Robert Redford—matinee idol, Oscar-winning director, advocate for independent filmmaking, and environmental activist—died on Tuesday morning at his home outside Provo, Utah, according to a representative. He was 89.
Photographed by Terry O’Neill, Vogue, July 1979
Born in Santa Monica in August of 1936, Redford acted first on television and onstage in New York before becoming, in the late 1960s, a movie star of staggering proportions, appearing in a string of films—Barefoot in the Park, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Sting, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, The Natural, Out of Africa—that made him one of his era’s defining performers. A successful career as a director, helming the likes of 1980’s Ordinary People and 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, and his later work with the Sundance Institute only affirmed Redford’s enduring legacy in American cinema.
In June of 1974, ahead of the release of The Great Waldo Pepper—Redford’s third collaboration with director George Roy Hill—the writer Liz Smith set out to capture his unique star power. From his looks to his persona, his personal life, and his relationship to his fans, Smith gathered up Redford’s many points of fascination at the peak of his powers. Revisit that story here.
In the cinema smörgåsbord currently offered up by The Sting, The Great Gatsby, and—soon to be seen—The Great Waldo Pepper, the living-doll centerpiece, “ham-what-am” with pineapple chunks, is an improbably authentic American hero named Robert Redford. This paradoxical paradigm doesn’t smoke, seldom drinks, and—in the view of his legion of admirers—is inconsiderately, inappropriately, and inexplicably faithful to his wife. (The same one he started with fifteen years ago.) But it is not the private Redford who makes mouths water. It is the movie-star fantasy flickering-in-the-dark Redford. If some actors indeed look good enough to eat, then Redford is the Butter Crunch ice cream sundae that starved-for-stars fans have been waiting for since Paul Newman peaked.
As idol-star-hero, Robert Redford is neither the tragedy F. Scott Fitzgerald asked to show us nor the bore Emerson predicted all heroes to be at last. He is simply a tough, tender, controlled, handsome (but not too pretty) man of action—and a very good actor with lots of sensitive thought hiding deep in those blueing-bottle eyes. American women, increasingly inured to male propaganda, turned off by machismo, and self-conscious about reverse sex symbolism or object-making, are no longer the screamer-fainters of the Valentino days nor the jumper-touchers of the Kennedy era. But still, there is a vast, accumulating, significant, sighing, soughing hero-worshipping wind in the land. The signs are all there in the publicity stampede that sometimes happens but can never be manufactured… in the “what is he really like” question put to anyone who might know… in the unmistakable crinkle of inflated currency at the box office where marquees bear Redford’s now-magic name. It all spells STAR!—in a time when stars and heroes are in even shorter supply than happy headlines.
