French postcard by INPI. Photo:
Robert Redford and
Paul Newman in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969).
With his all-American good looks,
Robert Redford (1936) was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1970s. In classics as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969),
The Sting (1973) and
All the President's Men (1976), he was the intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy. He received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010, the actor, director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival was appointed Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in France.
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, California in 1936. His parents were Martha W. (Hart) and Charles Robert Redford, Sr., a milkman-turned-accountant. Redford's family moved to Van Nuys, California, while his father worked in El Segundo. He attended Van Nuys High School and was interested in art and sports. After high school, he attended the University of Colorado for a year and a half. He travelled in Europe but decided on a career as a theatrical designer in New York. Enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Art he turned to acting. In 1959, Redford's acting career began on stage, making his Broadway debut with a small role in Tall Story. It was followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). On TV, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including Maverick (1960), Perry Mason (1960), The Twilight Zone (1962), and The Untouchables (1963). Redford earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (1962). Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (Denis Sanders, 1962), set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the acting debut of director Sydney Pollack, with whom Redford would collaborate on seven films. His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963). After this smash hit, he was cast in larger film roles. In the war comedy Situation Hopeless ... But Not Serious (Gottfried Reinhardt, 1965) with Alec Guinness, he played a soldier who has to spend years of his life hiding behind enemy lines. In Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965), he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood. It won him a Golden Globe for the best new star. A success was This Property Is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966), again with Nathalie Wood. The same year saw he co-starred with Jane Fonda in The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966), also with Marlon Brando. Fonda and Redford were paired again in the film version of Barefoot in the Park (Gene Saks, 1967) and were again co-stars much later in The Electric Horseman (Sydney Pollack, 1979).
After this initial success, Robert Redford became concerned about his stereotype image of the blond 'All American'. At the age of 32, he found the property he was looking for in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), scripted by William Goldman. For the first time, he was teamed with Paul Newman and it was a huge success. The film made him a major bankable star. Other critical and box office hits were Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack, 1972), the hugely popular period drama The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973) with Barbra Streisand, and the blockbuster crime caper The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), the biggest hit of his career, for which he was also nominated for an Oscar. Between 1974 and 1976, exhibitors voted Redford as Hollywood's top box-office name with such hits as The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974) and Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975) with Faye Dunaway. The popular and acclaimed All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), directed by and scripted once again by Goldman, was a landmark film for Redford. Not only was he the executive producer and co-star, but the film's serious subject matter—the Watergate scandal—and its attempt to create a realistic portrayal of journalism, also reflected the actor's offscreen concerns for political causes. He also appeared in the war film A Bridge Too Far (Richard Attenborough, 1977) before starring in the prison drama Brubaker (Stuart Rosenberg, 1980), playing a prison warden attempting to reform the system, and the baseball drama The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984). With his enormous salaries, he acquired Utah property, which he transformed into a ranch and the Sundance ski resort. In 1980, he established the Sundance Institute for aspiring filmmakers. Its annual film festival has now become one of the world's most influential.
Robert Redford continued his involvement in mainstream Hollywood movies, though with a newfound focus on directing. The first film he directed, Ordinary People (1980), which followed the disintegration of an upper-class American family after the death of a son, was one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed films of the decade, winning a number of Oscars, including the Academy Award for Best Director for Redford himself, and Best Picture. His follow-up directorial project, The Milagro Beanfield War (1987), failed to generate the same level of attention. Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), with Redford and Meryl Streep, became an enormous critical and box office success and won seven Oscars including Best Picture. It was Redford's biggest success of the decade and Redford and Pollack's most successful film together. Redford continued as a major star throughout the 1990s and 2000s. His third film as a director, A River Runs Through It (1992) with the young Brad Pitt was a mainstream success. Then, he starred in Indecent Proposal (Adrian Lyne, 1993) as a millionaire businessman who tests a couple's (Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson) morals. It became one of the year's biggest hits. His film Quiz Show (Robert Redford, 1994), starring Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow, earned him yet another Best Director nomination. He co-starred with Michelle Pfeiffer in the newsroom romance Up Close & Personal (Jon Avnet, 1996), and with Kristin Scott Thomas in The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed. Redford also continued work in films with political contexts, such as Havana (Sydney Pollack, 1990), playing Jack Weil, a professional gambler in 1959 Cuba during the Revolution, as well as the caper Sneakers (Phil Alden Robinson, 1992), with River Phoenix. He reteamed with Brad Pitt for Spy Game (Tony Scott, 2001). Redford stepped back into producing with The Motorcycle Diaries (Walter Salles, 2004), a coming-of-age road film about a young medical student, Ernesto 'Che' Guevera, and his friend Alberto Granado. He reteamed with Meryl Streep 22 years after they starred in Out of Africa, for his personal project Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007), which also starred Tom Cruise. The film disappointed at the box office. Recently, he starred in All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013) about a man lost at sea. He received very high acclaim for his performance in the film, in which he is its only cast member and has almost no dialogue. Next, he appeared in the Marvel Studios superhero film Captain America: The Winter Soldier playing Alexander Pierce (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2014). More recently, he appeared in such films as A Walk in the Woods (Ken Kwapis, 2015) with Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson, Truth (James Vanderbilt, 2015) with Cate Blanchett, The Discovery (Charlie McDowell, 2017) with Mary Steenburgen, and Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2019) with Robert Downey Jr. Between 1958 and 1985, Robert Redford was married to Lola Van Wagenen. The couple had four children: Scott Anthony (1959 - he died of sudden infant death syndrome, aged 2½ months), painter Shauna Jean Redford (1960), writer and producer David 'Jamie' James (1962), and director, and producer Amy Hart Redford (1970). Redford has seven grandchildren. In 2009, Redford married his long-time partner, German painter Sibylle Szaggars. In 2011, Alfred A. Knopf published 'Robert Redford: The Biography' by Michael Feeney Callan, written over fifteen years with Redford's input, and drawn from his personal papers and diaries.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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