Life could have been very different for Charles Robert Redford Jnr. The tousle-haired, chiselled-jaw, twinkling-eyed young man who was born on August 18 1936 in Santa Monica, California, to housewife Martha and accountant Charles Snr grew up in the San Fernando Valley town of Van Nuys, where in high school he proved himself to be an average student but a promising athlete.
The young Redford excelled at swimming, tennis, football and baseball, and earned a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado in 1954, where he could pursue his skiing and climbing hobbies. His projected path to the heights of US sports was cut short when Redford discovered the evils of the bottle, lost his scholarship and was expelled after completing only a year-and-a-half of college.
Convinced that his youthful talent for drawing caricatures might be a sign of unfulfilled artistic potential, Redford set off for Europe in 1957, travelling to Spain, Italy and, inevitably, Paris, where, after trying to make a life as a painter, he was forced to admit that he might not have the talent needed to make a career of it.
Still believing that he might have enough ability to be useful in a painting- or drawing-adjacent field, Redford returned to the US and, after marrying his girlfriend Lola Van Wagenen in 1958, he enrolled to study scenic design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Told by teachers that the only way to excel at scene design was to put himself in the place of the actor, Redford enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he “got the space to expand and form myself as an actor, but I didn’t learn to act”.
Like many East Coast-trained actors of the time, Redford began his career on stage and in TV — starring in Sunday in New York in 1961 and Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park in 1963, a role he later reprised in the film version opposite Jane Fonda in 1967.
In 1962 Redford starred as a naive Korean War soldier in Dennis Sanders’ War Sunday, which the National Board of Review named one of the 10 best films of that year, though it’s not much remembered today. It also featured the first big screen appearance of a budding TV director and actor named Sydney Pollack. The two men would go on to have a long collaboration, Pollack first directing Redford in the Tennessee Williams’ adaptation This Property is Condemned in 1966. A further six films would follow, including Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Out of Africa (1985). Pollack would later say that Redford was “an interesting metaphor for America, a golden boy with a darkness in him”.
In 1969, Redford took a role that had been passed on by Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen — starring as the Sundance Kid opposite the other slightly older twinkle-eyed, chiselled-jawed idol of the age, Paul Newman, in George Roy Hill’s western tragicomedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was the role that catapulted Redford into superstardom and 1973’s reteaming of Hill, Newman and Redford for the con man caper The Sting propelled his star ever higher. His performance in The Sting earned him his only best actor nomination. He didn’t win, but he was honoured with a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2002.
By the time the socially critical American New Wave briefly revolutionised Hollywood in the 1970s, Redford was a star who traded in the mainstream glossy films of the era. However, he could also dip his toes in politically riskier material that satisfied his liberal beliefs — including Alan J Pakula’s seminal paranoid political journalism thriller All the President’s Men and the earlier but criminally underappreciated Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969), directed by Abraham Polonsky, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
All the President’s Men, which became one of the key films of the Watergate era and created a generation of investigative journalists, might not have made it onto the screen were it not for the prescience of Redford, who purchased the option on the book by Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward before its publication in 1974.
Off-screen Redford, like Brando, was a keen advocate for Native American rights and an early champion for ecological conservation, who used the money from his stardom to purchase a ranch in the Utah mountains that would in the 1980s become the base for the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute.
Sundance went on to champion independent cinema when it became the breeding ground for a new generation of maverick filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino in the 1990s. Though Sundance went on to become a more mainstream, big Hollywood affair, and Redford eventually stepped away from his involvement in the festival, its early halcyon days fulfilled its intention as a place where artists could express themselves outside the constraints of blockbuster, profit-obsessed Hollywood.
Redford continued to appear on screen and behind the camera throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century even if his choices were not as clearly consistent as they had been during his 1970s peak.
His environmental activism and political advocacy remained steadfast, and in 2019 he penned an impassioned op-ed for NBC in which he called for Donald Trump to be impeached and lamented how America had reached “a point in time, where I reluctantly believe that we have much to lose — it is a critical and unforgiving moment. This monarchy in disguise has been so exhausting and chaotic, it’s not in the least bit surprising so many citizens are disillusioned.” As his former co-star and famously outspoken political activist Fonda said of Redford this week, “He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.”
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