Robert Redford, the Hollywood golden boy and Sundance Movie Competition founder who starred in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child, The Manner We Have been and All of the President’s Males — and who gained an Academy Award for guiding Bizarre Individuals — has died. He was 89.
Redford died early Tuesday at his dwelling in Utah, his long-time publicist Cindi Berger confirmed to THR.
The actor-producer-director, a four-time Academy Award nominee and honorary Oscar recipient, was one of many few really iconic display screen figures of the previous half-century, the avatar of a sure type of all-American ultimate who nonetheless took a dyspeptic view of his nation in a number of notable dramas together with Downhill Racer (1969), The Candidate (1972), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All of the President’s Males (1976).
He introduced his attractiveness, ineffable appeal and romantic attraction to heroes in addition to antiheroes, from one of many outlaws in Sundance Child to the Nixon-toppling journalist Bob Woodward in All of the President’s Males to the well-meaning however naive political contender Invoice McKay in Candidate. His sheen typically contrasted with the jaundiced view of his footage, notably within the ’70s movies that stay amongst his greatest; however he might use his attraction to equal and devastating impact in romance, notably reverse Barbra Streisand in The Manner We Have been (1973).
Behind the California-kid floor was a darker and extra difficult determine. The very definition of a Hollywood star, he nonetheless noticed himself as an outsider and spent a lot of his time dwelling away from the epicenters of the trade — together with on the Utah snowboarding resort that he changed into the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Movie Competition.
He bestrode two worlds, his biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, wrote in 2011: “His life [was] peripatetic. He engaged [in] careers on the East Coast and West. It will not be a coincidence that his arts laboratory — his ‘nice experiment’ [Sundance] isn’t too many miles from Promontory Summit, the place, in 1869, the golden spike was hammered that joined the East Coast and West on the transcontinental railroad.”
Born in Santa Monica on Aug. 18, 1936, Charles Robert Redford Jr. grew up poor in a closely immigrant a part of city, his household scraping by on the earnings of his father, a risk-averse milkman who later turned an accountant. “[He] labored brutal hours,” Redford, an solely baby, remembered in a 2014 interview with THR. “I didn’t see a lot of him after I was a child.”
His mom, Martha, a homemaker, “was the robust member of the household. She was very outgoing. She at all times had a smile; she was very, very adventurous. Danger was not a giant problem for her. She got here from Texas, and she or he carried that type of sturdy, jocular goodwill. She noticed issues in a optimistic mild. She additionally felt that I might do something, and she or he was very supportive of something I’d strive.”
Redford rebelled towards his father’s cautiousness and certainly towards all expectations, even after the household moved to the extra upscale Van Nuys. “I used to be at all times about breaking the foundations,” he stated. “I needed to be away from Los Angeles as a result of I felt it was going to the canines. I used to be simply getting an increasing number of anxious about wanting out. I didn’t need to be wherever I used to be. And I felt a sure suffocation. I felt issues had been closing in round me, and it made me anxious. I needed to be free.”
His dream was to comply with within the footsteps of the nice artists who had made Paris their hub; he didn’t take into account a profession as an actor till later, after dropping out of the College of Colorado following his mom’s demise in 1955, when he took months off to journey round Europe. He was deeply affected by his experiences in Spain, Italy and France. “It was the primary time I developed any type of a political view,” he stated, “as a result of I couldn’t care much less about politics after I was rising up.”
He turned a passionate environmentalist and supporter of Native American and LGBTQ rights and remained that method all through his life. In 2018, he revealed on the Sundance web site a lament in regards to the state of America titled, “A Transient Assertion About Huge Issues.”
“Tonight,” he complained, following the information of Brett Kavanaugh’s affirmation to the Supreme Court docket, “for the primary time I can bear in mind, I really feel misplaced within the nation I used to be born into and the citizenship I’ve liked my entire life.”
After returning to the U.S., he studied on the American Academy of Dramatic Arts after which discovered work in theater and tv. He turned a younger father and had 4 kids along with his first spouse, Lola Van Wagenen, whom he had met when she was a 17-year-old pupil at Brigham Younger College. One son, Scott, died at 2 1/2 months outdated from sudden toddler demise syndrome in 1959, leaving Redford guilt-ridden despite the fact that there was nothing he might have executed, and his different son, Jamie, died in October 2020 of bile-duct most cancers in his liver.
He’s survived by his daughters, Shauna and Amy, and his second spouse, Sibylle Szaggars, whom he married in 2009.
He made his onscreen debut in a 1960 episode of ABC’s Maverick. Three years later, he earned an Emmy nomination for his work on an installment of the ABC anthology collection Alcoa Premiere and starred in a memorable Broadway manufacturing of Neil Simon’s Barefoot within the Park (directed by Mike Nichols), which he later filmed alongside frequent collaborator Jane Fonda.
“You’re feeling that he’s one way or the other higher than most different mortals,” she wrote in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far. “You need Bob to love you, so you’re loath to do or say something which may make him assume much less of you.”
After the play, Redford turned down a variety of high-profile roles, together with the lead in Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). “I used to be instantly Mr. Focus,” he instructed Callan. “Eleanor Roosevelt and Noël Coward dropped by. Natalie Wooden got here backstage. Bette Davis summoned me to her suite on the Plaza.” Ingrid Bergman gave him recommendation he took to coronary heart: “Do solely good work.”
Redford’s early films additionally included his debut, Tall Story (1960), and Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which gained him a Golden Globe as greatest new star. He was a star, however not a famous person. That modified in 1969 when he appeared because the Sundance Child reverse Paul Newman, taking a task that had been supplied to Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen.
“The studio didn’t need me,” he recalled. “All of it relied on Paul, and I met him and he was very beneficiant and stated, ‘Let’s go for this.’ He knew I used to be critical in regards to the craft. That’s what introduced us collectively, and we turned associates, and our friendship turned out to be similar to our relationship in each Butch Cassidy and The Sting” — the 1972 follow-up to Butch Cassidy that gained the Oscar for greatest image.
Many critics dismissed Butch Cassidy. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker known as it “the underside of the pit” (prompting a livid letter from director George Roy Hill, which started: “Hear, you fucking c—t”). However the image was an enormous hit and has come to be seen as a traditional.
“The consequences of Butch Cassidy had been far-reaching for Redford,” wrote Callan. “In February 1968, [Redford had] been sleeping in lodge hallways in Grenoble … to save cash. Two years later, in February 1970, he was a nationwide icon on the duvet of Life journal.”
He adopted Butch Cassidy with Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1970) and The Candidate, a couple of U.S. Senate contender who’s the proper entrance man however then appears misplaced when he faces the prospect of governing. “What can we do now?” he asks within the film’s well-known final line. Years later, Redford toyed with making a sequel, to be written by Larry Gelbart. “The reality is so terrible,” he instructed Maureen Dowd of The New York Occasions in 2003, “however in its personal horrible method, it’s entertaining.”
With Downhill Racer, he turned a producer and thru his Wildwood Enterprises developed All of the President’s Males, based mostly on the Watergate guide by Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (Curiously, Redford had met President Nixon as a youngster and stated he acquired “a creepy vibe” from him.)
He had met Woodward and Bernstein in Washington earlier than their guide was completed and paid $450,000 for the movie rights, then was disenchanted in William Goldman’s script, which he closely rewrote with director Alan J. Pakula after turning down Bernstein and Nora Ephron’s adaptation.
The drama, additionally starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, was a monument to dramatic realism, so critical in its try to seize the reality that the manufacturing took luggage of trash from the real-life Publish workplaces and used the papers on the set. Pakula shot an astounding 300,000 ft of movie, which was decreased to 12,300 within the remaining, 2-hour, 18-minute film.
The movie nearly had a distinct ending: “Pakula,” notes Callan, “needed to indicate TV footage of Nixon’s resignation and the well-known defiant farewell wave on the steps of the helicopter on the White Home garden.” Redford resisted. “I instructed Alan time and again, ‘This isn’t about Nixon. It’s about journalism.’ ” They compromised by displaying a teletype machine ticking away, saying Nixon’s choice.
4 years after President’s Males, Redford tried his hand at directing with Bizarre Individuals (1980), based mostly on Judith Visitor’s novel and tailored by Alvin Sargent. It was an intimate household drama that Pakula thought to be subliminal autobiography. “Once I learn it,” he famous, “I stated, ‘Oh, I get it.’ The novel is about parental tyranny … Bob is shifting some furnishings right here. He’s co-opting the novel’s dysfunctional household for his father’s or his personal and investigating himself at a crucial time.” Redford denied that.
The completed image, wrote critic David Thomson, “got here as a powerful shock to the general public and the Academy. It was observant, heartfelt and stuffed with anguished performances. And it was appreciated that Redford was concentrating on the script and the actors and directing with stylistic restraint {and professional} anonymity. The shock now could also be that Bizarre Individuals gained greatest image and the Oscar for greatest director when Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull was amongst its rivals.”
Redford’s different movies as a director included The Milagro Beanfield Battle (1988), A River Runs By It (1992), Quiz Present (1984) — for which he obtained one other Oscar nom — The Horse Whisperer (1998), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and The Conspirator (2010).
None of his later films as an actor equaled these of the late ’60s and ’70s, despite the fact that many had been hits. They included The Pure (1984), Out of Africa (1985) — one other Academy Award greatest image — and Indecent Proposal (1993). In all, Redford’s naturalism was so convincing, his performing so expert, it nearly disguised his expertise; he by no means gained an performing Oscar.
Producer Sherry Lansing remembered how he took Indecent Proposal‘s most memorable second — when his character, billionaire John Gage, affords a younger man $1 million to sleep along with his spouse — and tossed it off with sensible casualness, as if throwing the road away. This was a person for whom there was not a lot distinction between $1 and $1 million, any greater than there was any distinction between lust and love. All the pieces about him was revealed in that line — not least the actor’s intelligence in selecting to not play it melodramatically.
Lansing additionally noticed a extra delicate facet to Redford than he revealed to those that didn’t know him properly. After a stupendous desk studying simply earlier than the shoot, through which the actor blew everybody, together with co-stars Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore, away, Lansing was summoned to see the star. “I assumed he was going to inform us he didn’t like one thing within the script,” she recalled. “However he stated, ‘I would like out. The children are fantastic. However I’m not. It’s their film.’ ” He was so insecure about his efficiency, he was prepared to depart the movie. Solely the deft intervention of his CAA brokers saved him onboard.
He was a perfectionist who was as crucial as himself as of others. “I used to be born with a tough eye,” he instructed THR. “The way in which I noticed issues, I’d see what was flawed. I might see what might be higher. I developed type of a darkish view of life, my very own nation. Once I was a child, I used to be instructed to be a great sport. It wasn’t whether or not you gained or misplaced; it was the way you performed the sport. I noticed that was a lie.”
He was notoriously unpunctual and infrequently took months and even years to decide to a undertaking, solely to insist on modifications after which typically pull out. He prevented darker, extra dissolute characters, despite the fact that he was additionally drawn to them. Dan Melnick, the late Hollywood govt and producer, cautioned twentieth Century Fox that Redford would by no means comply with play the alcoholic lawyer in The Verdict (1982) regardless of how a lot he insisted he would. Melnick was proper; Redford dilly-dallied till he was fired by producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and changed by Newman.
Redford’s later movies included Spy Sport (2001) and the Marvel superhero films Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Regardless of his advocacy for indie movie, he most popular studio films and solely later embraced unbiased automobiles equivalent to All Is Misplaced (2013) and A Stroll within the Woods (2015).
He saved working steadily, even relentlessly, taking part in information anchor Dan Reasonably in Fact (2015) and a widower who falls for his neighbor (Fonda) in Our Souls at Evening (2017), all of the whereas sustaining his involvement with Sundance; certainly, he solely stepped down as the general public face of that group in 2019. That was nearly twenty years after the Academy had awarded him an honorary Oscar and barely greater than two years after President Obama had given him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His remaining on-screen look got here earlier this yr in an uncredited cameo on the AMC collection Darkish Winds, on which he was an govt producer
Redford introduced his retirement from performing simply earlier than the discharge of The Outdated Man and the Gun (2018). By then, Thomson argued, he had “misplaced the intriguing edginess he had within the ’70s. He’s not the one member of his technology to shift from daylight to sundown.”
If he had misplaced a few of his edge, he had not misplaced his perfectionism. “Once I began to direct, I needed complete management of the story,” he instructed THR. “I didn’t need to be depending on anybody. However then you definately add producing to that, and then you definately add Sundance, and fairly quickly you’re including all these layers. Was all that different stuff price it? That’s an open query.”
Stephen Galloway is dean of the Chapman College movie college.