Rolex
Past Time: Robert Redford
Rolex
Past Time: Robert Redford
Redford’s unassuming attitude sums up the laconic, understated screen presence that occasionally frustrated film critics such as The New Yorker’s David Denby, who wrote: “Robert Redford has always been a natural, intuitive, unemphatic movie actor who draws us close with his good looks and his sweet candor and then shuts us out by never revealing much of himself.” The “stillness” approach to screen acting – feeling instead of acting – was in part a natural progression from the great Method actors of the 1950s such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
Charles Robert Redford Jr’s path to Hollywood was circuitous and far from blessed with good fortune. He was born in California in 1936 and won a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado. “I lost my scholarship pretty quickly after I discovered drinking,” he said without adding that, aged 18, he had lost his mother, who died at the age of 40 after giving birth to stillborn twins. Redford subsequently studied art in Paris and Florence before enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. As a struggling stage actor, he married Lola Van Wagenen in 1958. Their first child died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1959.
Camera Man
Despite being impossibly handsome, Redford fought against being cast in romantic comedies and overwrought love stories. His breakthrough movie, the 1969 Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-starring his mentor and friend Paul Newman, was in essence a buddy movie. His biggest box office success, The Sting (1973), was a 1920s prohibition caper – again co-starring Newman – that won the Best Picture Academy Award.
Like Butch Cassidy, The Sting and The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby (1974) put Robert Redford in period costume in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconoclastic novel about the dark side of the American Dream. The role of Jay Gatsby – a remote, mysterious and ultimately doomed character – was a near-perfect match for Redford’s subtle, still style of acting. It remains one of the greatest cinematic reference points in men’s fashion history aided, no doubt, by director Jack Clayton framing every shot like a still in a fashion magazine.
Screen Fest
Few actors have contributed as much to the craft of filmmaking as Robert Redford. As early as 1963, he had bought an estate in Utah christened Sundance. His film festival, officially named the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, helped launch the directorial careers of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and Jim Jarmusch. In 1981, he won his own Best Director Academy Award for Ordinary People and continues to produce films such as the 2017 movie, Our Souls at Night, for Netflix that reunited him with Jane Fonda.
Despite making zero effort to hold back the sands of time, Robert Redford has consistently co-starred with the most bankable actresses in Hollywood. In 1985, he was the love of Meryl Streep’s life in Out of Africa. In 1993, it was Redford who made the eponymous Indecent Proposal to Demi Moore. In 1996, he was Up Close and Personal with Michelle Pfeiffer and co-starred with Kristin Scott Thomas in the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer. But the enduring relationship in the second act of Redford’s career was with protégé Brad Pitt, who he directed in A River Runs Through It (1992) and co-starred with in the film Spy Game. Of his roles as actor/director, Redford said: “As a director I wouldn’t like me as an actor. As an actor, I wouldn’t like me as a director.”