Robert Redford was one of the last of the old school

In the end, the Sundance Kid died in his sleep. The death of the actor, director and Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford at the age of 89 removes one of the last great American icons of cinema from the world stage. 

Redford was preternaturally youthful, even towards the end of his life, never quite losing that shock of blonde hair that first made him stand out as a star of the Sixties and Seventies. However, he was never a dumb blonde, being one of the most politically savvy actors of his generation, as well as an astute businessman who managed to avoid falling foul of the changing shifts in fashion and taste. His status as a Hollywood legend was assured long before he died, but now it will be cemented in history.

The first film in which he appeared was 1962’s forgotten War Hunt, and the last picture that he starred in was – bizarrely – a cameo in Avengers: Endgame in 2019, in which he played the nefarious Alexander Pierce. Nevertheless, he was better used in 2019’s The Old Man & the Gun, in which he played an octogenarian bank robber whose ability to commit crimes well into his dotage was only matched by the charm and courtesy with which he conducted himself.

Over the intervening five decades, Redford became legendary for such pictures as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the peerless conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor and the political satirical drama The Candidate. Yet everyone will have their own favourite incarnation of Redford. Journalists love him as the idealistic Bob Woodward, bringing down the Nixon administration by revealing the Watergate conspiracy in All The President’s Men; lovers of caper films treasure his second collaboration with Paul Newman in The Sting; and aficionados of old-school weepies are all about his falling in love with Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. It was a more successful romantic pairing than the later Out of Africa, in which Redford was bizarrely cast as the Old Etonian Denys Hatton. Such was his charisma and the power of the film, though, that it, too, won Oscars.

Redford mixed charisma, charm, political engagement and good old-fashioned star quality

Seeing where the changing tastes in Hollywood were going after the Seventies, Redford took the smart decision to pivot away from acting into directing with 1980’s Ordinary People, a none-more-American family drama which won him Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars for his debut as a filmmaker. Although many would question the wisdom of the Academy awarding Redford the Oscars for his well-observed but ultimately conservative film over the far more enduring The Elephant Man and Raging Bull, it proved that Redford was a true son of the industry, and he continued an acclaimed career alternating between directing and appearing on screen himself for the rest of his working life. He was magnetic in the Tony Scott thriller Spy Game opposite the actor usually compared to a younger version of himself, Brad Pitt, and he directed Pitt in one of his breakthrough roles, in the elegiac A River Runs Through It.

Redford could be accused of a certain middlebrow tastefulness as a director that meant that the films he made, while never less than intelligent and thought-provoking, perhaps endure less well than the ones that he acted in. To watch him in Butch Cassidy, bringing the mischief and irreverence as Sundance to Paul Newman’s more stately Butch, is to see a truly great actor having fun, even early in his career. This sense of joie de vivre never left him. 

His performance in the Marvel films as Pierce brought him to a whole new audience, and even if the young viewers of The Winter Soldier may not have quite understood why this old guy was cast (spoiler alert: because the directors wanted to bring back memories of the great paranoid thriller Three Days of the Condor), he managed to remain relevant and brilliant right up until the end, bringing old-school Hollywood pizzazz and chutzpah into a generation who were not even born in his heyday.

He mixed charisma, charm, political engagement and good old-fashioned star quality. While the phrase is overused, it is true to say of the great Robert Redford that we shall not see his like again.