It’s a fine line between making something look easy and being on cruise control. If Robert Redford was underrated as an actor, it’s probably because his work never betrayed a sense of strain. Where contemporaries like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty—and his good pal Paul Newman—often went to pieces on-screen, Redford tended to hold things together, an immaculate figure whose blond hair seemed to serve as a kind of natural halo.
Because he was so good-looking, Redford couldn’t convincingly play losers; the famous story that Mike Nichols refused to cast the actor—a good friend and an ascendant box-office draw—in The Graduate on the grounds that he’d never been rejected by the opposite sex crystallizes the double bind of his preternatural attractiveness. Benjamin Braddock was out of his wheelhouse, but not Jay Gatsby; like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mythical playboy, Redford had one of those “rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance.”
Redford’s death this morning at the age of 89 was met with an outpouring of grief over the loss of a beloved, unassailable movie star who put his influence where his ideals were, over and over again. Redford’s ambivalence about publicity wasn’t a put-on: He seemed genuinely uncomfortable talking about his private life. But as far as social issues went, he fought the good fight—in the spotlight and on the record—in a way that made him a model for successive waves of celebrity activists. In the late 1970s, instead of bemoaning the fragile state of American independent cinema, he did something about it; the impact of the Sundance Institute on production, distribution, and exhibition cannot be overstated and may well end up being Redford’s legacy. Which is both fair enough and a shame, because he was absolutely more versatile than his champions and detractors allowed for: a surpassingly thoughtful actor who controlled his gleaming image without flattening or cheapening it along the way. In remembrance of a Hollywood legend, here’s a quick guide to Redford’s most enduring—and complicated—work, both on camera and behind it.
More on Redford’s Career
The Twilight Zone, “Nothing in the Dark” (1962)
Redford’s otherworldly handsomeness came in handy during his guest spot on this Twilight Zone episode, in which he played a benevolent angel of death; “Am I really so frightening?” he queries his costar Gladys Cooper, whose performance as an elderly woman coming to terms with her own mortality ranks among the greatest in the show’s history. He isn’t frightening, of course: He’s chosen this form to make the leap into the great beyond seem less threatening, and while Redford’s grim reaper is ultimately a perfect gentleman, you can see hints of a future seducer—one whose charisma would not be contained by the small screen.
The Chase (1966)
There’s a sense of a torch being passed in The Chase, or maybe a few of them: between Old and New Hollywood and between generational leading men as well. The film stars Marlon Brando as a small-town sheriff who’s trying to catch up to an escaped convict before the locals tear him limb from limb. The latter character is played by Redford with a sweaty, star-making intensity that almost—but not quite—upstages Brando’s Methodical bluster. The film, cowritten by the blacklisted Lillian Hellman and directed by Arthur Penn the year before he made Bonnie and Clyde, is a mess, but it proved that Redford—at that point still a fresh face—could carry a big-budget production. The rest was history.
Barefoot in the Park (1967) and The Electric Horseman (1979)
Many of Redford’s scenes in The Chase were played opposite his fellow liberal icon Jane Fonda, who would go on to be one of his two greatest screen partners (the other one is next on the list). In Barefoot in the Park, adapted from Neil Simon’s hit play, Redford and Fonda portrayed mismatched big-city lovers—he a square, she a free spirit, both madly in love in spite of themselves—spoofing the decade’s cultural tensions and making a solid case that they’re the most sheerly beautiful on-screen couple of their era.
Twelve years later, they costarred in The Electric Horseman, a screwball Western with a satirical streak targeting 1970s commodity culture. Rumors persisted for years that their chemistry was a by-product of barely suppressed real-life feelings; Fonda’s confession that she had nursed a crush for many years recontextualizes their compatibility.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973)
No history of the American buddy comedy can be written without Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, both of which served as dual showcases for Redford and Newman—a star who was not quite Redford’s mirror image but refracted and illuminated his charisma all the same. (“We bounce off each other real well” was how Newman put it.)
The (b)romantic fatalism of Butch Cassidy, with its doomed-outlaws-on-the-run story line, gave the film a countercultural charge despite its classical backdrop; The Sting was lighter, a ragtime-fueled victory lap around the Prohibition era with a happily ever after ending.
The Candidate (1972)
Redford was never more perfectly cast than in Michael Ritchie’s influentially scabrous backroom satire about an idealistic young lawyer—heir to a Kennedyesque political dynasty—who allows himself to become stage-managed into a senatorial contender. The dark joke of the movie is that Redford’s Bill McKay really is just another pretty face; he’ll say or do whatever it takes to win, and because he looks and sounds so good doing it, the content of his character is irrelevant. By simultaneously playing to and against his looks, Redford showed a depth that had evaded his earlier performances. The film’s final scene—and McKay’s behind-closed-doors question of what he’s supposed to do on the other end of his successful campaign—helped to crystallize the actor’s burgeoning political consciousness on-screen.
All the President's Men (1976)
Bob Woodward was flattered to be portrayed by Redford in All the President’s Men—a movie that made investigative journalism look like James Bond–style espionage. The greatness of Redford’s performance is the way he takes in information; you can feel his mind working in real time, sometimes laboring, sometimes racing, always active behind those blue eyes. His scenes opposite Hal Holbrook’s Deep Throat, in particular, are mini masterpieces of anxious concentration. He turns listening into a form of spectacle.
Ordinary People (1980)
In his directorial debut, Redford showed that he’d absorbed the codes of studio moviemaking without capitulating to them. Ordinary People is handsome and classical, but it also contains bursts of raw emotion—especially from Timothy Hutton, who won an Oscar for his role as a young man mourning the death of his brother—that puncture its immaculate suburban surfaces. It’s a shame that Redford’s Oscar for Ordinary People is often invoked negatively, to imply that it was stolen from Martin Scorsese for Raging Bull—there aren’t as many directorial pyrotechnics here, perhaps, but making an upper-middlebrow chamber drama this good is hard. Otherwise, more people would do it.
Indecent Proposal (1993) and Spy Game (2001)
By the ’90s, Redford was aging into a kind of Hollywood elder statesman—a persona that smart directors were apt to play with. In Indecent Proposal, Redford embodies a playboy fantasy that suggests his own ’70s incarnation of Gatsby except grown into prosperous middle age; the gag is that Demi Moore’s Diana would probably sleep with him for free and that the million bucks he offers her and her husband (Woody Harrelson) is—for her at least—icing on the cake.
The slyness of Spy Game, meanwhile, lies in juxtaposing Redford’s savvy CIA vet against a younger hotshot played by Brad Pitt—their second collaboration after A River Runs Through It. (The film also contains echoes of Redford’s cloak-and-dagger past in Three Days of the Condor.) At his best, Pitt has some of Redford’s effortlessness; Spy Game suggests an exercise in on-the-job movie star training.
Quiz Show (1994)
The moral quandary of Quiz Show’s fact-based plotline—the revelation that the telegenic, well-bred star of the biggest television program of the era was being propped up by under-the-table information—provides Redford with the framework for an old-fashioned melodrama. There’s also something evocative in Ralph Fiennes’s performance as the WASPy, handsome, front-running Charles Van Doren, as if Redford were engaging—however unconsciously—in a bit of self-reflexive critique about his own celebrity.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
For all of his screen credits, Redford rarely played villains, but he was terrific as the clandestine director of H.Y.D.R.A. in The Winter Soldier, a role that rhymes nicely with his work in The Candidate 42 years earlier. His Alexander Pierce is a smooth operator, and it’s fascinating to watch Redford convincingly lord over the brand-name protagonists of a multibillion-dollar superhero franchise simply by virtue of his stature. Even with Captain America and Nick Fury around, he feels like the biggest star in the room.
All Is Lost (2013) and The Old Man and the Gun (2018)
Redford’s relative reluctance to appear on-screen in the years that he spent building the Sundance brand shifted his image toward that of a mentor figure. Director J.C. Chandor was a Sundance kid, however, and All Is Lost saw him cast his industrial father figure in a physically demanding, baldly symbolic role as a maritime lifer doomed to go down with the ship: Call it Death of a Sailsman.
There’s something similarly metaphysical at work in The Old Man and the Gun, about an aging bank robber resigned to his own recidivism. When you look back on it now, there’s poetry in the fact that Redford’s valedictory role was as an outlaw determined to keep getting away with things on his own terms.