Robert Redford (1936-2025)

Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand on the
set of 1973's The Way We Were (Rolling Stone)

The first time I saw a Robert Redford movie was in 1967. In Barefoot in the Park the newly married couple, Paul (Redford) and Corie (Jane Fonda) Bratter, move in to an apartment in New York City, nearly break up because of their incompatible approach to life--he is organized and practical, she is flexible and free-spirited--and reconcile at the end.

Barefoot was my first exposure to a Neil Simon play. The actors showed off their chops by dashing off rapid-fire repartee as if that was how everyone spoke in New York. The humor and secondary characters lightened the seriousness of the plot, a characteristic of other Neil Simon plays like The Odd Couple and The Goodbye Girl.

But back to Robert Redford. For several decades he was everyone's ideal of the blonde, blue-eyed movie star, until the baton was handed to Brad Pitt. Some movies, e.g., the Way we Were and the Candidate, played off his good looks explicitly, but the roles grew meatier. By the '80's he took up directing and founded the Sundance Film Festival.

Redford spent the next 50 years making and appearing in some of the industry’s most expensive and most commercially successful films. As the force behind the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, he also helped create an ecosystem for the industry’s smallest. Some films that premiered at the festival became popular with mainstream audiences, such as “Reservoir Dogs” and “Napoleon Dynamite,” but far more succeeded in finding a modest audience that appreciated them thanks to the infrastructure for independent films in the U.S. that Redford and Sundance helped create...

“You make the most of what you’ve been given—that’s how I see it,” Redford said in the 2015 WSJ. Magazine interview. “And you keep pushing to make more of it. I don’t see any reason to stop. I think retirement can lead to death, and that’s not for me.”

R.I.P.