Sun sets on the Sundance Kid… as Robert Redford retires at the age of 81 CHRISTOPHER STEPHENS looks back at how he won the hearts of millions, but never an Oscar for Best Actor
For almost 50 years, Robert Redford wasn’t just a movie star. He epitomised the whole shebang, the great dream industry, with a hand in every aspect of film from first draft to awards ceremony.
It seems indecent that one man could be so good-looking, so talented and so successful. And yet the casual film-goer today is likely to know him only for his headline roles, in cowboy and gangster movies such as The Sting, then later in romances including Out Of Africa.
Intensely private, and suspicious of the superficial razzmatazz that has always accompanied cinema, he long ago relinquished box office superstardom to embrace the aspects of film-making that meant most to him — directing, running the independent Sundance movie festival and supporting emergent directors.
Robert Redford, Jane Fonda starring in Barefoot In The Park
Intensely private, and suspicious of the superficial razzmatazz that has always accompanied cinema, he long ago relinquished box office superstardom to embrace the aspects of film-making that meant most to him — directing, running the independent Sundance movie festival and supporting emergent directors
In the early Seventies, he was the biggest star since Clark Gable — at a time when celebrity obsession was almost as intense as it is today.
William Goldman, who wrote Redford’s 1969 breakthrough film, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, said: ‘No star in my time has had such heat focused on him.’
A hint of mystical mumbo-jumbo followed Redford around, because he gave nothing away about himself.
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Robert Redford, 81, announces his retirement from acting…
Robert Redford retiring from acting at 81
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His old friend and acting partner in two of his greatest hits, the late Paul Newman, once said: ‘I have known the man for over 40 years and I don’t know him, not really.’
His announcement yesterday, at the age of nearly 82, that he is to retire from acting after his latest movie, The Old Man And The Gun, will cause shockwaves across Hollywood.
Robert Redford in publicity portrait, 1963
Yet the career of the man who once had armies of fans queuing to swoon, and acclaiming him as the most beautiful man alive, almost stumbled at the first step.
Steve McQueen, the star of Bullitt and The Great Escape, had been invited to play Butch Cassidy, the sharp, sassy train robber who finds himself on the run with a laconic and dangerous sidekick, the Sundance Kid.
Newman was to play Sundance. But the director decided to swap the roles, and McQueen threw a strop. Unable to have his favoured role, he refused to make the film at all. At Newman’s urging, the studio agreed to hire Redford, though he had only one medium success to his name — Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot In The Park, co-starring Jane Fonda.
The result was dynamite. Newman and Redford lit up the screen. But Redford had been preparing a long time for this moment, from his first TV bit-parts in serials Maverick and Perry Mason, in 1960.
He followed Butch And Sundance with well-received movies including Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, playing a deputy sheriff, and The Candidate, the first of his heavy-hitting political dramas.
But it was his reunion with Newman in The Sting that sent his career into the stratosphere. The duo played wise-cracking conmen in Thirties Chicago, planning an elaborate ruse.
If most of the audience couldn’t follow every twist of the plot, no one cared. The stars looked as though they were best friends, having the time of their lives. In truth, Redford was struggling in the glare of stardom. He tried to live by a code of privacy so defensive it was almost paranoid: Rule No.1: Accept you will be treated like an object by people who don’t know who you are. Rule No.2: Understand it is almost impossible to avoid becoming that object. Rule No.3: Don’t let yourself become the object — or it will kill you.
It was an austere regime, typical of a man who had endured repeated loss and grief before finding fame.
Jamie Redford, Lola Redford, Amy Redford and Robert Redford
Born in Santa Monica, on the coastal outskirts of Los Angeles in 1936, Redford’s upbringing was poor. His father, Charles, was a milkman who paid little attention to his son, and it was his uncle David who played with him as a boy, teaching him to throw a football. But when Robert was eight, his beloved uncle was killed during the liberation of Europe.
Ten years later, his mother died in childbirth, and his father then remarried.
The teenage Robert was devastated and lost his way. Drinking heavily, he lost his college baseball scholarship for stealing from locker-rooms and breaking into empty houses, where he would have solitary whisky binges.
Robert Redford (R) and his then girlfriend Sibylle Szaggars
But acting saved him. After enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Art in LA, he fell in love with a Mormon girl called Lola van Wagenen, and eloped with her, aged 21, in 1957.
A year later, when Redford was appearing in his first Broadway play, they had a son, Scott. But when the boy was ten weeks old, he died in his cot.
Redford once said: ‘We didn’t know anything about sudden infant death syndrome, so as a parent you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals.’
Their second son, James, who was born in 1962, seven weeks premature, had respiratory problems. ‘There have been so many hits on our family that no one knows about,’ Redford said. ‘I don’t want them to, for my family’s sake.’
Lola Redford and Robert Redford during ‘All the President’s Men’ New York City Premiere
The couple also had two daughters, Shauna and Amy. But in 1985, the Redfords’ 28-year marriage broke down.
‘I never wanted to be one of those divorced showbusiness casualties,’ he remarked sadly. ‘I wanted to prove a marriage could last. But I couldn’t.’
Rumours swirled around his love life. And his leading ladies didn’t silence the gossip, with many confessing they had been hopelessly smitten.
Jane Fonda said: ‘I was so in love with Bob. Nothing ever happened between us, but he was fabulous to kiss. I had a mad crush.’
Meryl Streep, his co-star in 1985’s Out Of Africa, was also said to be his lover — a rumour both have always denied.
His career enjoyed another surge with Indecent Proposal, in which he played an amoral billionaire who offers Woody Harrelson $1 million to sleep with his wife, Demi Moore. Howls of derision went up from women who said that if Redford ever proposed a night of passion to them, their husbands would have no say in the matter.
Robert Redford on the set of Out of Africa based
Five years later, in 1998, a new generation discovered Redford, now playing a grizzled character in The Horse Whisperer. But these successes, good enough to be career highlights for most actors, seemed almost irrelevant to Redford.
As well as his passion for environmentalism, he was immersed in his film festival, staged far from the LA lights, in Utah. The aim was to celebrate American film-making, and encourage more first-rate independent movies. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh owe their breaks to Sundance — named after the character who made Redford famous.
These young guns went on to scoop armfuls of awards. Yet Robert Redford never won an Oscar for an individual performance. His only Academy Award as an actor was a consolation prize, for Lifetime Achievement, in 2002 — though he did win one as director for 1980’s Ordinary People, his debut behind the camera.
Robert Redford on the set of The Candidate
As he turns his back on the screen, Hollywood will miss him — but he won’t miss it. Once, he said, he used to ride his bike around the streets of LA, past the palm trees and the studios during the era of black-and-white stars.
But then his mother died. ‘I left Los Angeles and I never really went back there,’ he said. ‘I have no horror of LA, but there’s a sadness when I’m there.’
It is a sadness that cast a shadow over the most brilliant of the movies’ golden boys.
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