Robert Redford: Farewell To A True Old School Hollywood Legend

Farewell To The Sundance Kid

With the passing of Hollywood legendary figure Robert Redford this week at the age of 89, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at his impressive career both on screen and behind it…

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I don’t remember the first Robert Redford film I saw. I think it may have been Barefoot In The Park in my early teens, based on the Neil Simon play of the same name. With his passing, it is the end of an era in Hollywood. As I got a little older, I saw films like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, made in 1969 with his best friend Paul Newman, All The President’s Men which chronicled how journalists Woodward and Bernstein exposed Nixon’s Watergate scandal and The Candidate, a 1972 film about a man running for political office. We mustn’t forget The Sting, his film from 1973 where he teamed up again with Newman to pull off the ultimate con. Then there’s Three Days Of The Condor, the 1975 paranoid conspiracy thriller, with Redford as CIA researcher finding himself out in the field.

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There was something magnetic about Redford on screen, an onscreen charisma that very few other actors had. He began life as a pretty boy leading man but as he got older, he used his clout in Hollywood to make things happen. The Sundance Festival was founded back in 1981, when Redford saw that Hollywood was such a fickle place that he knew his star wouldn’t last forever and he wanted to put something back into the industry. He did that over and over again with this yearly indie movie festival.

When he won an Oscar for best director in 1980 with drama Ordinary People, he showed that he wasn’t just a pretty face on the silver screen.

Redford didn’t slow down that much into the 1980s, appearing in films like 1984’s The Natural and into the 1990s in Phil Alden Robinson’s likeable conspiracy drama Sneakers, holding his own in a cast that also included fellow Hollywood heavyweight Sidney Poitier. In the later part of his career, we saw him in films like 2001’s The Last Castle pitting his wits against James Gandolfini in prison and Spy Game, out the same year, where he played retiring CIA agent Nathan Muir, on one last mission to free fellow agent Tom Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, from a brutal Chinese prison. Of course, the irony here is that it could be argued that Pitt was a successor of sorts to the position that Redford occupied in the 1970s. But Redford was a far more versatile figure than Pitt.

Towards the last fifteen years of his career, the actor appeared in Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014 and Disney’s remake of Pete’s Dragon in 2016. But he was still active behind the scenes at Sundance and he was executive producer on Native American police drama series Dark Winds since 2022.

So looking back at his career, his legacy is a unique one. He starred in a number of iconic films and in a number of important roles but he stopped playing the Hollywood game after his 1970s heyday. The only nod to mainstream cinema in recent years was his appearance as Alexander Pierce in two Marvel films with the most recent being Avengers: Endgame in 2019. In 2018, he made a brief comeback with gentle drama The Old Man & The Gun about an elderly bank robber on the run. Despite the fact it was fairly late in his career, there was still some of the same sparkle that he possessed in his younger days.

Redford had a truly unique screen presence and charisma and when he was teamed up with the right big-screen partner and an exceptional director or project, then the result was a truly memorable effort. He was a versatile actor at his best too, able to move from comedy to drama, from western to espionage. Over his career he worked with some of the finest directorial practitioners who knew how to bring out the best in him. Redford managed to make All The President’s Men a compelling political drama when it could have just been a dry unengaging effort. Redford also knew how to work with actors of a similar calibre and his chemistry with Hoffman on the same film was just one example of how he worked well with his contemporaries. He only worked twice with his close friend Paul Newman but both were truly memorable movies: Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Sting. One was a western buddy movie while the other was a period caper film but Redford displayed a unique range as an actor.

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Sundance will continue without him probably for many years to come and his most notable films will continue to dazzle audiences while people still watch films. So he’s left a pretty impressive legacy both as an actor and also as a figure in the wider world of cinema, so he will be missed.

JOEL MEADOWS