Robert Redford was Hollywood’s greatest enigma, a man who could do anything he liked in the film industry – and do it better than practically anyone else – yet often seemed to despise the entire business.
He starred in some of the most popular movies ever made: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, Out Of Africa and The Horse Whisperer.
But Redford, who has died aged 89, never won an Oscar as an actor, in part because he refused to play the celebrity game of going to parties and hanging out with false friends.
Instead, he spent as much time as possible at his Utah mountainside retreat, Sundance, where he created a ski resort and an independent film festival.
‘Sure he likes it up in the mountains,’ carped one studio executive. ‘It’s his kind of temperature… he’s a sub-zero guy. Robert Redford is cold.’
That assessment goes a long way to explain why he was treated with suspicion by so many in Hollywood, but it ignores the opposite side of his personality, with the white-hot passions and griefs that drove him.
He launched an outstanding second career as a film director with Ordinary People, in 1980. It starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as a couple trying to overcome the agony of losing a child – a trauma that Redford knew well.
As well as suffering the loss of his first son, Scott, from sudden infant death syndrome, Redford never fully recovered from the death of his mother, Martha, aged 40, from complications after a double stillbirth.
Redford, who has died aged 89, never won an Oscar as an actor, in part because he refused to play the celebrity game of going to parties and hanging out with false friends. Pictured: Redford with Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men
Redford with Mia Farrow in the 1974 box office hit The Great Gatsby
Redford with Barbra Streisand in the 1973 classic The Way We Were
Ordinary People did earn him an Oscar for best director. Even that acclaim, though, could not reconcile him to an industry that he regarded as shallow, dishonest and trivial.
He hated to watch the ‘rushes’ or early edits after a day’s filming – “Who am I kidding?” he would burst out at the screen.
Acutely aware of his god-like good looks, at the height of his fame in the 1970s he admitted he could not pass a mirror without stopping to admire himself.
A kind of inverted vanity prevented him from having cosmetic surgery to remove his one blemish, a cluster of moles under his right cheekbone… even though they made him so self-conscious that he would insist on being filmed from his left side.
His greatest pleasure was to go walking or riding in the wilderness for weeks on end, so he would never have to see his own face.
‘There are no mirrors to tell you how your beard is, or if there’s a boil on your nose.’ He crossed America, on foot or on horseback, at least 20 times.
When a producer ordered him to make a movie called Blue, early in his career, Redford refused to honour his contract.
He told his wife, Lola: ‘If anyone calls, tell them I’m out walking to Big Sur. I’ll be back in a month.’
Redford with second wife Sibylle, who he met after his first marriage of 30 years ended
The Hollywood icon with Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy in The Sundance Kid
Robert Redford during the filming of the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor
Big Sur, a stretch of rugged Californian coastland, was 800 miles away from Utah.
Alan Pakula, who directed him in All The President’s Men in 1976, came closest to understanding his contradictions: ‘What he has is a contained energy and a control over his emotions.
‘And suddenly, a black Irish depression will descend and despair will encompass him. Then he has to vanish, by himself.’
Redford attributed his low moods to Irish ancestry. But Pakula saw something deeper, asking: ‘What really causes these depressions? I think it is because he is acute enough to see he is living a fantasy, being part of a dream.
‘Every so often, he has to ask, ‘Is that really me it’s happening to?’
The answer to that question defined the contradiction in Redford’s heart. He never wanted to leave his mountain refuge, he once said, because when he did, he encountered the other version of himself – the star, with whom he shared a body though they had nothing else in common.
The irony, said his Butch Cassidy co-star Paul Newman, was that no one in Hollywood was better at being an icon.
‘Bob Redford is a star in the shower in the morning,’ he said. ‘No water spray would dare give him hassle.
Redford in a still from the 2015 film A Walk in the Woods
He founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute in 1981, which became a staple in the arts world for years to come
In 1984, he transformed a struggling film festival into what’s now known as The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah
However, as the festival grew more and more popular over the years, Redford spoke out against the commercialization of the event
‘The water would never be too hot or too cold, and the eggs at breakfast would always come out of the pan perfect. That’s what being a superstar is.’
But even decades after they first worked together, Newman admitted he didn’t really know the man behind the image. They were long-time acquaintances, not friends, despite a shared fondness for macho pranks and banter.
‘His secret, I suppose, is that there is always the promise that you can penetrate his cool, that you can get through. Only you can’t. I haven’t. He keeps his distance – and perhaps that isn’t all that much of a bad thing.’
Working with Newman in 1969 on Butch Cassidy, an outlaw adventure based on Wild West legends, cemented Redford’s place as a Hollywood A-lister. His first success came in 1967, after a series of bit parts, when he made Barefoot In The Park with Jane Fonda.
Until then, he was regarded as an identikit LA blond hunk. ‘Throw a stick out of a window,’ said one producer, ‘and you’ll hit six like him.’
But Barefoot, based on a Neil Simon play, revealed an elusive quality that no other hunks possessed. There was something unreachable in him.
Fonda saw it, and said she fell in love with him every time they worked together.
He was a great kisser, she said, but he ‘doesn’t do love scenes’ – meaning that she hadn’t been able to bed him.
In 1969, Redford posed on the set of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance kid, above
He often starred alongside many of Hollywood’s leading ladies at the time, like Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were in 1973, and Jane Fonda in the 1967 film, Barefoot in the Park, seen above
The success of Barefoot led to an offer later that year to star in The Graduate opposite Anne Bancroft.
Redford turned it down. ‘Who would believe,’ he asked director Mike Nichols, ‘that I was a 21-year-old just out of college and had never been laid?’ The role went to Dustin Hoffman.
He also rejected Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? because the scripts didn’t appeal to him.
And he was in two minds over Butch Cassidy, until Newman took him to lunch and told him he could pick whichever role he liked better – the sharp, sassy train robber or his laconic and dangerous sidekick.
That movie chimed with his longing for the Old West. He rarely gave interviews, but wrote about his connection with the Sundance Kid: ‘As technology thrusts us relentlessly into the future, I see myself, perversely, more interested in the past.
‘We seem to have lost something vital, something of individuality and passion. That may be why we tend to view the Western outlaw as a romantic figure. I know I’m guilty of it.’
Six years after the film became the box office smash of the year, he paid homage to it by riding the 600-mile length of the Butch Cassidy trail, from Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, to Page, Arizona. The cold, he said, was so intense, ‘the horse’s bones were frozen’.
By the beginning of the 1970s, Redford was cinema’s hottest male heartthrob since Clark Gable. He made Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, about a Native American on the run for murder.
The actor began directing later in life and won an Oscar for Ordinary People in 1980, as he’s seen here in A Bridge Too Far
In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Redford as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America’s highest civilian honor
Then came The Candidate, the first of his heavy-hitting political dramas. In 1973, he and Newman were reunited with Sundance director George Roy Hill in The Sting, as wisecracking conmen in 1930s Chicago.
The same year he starred opposite Barbra Streisand in romantic drama The Way We Were. A year later he was the lead in The Great Gatsby. His fame became almost intolerable.
William Goldman, the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy, said: ‘No star, at least in my time in the movies, has ever had such heat focused on him.’
To relieve the pressure, he threw himself into all kinds of sports, from skiing and motor racing to tennis.
Hoffman, who co-starred with him in All The President’s Men, found him an intimidating opponent: ‘The reason he drives so hard and races so fast is simply that it is his way of letting go.’
Others were wary of taking him on at any contest. Robert Shaw, who also co-starred in The Sting, said: ‘When we played table tennis and I had a limp because of a fall, he gave me no quarter. He believes in winning. If I were riding in a posse with him and fell off my horse, he’d leave me to crawl up the mountain trail on my own.’
Visitors to the Sundance ranch often returned home nursing injuries from the ski slopes or the riding trails. ‘What Bob wants to do is see if you’re scared, and if you’ll show it,’ said Pakula.
Born in Santa Monica in 1936, he grew up poor. His father Charles was a milkman before landing a job with Standard Oil as an accountant. He had little time for his son, and the main father figure was his uncle David.
Redford won multiple Golden Globe Awards, including Best Director for Ordinary People in 1981
In 2009, Redford married German artist Sibylle Szaggars, pictured above
But when Robert was eight, his beloved uncle was killed on the battlefield in Europe – shot as his Jeep crossed a bridge under heavy fire.
Martha, Redford’s mother, struggled to fill the gap in his life, teaching him to drive a car before he was ten. A rural Texan, she had an interest in Native American culture – something that became a lifelong passion for her son, too.
He was 18 when she died, and his father quickly remarried. Devastated and drinking heavily, Redford was caught stealing from locker-rooms as a student at the University of Colorado, where he had a baseball scholarship, and was expelled.
He began breaking into empty houses to have whisky binges. But he saved himself:
‘There’s a breaking point for some people and not others,’ he said. ‘You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.’
Acting was his lifeline. After enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA, he fell in love with a Mormon girl called Lola Van Wagenen.
They eloped to Las Vegas to get married in 1958. He was 21 and they had just $300 to their name.
A year later, their baby son, Scott, died in his cot aged ten weeks old. Their second son, James, was born in 1962, seven weeks premature.
In a 2024 interview with Orion Magazine, Redford shared his advice for young filmmakers who want to urge their viewers to care about something
‘There have been so many hits on our family that no one knows about,’ Redford said. ‘And I don’t want them to, for my family’s sake.’ The couple also had two daughters, Shauna and Amy.
The marriage to Lola lasted almost 30 years. A decade later, Redford met his second wife, Sibylle Szaggars, though they did not marry for another 13 years.
He helped launch the Sundance Film Festival in its current form in the 1980s, to encourage film-makers to break away from Hollywood.
His acolytes included Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Jim Jarmusch.
To fund this, he picked his starring roles judiciously. In Out Of Africa, in which he played a devil-may-care aviator, he starred opposite Meryl Streep, who yesterday paid tribute by saying: ‘One of the lions has passed’.
He directed Brad Pitt in 1992’s backwoods fable, A River Runs Through It, and starred in and directed The Horse Whisperer in 1998, with Kristin Scott Thomas.
He also played a billionaire who offers Demi Moore $1 million to have sex with him, in 1993’s Indecent Proposal – a hit movie that provoked much mockery from women who protested they would gladly sleep with him for free.
In 2013, he played a lone yachtsman fighting to guide his boat through a storm in All Is Lost, a one-man movie. Five years later, he announced his retirement.
Redford, pictured here with Margaret Mead and Lola Redford, recently urged young filmmakers to ‘get involved,’ and to not take it ‘lightly’
In 1973, Redford and Barbra Streisand played romantic interests in hit film, The Way We Were
‘Whatever glamour, whatever wonderful things there are that can benefit your life,’ he said, ‘there is also a downside, which is the loss of privacy.
‘You begin to be treated like an object, and then you start feeling like one. Then maybe you become one, without the ability to be private.’
That ability to be private was Redford’s most fiercely guarded attribute.
‘Life is not about Boy Scout maxims,’ he said. ‘Life is about winning. To be loved, to be a nice guy, is not necessarily a goal.’
