Robert Redford accepted the burden of being born with natural swagger, easy charm, and clean-cut good looks. To many, those attributes would hardly be considered crosses to bear, but in the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, Redford was an outlier. To his credit, though, he knew, accepted, and tried to make sense of that status. 

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Redford, who died on Sept. 16 at age 89, accepted matinee idol-style roles in some of his earliest successes, including Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Later, he took on parts in which he reckoned with what it meant to have “the all-American smile” — the title, incidentally, of the short story penned by his college-age all-American character in the classic romance The Way We Were (1973). What were films such as his political drama The Candidate (1972) or his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1974) but attempts to unpack what it meant to be blessed with seemingly limitless opportunities? 

Even after he found a perch for himself in the director’s chair, Redford cherry-picked projects that more often concerned young characters from good homes with material abundance who nonetheless went astray, such as Timothy Hutton’s teenager with psychological hang-ups in Ordinary People (1980) or the game show cheater Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes) in the superb Quiz Show (1994). He was a forthright enthusiast of liberal causes, but his interest in the implications of his own Americana made him something of an inadvertent conservative. 

Redford was born in Santa Monica in 1936. Despite having all the makings of a future leading man, Redford seems to have resisted his ultimate vocation. He delayed the inevitable by enrolling at the University of Colorado Boulder and, later, the Pratt Institute, where he nurtured an interest in art. But his gifts as a performer were too large to suppress indefinitely. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he began accumulating credits on Broadway, where he specialized in comedies on the order of Barefoot in the Park (a hit stage show before becoming a successful motion picture). 

Then came a wave of bookings as a guest star on the important television dramas of the period, from Perry Mason and Naked City to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Bit by bit, Redford was refining the sketch of his own persona, including the sometimes aloof steeliness that would be exploited in some of his first significant big-screen parts, including his roles as Natalie Wood’s movie star beau in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and the titular figure in Downhill Racer (1969). Of course, by the time of the latter film, Redford had already attained legitimate stardom by serving as the callow blond sidekick to the older and rangier Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Redford was not immune to accepting ill-judged projects, and he made several in the immediate wake of the sensation of Butch Cassidy: Few today look at, or likely even remember, such productions as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), or The Hot Rock (1972). Yet, to a greater degree than any of his peers, Redford carefully tailored his choices to what he understood to be his own strengths. He went back to the well for additional Redford-Newman magic in 1973’s The Sting, an Oscar Best Picture winner, and he confronted his own idealized image in The Candidate and The Way We Were.

Then came his 1976 adaptation of All the President’s Men, which, tellingly, did not attempt to argue for the significance of Watergate itself but was a two-hour-plus brief in support of the canonization of the scandal’s chief chroniclers, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Redford and Dustin Hoffman). It was Redford’s most political film until the hugely entertaining Sneakers (1992), although the latter film’s deep suspicion of what we would now call the Deep State has, in the fullness of time, become a concern not of the Left but of conservatives.  

SYDNEY SWEENEY GOES WESTERN IN ‘AMERICANA’ 

Mainly, though, Redford was smart enough to play within the lines of his own status as an avatar of perfection: He incarnated a baseball hero in The Natural (1984), and he consented to appear as a credible romantic lead as late as Indecent Proposal (1993), Up Close & Personal (1996), and The Horse Whisperer (1998), the last of which he directed. He won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People, and was given an honorary Oscar — just for being Bob — in 2002. Much has been written about the encouragement offered to young and offbeat talent through his Sundance Film Festival, but Redford’s own directorial sensibility was highly traditional, as reflected in Ordinary People, Quiz Show, and what was perhaps his best film, A River Runs Through It (1992).

Only near the end of his life did he start to compromise, inexplicably becoming incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). His last important film was The Old Man & the Gun, from 2018, although Redford was never, exactly, old: He was still the kid — the Sundance Kid, no less — with the all-American smile who embodied so much of what is best about our shining city on a hill.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.