Robert Redford—matinee idol, Oscar-winning director, advocate for independent filmmaking, and environmental activist—died on Tuesday morning at his home outside Provo, Utah, according to a representative. He was 89.
Born in Santa Monica in August of 1936, Redford acted first on television and onstage in New York before becoming, in the late 1960s, a movie star of staggering proportions, appearing in a string of films—Barefoot in the Park, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Sting, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, The Natural, Out of Africa—that made him one of his era’s defining performers. A successful career as a director, helming the likes of 1980’s Ordinary People and 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, and his later work with the Sundance Institute only affirmed Redford’s enduring legacy in American cinema.
In June of 1974, ahead of the release of The Great Waldo Pepper—Redford’s third collaboration with director George Roy Hill—the writer Liz Smith set out to capture his unique star power. From his looks to his persona, his personal life, and his relationship to his fans, Smith gathered up Redford’s many points of fascination at the peak of his powers. Revisit that story here.
In the cinema smörgåsbord currently offered up by The Sting, The Great Gatsby, and—soon to be seen—The Great Waldo Pepper, the living-doll centerpiece, “ham-what-am” with pineapple chunks, is an improbably authentic American hero named Robert Redford. This paradoxical paradigm doesn’t smoke, seldom drinks, and—in the view of his legion of admirers—is inconsiderately, inappropriately, and inexplicably faithful to his wife. (The same one he started with fifteen years ago.) But it is not the private Redford who makes mouths water. It is the movie-star fantasy flickering-in-the-dark Redford. If some actors indeed look good enough to eat, then Redford is the Butter Crunch ice cream sundae that starved-for-stars fans have been waiting for since Paul Newman peaked.
As idol-star-hero, Robert Redford is neither the tragedy F. Scott Fitzgerald asked to show us nor the bore Emerson predicted all heroes to be at last. He is simply a tough, tender, controlled, handsome (but not too pretty) man of action—and a very good actor with lots of sensitive thought hiding deep in those blueing-bottle eyes. American women, increasingly inured to male propaganda, turned off by machismo, and self-conscious about reverse sex symbolism or object-making, are no longer the screamer-fainters of the Valentino days nor the jumper-touchers of the Kennedy era. But still, there is a vast, accumulating, significant, sighing, soughing hero-worshipping wind in the land. The signs are all there in the publicity stampede that sometimes happens but can never be manufactured... in the “what is he really like” question put to anyone who might know... in the unmistakable crinkle of inflated currency at the box office where marquees bear Redford’s now-magic name. It all spells STAR!—in a time when stars and heroes are in even shorter supply than happy headlines.
James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable were all he-men other men didn’t have to resent. Redford, too, fits the rugged, iconoclastic masculine image that makes him a suitable myth for both sexes: one part of the audience seeing him as a fantasy projection of the attractive male self, and the other part of the audience desiring him. The magic is as old as the magic lantern—a link in the strong bond created between the Star (who gives each film a concentrated interest) and the audience. Like Gable, Redford comes “ready-made and unanimously elected by the people.” He answers some deeply felt human need for a beautiful—but not-too-beautiful—hero.
The essence of true stardom, they say, resides in those who really want it. Redford is a true star who seems not to care so much. He has an assured, God-given talent, having turned with facility from serious post-college attempts to be a painter to acting—because it just felt “natural.”
Aside from a brief hard stint, with a working pregnant wife in a one-room walk-up, he began early to make contact with his bitch goddess. Three flop plays led to a hit, Barefoot in the Park; and he took the trip west to repeat his performance on film. From then on, there were some not-so-great movies, but nothing like the credits that live on to shame many actors.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made Redford a big name. He appeared in that movie out of a sinister dusk, to place a gun in the beautiful belly of Katharine Ross and to order her, through his quincey-colored moustache, to disrobe. Since then, Redford has been burning up female imaginations. His preoccupation with offering a number of thoughtful oeuvres based on the dangers of winning or surviving (The Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson) failed to damage his image as every woman’s secret golden boy. By the time he got around to reaffirming what had been so dashing and sexy in Butch Cassidy—and showing himself a true romantic lover in The Way We Were—Redford was as fixed as any star that the Pioneer Ten Satellite may report on while in orbit.
Even the top-heavy, costume-car-great-houses atmosphere of Gatsby cannot entirely stifle Redford s vitality as he plays a man willing to remove his Turnbull Asser shirt in order to waltz with his beloved around an empty ballroom in a dashing World War I uniform. Redford! Romance! Adventure! (Sigh.)
Redford is a new kind of Hollywood king—the kind who never goes to Hollywood if he can help it, and who is much too normal and non-neurotic to think of jumping off the “H” in the Hollywood sign. Though he lives in a Manhattan co-op apartment, the actor is a pure product of last-frontier Western Americana. He grew up in Southern California and Texas and studied on an athletic scholarship at the University of Colorado. Between films, Redford spends time seeking to push back civilization and to wall in his privacy amid the scenic grandeur of a Utah ranch and ski lodge.
Redford’s phosphine hair reminds us that the movies have seldom produced any larger-than-life blond leading men. (John Lund, Alan Ladd, Sonny Tufts, Tab Hunter just didn’t quite make it to superstardom.) Somehow, Redford has the depth and authority of a brunet masquerading under peroxide—yet his hair color is his own, and he doesn’t dye it. Not only does Redford seem to be a blond who is actually a brunet, his mystique resides partially in a darker side of his nature, and in his natural intelligence. He is the moody father of three children, concerned about ecology, animals, conservation, and America’s future. He is vocally anti on subjects from the Method to uniforms to golf to the Establishment to bureaucracy to politicians to the Alaskan pipeline. An unstinting realism about Redford adds up to a life being truthfully lived. There is that athletic, outdoorsy look to his thirty-seven-year-old, tanned, lined, faintly hawklike profile. He is tall, lithe, and ruggedly able. The chipmunk jaws, a broken nose like Brando’s, and a series of facial moles that mar the right side of his face overcome any danger of sensitive pretty-boy-ism.
This is the Redford who had to get a court order to stop one female fan from following him, who has been known to hit a photographer interfering with his pursuit of happiness, who detests interviews (“Conversations are great, interviews are weird”), won’t attend his own premieres, refuses to sign autographs when out to dinner, and insults the over-eager trying to join or enjoin him. But it is the same Redford who was delighted when a woman on the island of Crete came up and grabbed his hair because she’d never seen anything like it before. Vitality and reality interest and stir the actor—just as genuine one-to-one contact is what he seeks in people. The star hoopla, the fans’ mumbling “sign this for my niece,” and any kind of group behavior or mass-think receive Redford’s categorization as “crap.”
They say the public discovers its own stars, and its verdict is final. You know Robert Redford has arrived in the pantheon when a fan—Josephine Dalmasi—can wait from 4 p.m. to showtime, roped behind a barrier at The Great Gatsby opening, screaming, “I want Redford!” Told he wouldn’t show, Josephine adjusted: “Maybe I’ll see somebody who looks like him.”
Not bloody likely.