Opinion | Robert Redford: The Last Grown-Up

Robert Redford didn’t outlive his legend; he refused to act it. In Hollywood, the standard career arc is a slow, ironic death by self-parody—actors playing variations of themselves until the mythology curdles. Marlon Brando ballooned into eccentricity, Al Pacino has been yelling for thirty years, and Robert De Niro has spent the better part of two decades mugging through comedies that make you wince. Even Dustin Hoffman, that seemingly brilliant bundle of neurosis, has occasionally leaned on the shtick. Redford, who died at 89, avoided all of that. He never winked, never coasted, never reduced himself to “Robert Redford”. Until the end, he remained cinema’s most consistent adult in the room. The story begins with television. In the early 1960s,

Redford cut his teeth in what was left of the golden age of live TV, appearing opposite Anthony Perkins and Alec Guinness. He shared his earliest roles with Jane Fonda, another future rebel against Hollywood’s disposable culture. His breakthrough came in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), a small-town fever dream that put him on screen with Brando. A few years later, when Brando turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the slot went to Redford. What might have looked like luck was really the culmination of an apprenticeship: he had already chosen against the obvious career-makers, rejecting The Graduate (1967) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Not cowardice—clarity. He was unwilling to be typecast before he had even begun. Paul Newman saw something others missed. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wasn’t just a buddy western; it was a coronation. Newman fought for Redford’s casting, handing him a platform, not a consolation prize. Their chemistry was so natural that when they reunited in The Sting (1973), the hierarchy was gone. Redford was no longer the junior partner. He had his own gravity, his own mythology. The 1970s became Redford’s laboratory. This was the decade where American cinema took risks—moral, political, aesthetic—and Redford was at its centre. The Hot Rock (1972) showed he could handle comedy without strain. The Candidate (1972) revealed him as the ideal face for a political satire about corruption—handsome enough to be electable, troubled enough to make audiences uneasy. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) tapped into the back-to-nature yearning of a post-Vietnam America. The Way We Were (1973) paired him with Barbra Streisand in one of the decade’s most popular romances. Then came The Sting (1973), a caper that remains one of the most lucrative films of all time, and The Great Gatsby (1974), where he carried Fitzgerald’s melancholy into box-office success. But it was Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976) that revealed his depth. In the former, paranoia crept across his all-American face; in the latter, he became Bob Woodward. Redford not only produced the film but insisted on Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. The way Newman had once vouched for him, Redford now used his star power to elevate a co-star who sharpened the material rather than softened it. To cement the authenticity, he and Hoffman memorised each other’s lines, creating a dialogue rhythm that mimicked real journalism. With Newman, he found a lifelong bond; with Hoffman, he proved that power could be wielded in service of realism rather than vanity. Watch him fill the screen in those newsroom scenes—he conveys the unease of the average American citizen, not ignorant but fearful of what the truth might reveal. In one long take, as he takes notes on a phone call, he fumbles a name, most actors, – at least the Method maniacs would – have asked for a retake. Not Redford. He made it look messier, truer, and more real than you’d think cinema could allow. His long collaboration with Sydney Pollack added further texture. Films like Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, The Electric Horseman (1979), Out of Africa (1985), and Havana (1990) weren’t simply vehicles for Redford but crucibles where Pollack drew out subtler shades of his screen persona. Redford was not chasing reinvention—he was deepening. By the 1980s, he had turned to direction. Ordinary People (1980), his debut, beat Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull for Best Picture, proving his seriousness behind the camera. Cinephiles still howl, but the point wasn’t conquest; it was that Redford could move from in front of the camera to behind it without betraying cinema’s seriousness. He followed with A River Runs Through It (1992), a lyrical meditation on family and loss, Quiz Show (1994), an elegant dissection of media corruption, and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), a golf fable with unmistakable echoes of the Bhagavad Gita. Later came smaller but pointed works like The Conspirator (2010) and The Company You Keep (2012). His themes were consistent: American myths, morality under pressure, the lies we tell ourselves as a culture. As an actor, he refused predictability. He played with glossy mainstream fare—Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993)—before pivoting to sharper turns. In Spy Game (2001), he kept pace, even outmanoeuvred Brad Pitt with bravura subtlety. In Lions for Lambs (2007), he squared off against Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep with weary authority. At 77, he carried All Is Lost (2013), a near-wordless one-man film of survival at sea, which should have delivered the acting Oscar that had always eluded him. He even appeared in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), reportedly for his grandchildren, a wink at pop culture without surrendering to it. And then Sundance. In 1981, Redford founded the Sundance Institute, which grew into the most vital film festival for American independent cinema. Without Redford, there might not have been Tarantino, Soderbergh, or the Coen Brothers. Sundance was not an afterthought—it was his clearest statement of faith that cinema mattered, that new voices needed protection from Hollywood’s flattening machinery. If Newman and Hoffman embodied Redford’s generosity on screen, Sundance institutionalised it off-screen. Unlike many of his peers, Redford never curdled into caricature. Brando hid behind eccentricity, Pacino behind volume, De Niro behind late-career paychecks. Redford remained precise, serious, unshowy. He never performed Robert Redford playing Robert Redford. He performed the part at hand, then disappeared until something worthy came along. Robert Redford’s refusal to imitate himself didn’t make him louder or more mythic than his peers. It made him steadier, rarer, harder to replace. His career wasn’t a succession of desperate reinventions but a continuous argument that cinema deserves patience, risk, and generosity. Brando decayed, Pacino shouted, De Niro grinned his way to the bank. Redford did none of the above. He outlived parody not by reinvention but by principle. And if you want to understand what cinema once meant—and may never mean again—you will have to explain why Robert Redford, of all people, turned out to be its last grown-up. The writer is a film historian. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.