When I think of Robert Redford, I think of three things. First, I think of seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a ten-year-old kid in the autumn of 1969 and falling in movie love with Paul Newman and Redford, and especially Redford, when his Sundance Kid is backed into admitting “I CAN’T SWIM!” to Butch as they are about to be stampeded by ill-meaning pursuers and have no choice but to cliff-dive into the rapids of a river below. This admission of vulnerability from a true golden boy of cinema made Newman’s Butch crack up. I, on the other hand, was full of concern. And I watched the film’s final scene with my hand in front of my eyes, peering through frightened fingers, not wanting to witness the bloody end of the lovable outlaws. Mercifully, director George Roy Hill resolves the picture with a sepia-tinted freeze-frame — we only hear the rifles that take them down.  I think I cried anyway. 

And then I think of my high-school drama teacher, Pat Clancy, telling his class about having seen All The President’s Men the night before, in the city (we, his class, were stranded in the boondocks of Jefferson Township and hadn’t driver’s licenses yet). After praising its historical acuity, he kvelled about Dustin Hoffman, the actor’s actor, and his energetic work as near-gonzo reporter Carl Bernstein. What about Redford, who played the more straight-arrow Bob Woodward. He was excellent, Mr. Clancy said, and expanded on that with what he considered high praise: “I forgot he was Robert Redford.”

Finally, I think of an anecdote related by the author and historian Mark Harris in his books Pictures at a Revolution and Mike Nichols: A Life. Mike Nichols had first worked with Redford in the early 1960s, for the Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, in which Redford and Jane Fonda playing post-honeymoon newlyweds beginning tumultuous life in New York City. (The1967 film version, also starring the pair, was directed by Gene Saks.) Redford was keen to play the role of Benjamin Braddock in Nichols’ upcoming The Graduate. The part, as written, might not have been a bad fit — Benjamin is the child of a steadfast WASP family. Playing pool with Nichols one evening, Redford broached the subject. Nichols had a question for him. “Look at you. How many times have you struck out with a woman?” Redford was unselfconsciously dumbstruck. “[H]e said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’,” Nichols recalled, not without affection, one infers. “He didn’t even understand the concept.”

Redford would never play a guy who struck out with a woman per se, but he would frequently lose his love, most unforgettably in The Way We Were, which paired him with Barbra Streisand.  In the decades-spanning love story Redford is Hubbell, the breezy, talented, apolitical novelist; Streisand’s character is Katie, a pre-Stalin Marxist. Caught up in the tides of the McCarthy era, their marriage founders when Hubbell can’t, or won’t, match Katie’s ideological commitment. Redford played callow well — if he was too “good looking” to embody Jay Gatsby entirely, he captured a good deal of that character’s baseline immaturity in director Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

But Robert Redford the man had a great deal of commitment, and he put his money where his mouth was. Almost immediately after skyrocketing to superstardom in 1969’s Sundance Kid, he worked for the once-blacklisted Abraham Polonsky — who had not directed a film since 1948’s remarkable noir Force of Evil — on Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a fact-based miscarriage-of-justice story. 

And from that point on, Redford continued to use his clout to motor some of the most vital films of the 1970s, some of them exhilarating entertainments, others consistently offered bracing critiques of American culture and politics while also celebrating the way we the people have gotten things right every now and then. Michael Ritchie’s 1969 allegorical ski-competition movie Downhill Racer was memorably downbeat even as it chronicled a rising star. Ritchie and Redford made an arguably even more decisive strike with The Candidate, about a politico who’s all surface and doesn’t really mind that circumstance. In 1972 he played master thief John Dortmunder in one of the best adaptations ever of a Donald E. Westlake crime novel, The Hot Rock; director Peter Yates conducted the proceedings with admirable dispatch while Redford completely sold the character as a charismatic mastermind. What can be said that hasn’t been already about Redford’s re-teaming with Paul Newman, 1973’s The Sting, one of those rare movies that’s pure unadulterated pleasure from the first frame to the last? With 1974’s Three Days of the Condor, he got in on the ground floor of the American paranoid thriller, and with 1976’s All The President’s Men he illuminated a real-life political scandal engendered by a paranoid president. It was with Men that Redford got into the nitty-gritty of filmmaking, buying the rights to the best-selling book by Woodward and Bernstein, overseeing the script, and hanging out at the offices of the Washington Post with co-star Dustin Hoffman to soak up newsroom atmosphere. 

He was all of forty years old by the time Men was released, but the picture gave him something of an elder-statesman status in Hollywood. He would continue to play youthful — his credibility in Barry Levinson’s 1984 baseball fable The Natural depended on that ability — but in the likes of 1985’s Out of Africa, for instance, he played a more weathered kind of heart-stealer as he ambivalently romances Meryl Streep. Africa was directed by Sydney Pollack, the filmmaker with whom Redford collaborated most frequently. Beginning with This Property is Condemned, in 1966, costarring Natalie Wood, they went on to 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson, a better and richer film than the goofy GIF meme that came from it suggests; the aforementioned Way We Were and Condor; The Electric Horseman, a reteaming with Fonda and a mild sendup of Redford’s cowboy image; Africa, and finally, 1990’s Havana, a critical and box-office dud that deserves a second look anyway. He kept at acting for almost his entire life, announcing his retirement in 2020 after his second Marvel picture (Avengers: Endgame), but pursued other interests more enthusiastically. You may have heard of the Sundance Film Festival, which Redford re-christened after founding the Sundance Institute in Utah, and seeing the potential of the US/Utah film festival that had launched in 1978. He took a quiet pride in his baby; I was privileged to attend a dinner there that he attended and he had the look of a man well-satisfied but not in the least smug. He was constantly engaged, it seemed, by the idea that film could change the world. The films he championed courted controversy, and he had no fear of that. He was an executive producer of Walter Salles’ 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries, about the young, pre-revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara taking consciousness-raising chopper excursion across South America. Redford actually went to Cuba to show a print of the film to Guevara’s widow. 

As a director, he showed an acute social consciousness; his 1994 Quiz Show was a remarkable, understated expose of the rot at the heart of all-American entertainment. His directorial debut, 1988’s The Milagro Beanfield War, was a lively “save-the-local-farmer” entertainment. 1992’s A River Runs Through It was a near-epic tale of brotherly entanglements that introduced the world to Brad Pitt — who resembled Redford in his goldenness but would go on to become a rather different performer than Sundance. The movie was also indirectly about ecology, a longtime Redford cause — he was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Such was his clout that Donald Trump tried to turn an offhand remark Redford made about Trump to Larry King about Trump’s foray into politics into a book blurb. (Redford requested that it be removed.)  He turned on the star power with 2007’s Lions for Lambs, casting himself, reupping with Meryl Streep, and introducing Tom Cruise to his rep company. And he kept challenging himself, collaborating with indie maverick David Lowery on what would be his final film, the antic and poignant gentleman bank-robber story (shades of the Kid!) The Old Man & The Gun. 

Until Redford’s passing today at age 89, he led an epic life and career, but that life had its share of tragedy. He lost his mother when he was only 18, and he would see two of his children pass from this world: the first, Scott, died of SIDS in 1959, while his son James succumbed to liver cancer in 2020, at age 58. As both a man and a movie star, he was one of those rare beings of which it truly can be said: we will not see his like again.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.