He was the actor women adored and men disliked. He was too blond, too handsome, too sexy, too much of a boy scout, too cool. He also single-handedly represented, both as an actor who carefully chose the characters he played and as a director, a certain kind of American cinema: generous, progressive, romantic, a cinema that sometimes questioned, though always gently, the very foundations of its identity. He was also committed to changing it, to promoting new talent, perhaps in search of a utopia, whether in the heart of Hollywood or alongside it. Far from the rugged masculinity and conservative melancholy of a Clint Eastwood or the hedonistic, psychedelic exuberance of a Jack Nicholson, there was Robert Redford. He died on Tuesday, September 16, announced his agent Cindi Berger, quoted by the New York Times.

He was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. A boisterous child and teenager, he inherited from his mother (whom he lost at the age of 19) a certain erudition and a fierce love for the arts. He was the despair of his more conservative father, an accountant at Standard Oil, as he shunned his studies and was regularly expelled from high school and then from university after committing minor offenses or because of frequent drunkenness.

You have 92.63% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.