Robert Redford — The Golden Boy Who Built His Own Mountain

Biography

From Sundance Kid to The Mountain He Built

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California — the son of an accountant and a mother who died when he was eighteen, a young man who received an art scholarship to the University of Colorado, lost it through indifference, drifted through Europe painting, and eventually found his way to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He established himself on Broadway before transitioning to film.

George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) — Redford as the Sundance Kid, opposite Paul Newman's Butch Cassidy — made him a star and established the specific quality that would define the actor career: the ease and the competence, the man who is good at things without needing you to know he is good at them. The Newman-Redford chemistry generated one of the most commercially successful films of the year; Newman and Redford would reunite for Hill's The Sting (1973).

Sydney Pollack's All the President's Men (1976) — Redford as Bob Woodward, opposite Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post journalists who broke Watergate — is the most politically significant film of his acting career and the clearest demonstration of the quality beneath the golden exterior: the specific intelligence of a man doing a job carefully, without drama, because the job matters.

His directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980) — the Judith Guest adaptation about a suburban family's disintegration after the death of one son — won him the Academy Award for Best Director over Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. The Sundance Institute, which he had founded in 1978 on his Utah property, grew into the Sundance Film Festival — the most important platform for independent American cinema and the launch site for dozens of careers including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Park Chan-wook's American distribution.

1936

Born Santa Monica; art scholarship lost; Europe; AADA; Broadway

1969

Butch Cassidy — Newman; the Sundance Kid; the star made

1973

The Sting — Newman again; Oscar Best Picture; the partnership at its peak

1974

The Great Gatsby · The Natural · the golden exterior examined

1978

Sundance Institute founded on his Utah mountain; the institution begins

1980

Ordinary People — directs; Oscar Best Director; over Scorsese's Raging Bull

2018

The Old Man & the Gun; announces retirement; the mountain his final legacy

Filmography

From Sundance's Draw to Woodward's Notes

1969Western Comedy · George Roy Hill · Paul Newman

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

George Roy Hill's revisionist western — Redford as the Sundance Kid, the quiet one, the one who shoots rather than talks, opposite Newman's Butch, who talks rather than shoots. The film that made Redford a star on terms he could live with: the competence without the display, the ease without the effort. William Goldman's screenplay; Burt Bacharach's score; the bicycle scene; and the specific chemistry between two actors who genuinely liked each other.

Sundance's quality — the man whose skills are genuine and whose modesty about them is equally genuine — is played by Redford with the ease that would define the acting career. The opening card game, in which Sundance's reputation does all the work and Sundance watches it work without false modesty, establishes the character completely: the competence is real; the reputation is accurate; and the man behind both is simply waiting to see what the situation requires.

1976Political Thriller · Alan Pakula · Dustin Hoffman · Jason Robards

All the President's Men

Alan Pakula's Watergate drama — Redford as Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter whose investigation of the Watergate break-in, conducted with Carl Bernstein (Hoffman), led to Nixon's resignation. The most politically significant film of his acting career; the specific intelligence of the journalist doing the work carefully; and the performance that demonstrated the golden exterior was not the whole instrument.

Woodward's quality — the reporter whose persistence is not dramatic but procedural, who keeps knocking on doors because that is what the job requires — is played by Redford with the specific steadiness that the political thriller demands: the man who understands that the story is larger than the storyteller and who proceeds accordingly. The parking garage scenes — Woodward meeting Deep Throat — are the film's set pieces, played by Redford as the professional receiving intelligence, not the hero having an adventure.

1980Family Drama · Robert Redford (dir.) · Timothy Hutton · Mary Tyler Moore

Ordinary People

Redford's directorial debut — the Judith Guest adaptation about a suburban family's disintegration following the accidental death of one son and the survival-guilt breakdown of the other (Timothy Hutton). Won Best Director over Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull; Best Picture; and demonstrated that the golden exterior had been fronting a serious intelligence about how people conceal damage from themselves and each other in the language of ordinary life.

Oscar Won (Dir.)

The direction's quality — the restraint that matches the subject's restraint, the refusal to show the pain more clearly than the characters would show it to each other — is the film's central argument. Mary Tyler Moore's performance as the mother who cannot grieve, allowed and guided by Redford's direction, is the finest work of both their careers: the woman whose control is indistinguishable from coldness, playing a real distinction that the film refuses to resolve into either.

1973Period Crime Comedy · George Roy Hill · Paul Newman · Robert Shaw

The Sting

George Roy Hill's Depression-era con film — Redford as Johnny Hooker, the small-time grifter who teams with Newman's Henry Gondorff to run an elaborate sting on a mob boss. Best Picture; Newman and Redford's second collaboration; and the most purely pleasurable film of either career — the con movie that is itself a con, withholding the full picture until the moment it is most useful to reveal it.

Hooker's quality — the intelligence that works best when it is not noticed — is played by Redford with the lightness that the comedy requires and the precision that the thriller demands. The film is constructed as a series of reveals, each of which reframes what the audience thought it understood; Redford's performance is built the same way — you think you have understood Hooker, and then you discover you have understood only what he chose to show you.

Honors

Best Director — Sundance — The Honorary Oscar

Academy Award — Best Director

1981

Ordinary People

Won Best Director for Ordinary People over Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull — the decision that became the most debated Oscar outcome of the decade. The film also won Best Picture. The award confirmed that the actor career had been fronting a director's intelligence; that the restraint in the performance style was a directorial choice; and that Redford's understanding of how people conceal damage in the language of ordinary life was a filmmaker's understanding.

Oscar Won

Honorary Academy Award

2002

Career Achievement

Honorary Oscar for career achievement — the Academy's acknowledgment that the Sundance Institute's contribution to American cinema was as significant as any individual performance or direction credit. The honour was for both the films and the institution; the institution, by 2002, had arguably done more for American cinema than the films, which is itself an argument for a kind of success that the Oscars do not normally recognise.

Honorary Oscar

Sundance Institute

1978 – Present

Independent Cinema's Home

Founded on his Utah property in 1978 as a laboratory for independent filmmakers; grown into the Sundance Film Festival, the most important platform for independent American cinema. Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Reservoir Dogs; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Napoleon Dynamite; Beasts of the Southern Wild — films whose theatrical careers began at Sundance and whose directors' subsequent careers were shaped by the platform it provided.

Founded 1978

Presidential Medal of Freedom

2016

Cultural Contribution

Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Obama in 2016 — the nation's highest civilian honour, given for the combination of the film career and the Sundance institution. The Medal acknowledged what the Oscars' honorary award had gestured toward: that building the infrastructure for a generation of filmmakers was a contribution to American culture equivalent to, and possibly larger than, any individual creative work.

Medal of Freedom

Identity

The Golden Exterior — The Institutional Legacy — The Utah Mountain

The Golden Boy Problem

The golden exterior — the particular blondness, the particular ease, the looks that made interviewers write about the looks — was simultaneously the career's greatest asset and its most persistent critical obstacle. It made him a star; it also made critics reluctant to look through it at the intelligence operating beneath. Ordinary People resolved the question: the intelligence was real, the exterior had been the instrument's surface, not its substance.

The Newman Partnership

Two films with Paul Newman — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting — constitute the most commercially successful male partnership in Hollywood history. The chemistry was genuine; the friendship was genuine; and the specific dynamic (Newman talks, Redford watches; Newman performs, Redford simply is) was the films' structural argument about the relationship between charisma and competence.

The Sundance Machine

The Sundance Institute is the career's most significant creation — the platform that has launched more careers and more films than any other institution in American independent cinema. Redford built it on his own land, funded it with his own money, and ran it as a genuine laboratory rather than a commercial enterprise. Its influence on American cinema is larger than any individual film he made as actor or director.

The Utah Identity

He has lived on his Utah property since the 1960s — long before Sundance made it famous. The mountain and the land are the physical expression of the values the career embodied: the outdoor life, the conservation advocacy, the distance from Hollywood that allowed a different kind of cultural institution to grow. The Sundance Kid did not need Utah by accident; the place was the argument.

Legacy

Sundance's Mountain — Woodward's Notebook — The Institution He Built

Robert Redford's legacy is Sundance — the institution that changed American cinema more profoundly than any individual film he made as actor or director. One Academy Award for directing, an honorary Oscar for the institution, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the specific achievement of building a platform for independent cinema on a Utah mountain that had no infrastructure and becoming, over forty years, the industry's most important alternative pathway to production and distribution.

The Newman partnership, the Pakula political thriller, the directorial career that began with one of the decade's most debated Oscar wins — all of it is real and all of it matters. But the films will be shown at Sundance long after the arguments about Ordinary People versus Raging Bull have stopped being interesting, and the careers launched by the institution will generate films long after the last print of Butch Cassidy has worn through. The mountain is the legacy; the institution is the mountain.

Academy Awards Won

Ordinary People (directing), 1981

Sundance Founded

Utah mountain, on his own land

1978

Films with Paul Newman

Butch Cassidy · The Sting