Robert Redford: the Hollywood icon who founded the Sundance Film Festival

Robert Redford was constantly described as “golden.” The adjective applied to his wavy blond hair, his sunny all-American good looks—which once led co-star Dustin Hoffman to call him a “walking surfboard”—and his decades-long career as a movie star, as headline after headline dubbed him Hollywood’s “golden boy.” But Redford was, as director Sydney Pollack once said, “a golden boy with a darkness in him.” The classic Redford character had an easy charm but with darker currents beneath the surface. Among dozens of credits, his best-known roles include a wily outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a Depression-era grifter in The Sting (1973), a vacuous presidential contender in The Candidate (1972), and an aging baseball prodigy in The Natural (1984). A Utah resident who disdained Hollywood, Redford used his stardom as a stepping stone to other roles: as an Oscar-winning director, an environmental activist, and the founder of the Sundance Film Festival. Increasingly choosy about acting roles, he was drawn by the line “between what appears and what is,” he said in 1990. “There was always that tension, and the darker side is what interests me.”

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, Calif., where his family spent “years on the edge of poverty” before his milkman father became an accountant for Standard Oil, said The Washington Post. Alienated by his father’s cautious conformity, he was a self-described “f---up” who “channeled his restless energy into athletics.” He was recruited to play college baseball but dropped out after a year to study art in Paris and Florence. When he returned to the states, to study set design, he was required to take an acting class and discovered his natural talent. He switched focus and entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he turned heads “with the tightly coiled anger he brought to his stage auditions.” After stints on TV dramas, he landed the lead in Neil Simon’s 1963 play Barefoot in the Park, a Broadway hit that opened the door to film work. When he was cast alongside Paul Newman as the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, Redford’s life took a turn, said The Times (U.K.). The revisionist Western proved 1969’s top-drawing film and made him a “bona fide movie star.”

Through the 1970s, Redford “starred in celebrated and award-winning movies,” said The Wall Street Journal. Another Newman pairing, The Sting, won seven Oscars and brought him his only nomination for Best Actor. The Way We Were (1973), a romantic drama with Barbra Streisand, and All the President’s Men (1976), with Redford and Hoffman as the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, won several Oscars each. At his fame’s peak, he turned to directing, and film roles “became more sporadic,” said the Associated Press. His debut, Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family wrestling with a son’s death, was a critical “triumph,” and won him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Directing. Other efforts included A River Runs Through It (1992), set in rural Montana, and Quiz Show (1994), about the TV game show scandals of the 1950s, which drew Best Picture and Best Directing nominations.

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Redford’s most lasting influence may have been as the man who “invigorated American independent cinema” through Sundance, said NBCNews.com. Based in Park City, Utah, since 1985, the festival emerged from an institute Redford founded to nurture “talent from outside the Hollywood system.” A launching pad for directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, it “grew into a cornerstone of the film industry” and, to Redford’s chagrin, one of its “most glitzy extravaganzas.” Such spectacle was not for Redford, who through decades of celebrity “led a remarkably private life,” said the Los Angeles Times. He was a loner who could be mercurial and aloof; even Newman, his longtime friend, once said he didn’t feel he really knew the man. Acting into his 80s, Redford spent much of his time on his 7,000-acre property in Provo Canyon, lobbying for environmental causes. “Some people have analysis,” he once said. “I have Utah.”