then returned to the US where he studied painting and acting. Trying to search for his paintings mostly brings up paintings of him, but from what I’ve seen he wasn’t too bad.
He started on the stage and moved to television, then the big screen. He was ruggedly handsome and effortlessly charming. Even when you didn’t really like the character, it was hard not to, because you instinctively liked Redford. His characters could range from wastrel to outright evil, but Redford himself was impossible to resist. It was never surprising when people around him fell for his charms, because you fell for them yourself.
His only competitive Oscar was for directing Ordinary People. He beat Lynch and Scorsese, which I’m sure a lot of people were unhappy about. On the other hand, he was beaten for acting in The Sting by Jack Lemmon in a movie I’ve never heard of outside the Oscar listings. He lost for Directing and Best Picture on Quiz Show to Forrest Gump, a movie I frankly hate. And he wasn’t even nominated for Butch Cassidy, though he won a BAFTA for it. Shockingly, he actually managed to win the Golden Globe for Best New Actor, that most erratic and least prescient of categories.
And he created Sundance, and he was an activist, and he was passionate about his causes. He supported some Republicans, but he was deeply opposed to the current administration. He cared about the environment and LGBTQ+ rights. He cared about Native American rights. Robert Redford was a great actor, a great director, a great man. And incidentally he was sexy as hell, even at 89. No wonder his movies with Paul Newman were so successful, with both of them to look at.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
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As I have noted from time to time, I never entirely warmed to Redford as an actor. But he was definitely a star, an icon, a screen presence. Though I daresay that his greatest contribution to cinema was not as an actor but as the founder of Sundance. RIP
Heh, us Dortmunder fans will never truly like the guy, will we? What’s interesting to me is how a lot of the stuff I bounce off of is what made him perfect for Quiz Show and All Is Lost — the latter needs someone of his effortless confidence to strip down and he plays the persistence through this perfectly, and Quiz Show needed someone who embodied the virtues the movie exposes as false to truly understand what is being lost there and how to portray it. Gump beating Pulp Fiction is the go-to Academy misfire but like Gillian says, Quiz Show should’ve won in any case.
This one really hits home. Redford was the first “movie star” I was aware of who was contemporaneous to the era that I grew up in, and the lead in the first “grown up” movie that I was permitted to see in the theater under parental supervision (That would be THE STING, which pretty much dates me). He struck me in the 70s films I saw him in as a kind of easy going (and exceedingly handsome) embodiment of masculine self confidence. If I was subconsciously searching, in the movies, for an aspirational role model during my post childhood, pre-adolescent phase, it would have been Redford.
Really saddened by this. Thanks to a high school film lit showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford was one of the first actors I noticed from when I started caring about movie as movies, and he always stayed a favorite. I’ve written about a couple of his films over the years, and he was always an incredible–and incredibly charismatic and yes, stunningly good-looking–presence, one of those people the camera just (rightly) loves. He will be remembered, both for his on-screen and off-screen work. I’ll always wish he’d done more directing, too.
EDIT: I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add that a young Redford also played a beautiful, hopeful version of Death in The Twilight Zone episode “Nothing in the Dark,” giving an old woman who’d been fearful of him the kind of passing-away I hope he had for himself. “No shock. No … engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion, is like a whisper. What you thought was the end, the beginning.”
“No wonder his movies with Paul Newman were so successful, with both of them to look at.” Way to stick the landing!
Ordinary People is about a family going through some stuff and therefore film snobs get all snooty about it. If only someone had yelled at themselves in the mirror or done something super misogynistic!
Sigh, yes. Don’t get me wrong–there’s nothing wrong with being annoyed that David Lynch didn’t win a competitive Oscar. But there’s a reason I’m not the hugest fan of a lot of Scorsese’s more popular work.