Actor, director Robert Redford has died. He was 89.
Redford starred in All the President’s Men with Dustin Hoffman, a political film no one wanted to make. He directed "A River Runs Through It," starring Brad Pitt, early in his career. Perhaps his most notable achievement was to create the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports independent film and theater. Redford was also a dedicated environmentalist.
Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1936, Redford was an avid reader but evidently showed no early interest in theatre or filmmaking.
“I had no patience… I was not inspired,” Redford recalled. “It was more interesting to me to mess around and to adventure beyond the parameters that I was growing up in.”
Redford earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1955, the year his mother—always supportive—died.
“She was very young, she wasn’t even 40,” he said. “My father came of age during the Depression, and he was afraid to take chances… so he wanted the straight and narrow path for me, which I was just not meant to be on. My mother, no matter what I did, was always forgiving and supportive and felt that I could do anything.
The future matinée idol drank heavily, lost his scholarship and eventually was expelled from the university. He traveled to Europe, where more positive things happened.
“I lived hand to mouth, but that was fine,” Redford said of his time in Europe. “I wanted that adventure. I wanted the experience of seeing what other cultures were like.”
When he returned to the US, Redford studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and finally got his first acting role on an episode of “Perry Mason.” His acting career was “uphill from there,” he said.
Though Redford was known for his striking good looks, he was an actor with focus and charm. His break came in 1963 when he starred in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park on Broadway.
Redford’s most memorable film role was as a second lead in 1969 when he starred opposite Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," a Western about a pair of outlaws; the film won four Academy Awards. The two actors reunited for The Sting in 1973, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Redford acted in "The Way We Were," co-starring Barbra Streisand, and "The Great Gatsby," which was not successful.
Redford made his directing debut in 1980 with "Ordinary People," a drama about an unhappy suburban family, which earned an Academy Award for best picture and one for Redford as best director. He continued starring in hit films such as "The Natural" in 1984 and 1993’s "An Indecent Proposal," which paired him with a much younger Demi Moore.
Redford’s passion for the environment and independent filmmaking merged when he founded the Sundance Institute in 1981. The nonprofit supports “risk-taking and new voices in American film” as well as theater, and hosts annual workshops for playwrights and screenwriters.
Many young filmmakers got their big break at Sundance, including Steven Soderbergh with "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" in 1989, and Quentin Tarantino with "Reservoir Dogs" in 1992. Sundance is possibly Robert Redford’s greatest achievement in the Film industry. Robert Redford was recognized in 2002 with an honorary Oscar.
“I want to make the most of what I’ve been given,” Redford told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in 2015. “You keep pushing yourself forward, you try new things and that’s invigorating.”
In 2016, Redford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation read: "His art and activism continue to shape our nation's cultural heritage, inspiring millions to laugh, cry, think, and change." At the presentation ceremony, President Barack Obama remarked, "As an actor, director, producer, and as an advocate, he has not stopped — and apparently drives so fast that he had breakfast in Napa and dinner in Salt Lake."
Robert Redford’s favorite line of poetry is from T.S. Eliot:
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
Robert Redford tried and certainly succeeded in the movie business.
(4) comments
Hi Michael, thanks for cobbling this article together. 2nd rate journalism. Try to do better next time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJF70sHMFN8
Robert Redford narrated this piece from a "A River Runs Through It.' In Redford's almost spiritual voice it has become the most beautiful poetry in the English language challenging William Wordsworth. Norman Maclean wrote it, but Robert Redford immortalized it.
" Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
Robert Redford was an American icon. He was a life long democrat and a supporter of liberal causes. he was an environmentalist and saw the United States as heading down the wrong road with the destruction of Public lands by fracking and the move backward into fossil fuel pollution of air, water, and land.
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