Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director whose hit movies often helped America make sense of itself and who, off screen, evangelised for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centred independent film movement, died early Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.
His death, in the mountains outside Provo, was announced in a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK. She said he died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.
With a distaste for Hollywood’s dumb-it-down approach to moviemaking, Redford typically demanded that his films carry cultural weight, in many cases making serious topics like grief and political corruption resonate with audiences, in no small part because of his immense star power.
As an actor, his biggest films included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with its loving look at rogues in a dying West, and All the President’s Men (1976), about the journalistic pursuit of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate era. In Three Days of the Condor (1975), he was an introverted CIA codebreaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game. The Sting (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.
Robert Redford in All The President's Men
Redford was one of Hollywood’s preferred leads for decades, whether in comedies, dramas or thrillers; studios often sold him as a sex symbol. His body of work as a romantic leading man owed a great deal to the commanding actresses who were paired with him — Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973) and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985).
“Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes”.
He branched into directing in his 40s and won an Academy Award for his first effort, Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family’s disintegration after a son’s death. Ordinary People won three other Oscars, including for best picture.
His next film as a director, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), a comedic drama about a New Mexican farmer denied water rights by uncaring developers, was a flop. But Redford stubbornly refused to pursue less esoteric material. Instead, he directed and produced A River Runs Through It (1992), a spare period drama about Montana fly fishermen pondering existential questions, and Quiz Show (1994), about a notorious 1950s television scandal. Quiz Show was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and best director.
Perhaps Redford’s greatest cultural impact was as a make-it-up-as-he-went independent film impresario. In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices. He took over a struggling film festival in Utah in 1984 and renamed it after the institute a few years later.
The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, became a global showcase and freewheeling marketplace for American films made outside the Hollywood system. With heat generated by the discovery of talents like Steven Soderbergh, who unveiled his Sex, Lies and Videotape at the festival in 1989, Sundance became synonymous with the creative cutting edge.
The directors Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, David O. Russell, Ryan Coogler, Robert Rodriguez, Chloé Zhao and Ava DuVernay were nurtured by Sundance early in their careers. Sundance also grew into one of the world’s top showcases for documentaries, in particular those focused on progressive topics like reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues and climate change.
Preferring life on his secluded Utah ranch, Redford created the image of a reluctant star. His Hollywood career, he insisted with characteristic orneriness, was incidental to his real concerns, one of which was the environment. In many ways, he created the actor-as-environmentalist archetype that stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo would adopt.
Box-office gold
Redford enjoyed being a sex symbol, except when he didn’t. “This glamour image can be a real handicap,” he complained in a 1974 profile in The Times.
Nonetheless, it was his broad grin, tousled reddish-blond hair and all-American look (“WASP jock” in his own words) that first won the audience to his side. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a well-reviewed picture, but it succeeded at the box office in large part because Redford was paired with another matinee idol, Paul Newman. They repeated the trick in 1973 for the same director, George Roy Hill, with The Sting.
His other acting successes included Jeremiah Johnson (1972), about a legend-in-his-own-time mountain man, and The Natural (1984), the quintessentially American story of a man who gets a second chance at his dream baseball career. Sneakers (1992), a breezy caper starring Redford as a security hacker, reflected his occasional willingness to embrace popcorn cinema.
Redford’s biggest ticket seller as an actor (not counting two late-career Marvel films in which he played supporting roles) was the 1993 morality tale Indecent Proposal, which co-starred Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson and took in $267 million, or $590 million in today’s dollars. In her Indecent Proposal review for The Times, Janet Maslin called Redford “one of the screen’s great flirts”.
Redford’s finances suffered with the years, partly because some business ventures were ill-timed. A planned movie theatre chain, Sundance Cinemas, faltered in 2000 when a partner filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2002, Redford raised cash by selling half of his Sundance Catalog, a mail-order venture. A more bitter pill was the 2008 sale of his stake in the Sundance Channel cable network to Rainbow Media, which operated the rival Independent Film Channel.
New York Times News Service