Charismatic star who shunned the Hollywood limelight
Robert Redford, who has died aged 89, was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars – a matinee idol with looks so chiselled, and yet so radiant, he routinely featured at the top of lists of the most attractive men of all time. Redford did not like being defined as a sex symbol, however. Though not untouched by vanity, he worried that his looks held him back, said The Daily Telegraph. And indeed, they had almost cost him the role that made him into a screen legend. “He’s just another Hollywood blond,” was a studio boss’s verdict when he auditioned for the role of the Kid in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. It was only thanks to the intervention of his co-star, Paul Newman, who was already a big name, that he got the part.
In 1963, he played the lead role in Neil Simon’s hit comedy play “Barefoot in the Park”, then in 1967 was cast in the screen adaptation, opposite Jane Fonda. That made his name. From the 1970s, he used his star power to make serious films with weighty themes. In 1974, he optioned “All the President’s Men”, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their Watergate exposé, and he played Woodward in the 1976 film; in 1980, he made his Oscar-winning directorial debut with “Ordinary People”, a drama about a well-off family torn apart by repressed grief. This film, he revealed, drew on his own experience of bereavement; but he generally did not give much away about himself, said The Times.
Redford’s “outsider status” was reinforced by the fact that he had left LA early in his career, and lived for long periods in the wilds of Utah. An outdoors man and committed environmentalist, he trained horses and loved skiing. He gradually bought up land in the area, as well as a small ski resort, and in 1985 he founded a film festival there to promote independent filmmaking. The Sundance Film Festival, along with the institute for aspiring filmmakers that it had sprung from, was perhaps his greatest cultural legacy, said The New York Times.
Robert Redford was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1936. His father was an accountant. At high school, he excelled as an athlete, but was also a tearaway. He was 18 when his mother died suddenly of sepsis; and having won a sports scholarship to the University of Colorado, he was soon kicked out for heavy drinking and not turning up to practice. Redford spent time in Europe trying to become a painter. Back in New York he took classes in set design, then switched to acting. Aged 22, he married Lola Van Wagenen. She was heavily pregnant when Redford got his first part, in a play on Broadway. One morning a few weeks later, they found their baby son dead in his cot. “It was really hard,” Redford recalled. “We were very young. We didn’t know anything about sudden infant death syndrome, so as a parent you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals.” He and Lola had three more children – including a son, James, who had a rare liver disease and died aged 58. They quietly split up in 1985; he later married Sibylle Szaggars, an artist, who survives him.
Redford did not go in for showy monologues or sharp one-liners, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It is images of him in close-up that are “burned into movie culture”; he had in spades a quality that “movie nerds” call “to-be-looked-at-ness” – which is why his best films were mostly “double-headers”: they allowed us to see him through the eyes of his co-stars. He acted less from the 1980s, but continued to appear in major films including “Out of Africa”. As a director, he won plaudits for “Quiz Show” and “A River Runs Through It”, starring a young Brad Pitt. One of his last roles was in 2013’s “All is Lost”, about a solo sailor’s battle for survival. It was considered one of his most remarkable performances, and he was disappointed not to be Oscar nominated for it. He never did win an acting Oscar.
