Robert Redford’s 14 Most Memorable Leading Ladies, in Pictures
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As an actor, director, and co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Charles Robert Redford left an indelible mark on American cinema. The archetypal leading man, he appeared in political thrillers, crime capers, and romantic dramas over his 60-year career; in films about baseball, skiing, sailing, the rodeo, and several about journalism. And buttressing many of those performances are some wonderful leading ladies, from an adolescent Scarlett Johansson to the likes of Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, and Meryl Streep—each of whom Redford worked with on multiple occasions.
Across the board, his costars have praised his integrity, his kindness, and his remarkable good looks, making the convincing case for Redford as a once-in-a-lifetime star. Here, as we mourn the recent announcement of his death, at the age of 89, we look back at some of the movies—and the women—that have helped shape his iconic filmography.
Photo: Getty Images1/14Elizabeth Ashley
On Barefoot in the Park’s opening night in 1963, Redford—cooly reticent even as a 20-something newcomer—declined to attend the post-show party at the Tavern on the Green, presided over by the play’s director, Mike Nichols. His co-star Elizabeth Ashley, however (who had appeared with Redford in the 1959 flop The Highest Tree) didn’t fault him for it. “We always forgave Bob because that’s how Bob was,” she says in the documentary Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age. “He was smarter and more artistic and better than us because all we wanted was to be in a hit play, but Bob wanted finer things than that.”
Photo: Getty Images2/14Natalie Wood
Redford did two films with Natalie Wood (not counting her brief cameo in 1972’s The Candidate): Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and This Property Is Condemned (1966, pictured). “I had a wonderful time working with Natalie, not only because of her innate talent, but she also loved to laugh and joke around on the set, and we would tease each other a lot,” Redford said in a tribute to Wood for TCM. “Natalie had this mannerism when she acted, where she would swish her head to one side and give a puzzled look. She adopted this as part of her screen trademark, I guess, so I would do it back to her, exaggerated. And there we’d be, two cocked heads looking at each other.”
Photo: Everett Collection3/14Jane Fonda
Redford starred with Jane Fonda in four films: 1966’s The Chase, the 1967 screen adaption of Barefoot in the Park (pictured), 1979’s The Electric Horseman, and 2017’s Our Souls at Night. “The only problem with working with Bob is that I just look into his…I kind of fall into his eyes and forget my dialogue,” Fonda told Ellen DeGeneres in 2017.
Photo: Everett Collection4/14Katharine Ross
This isn’t a Redford story, but it’s a sweet one: Katharine Ross, who played opposite Redford and Paul Newman in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had a secret admirer on set. “My wife, Katharine Ross, and I both worked on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I didn’t dare try to talk to her then,” the actor Sam Elliott revealed to AARP The Magazine in 2015. “She was the leading lady. I was a shadow on the wall, a glorified extra in a bar scene. It wasn’t until we made The Legacy [in 1978] that we actually interacted.” Ross and Elliott went on to marry in 1984.
Photo: Everett Collection5/14Barbra Streisand
It wasn’t easy getting Redford to agree to play Hubbell Gardiner in 1973’s The Way We Were. “They were talking about other people because he had turned it down so many times,” Barbra Streisand told Oprah Winfrey in 2010. (His reservations came, in part, from Hubbell’s initial characterization as a one-note, East Coast golden boy: “[It] felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me,” Redford said.) “I was hoping and praying, but it didn’t look good,” continued Streisand. “And then, I was in Africa making a movie and...a friend of mine at the time sent me a telegram, and it said ‘Barbra, Redford,’ and I knew he had signed on.”