Sun sets on the SUNDANCE KID
As Robert Redford retires at 81, how he won millions of hearts — but never a Best Actor Oscar
For almost 50 years, robert redford wasn’t just a movie star. He epitomised the whole shebang, the great dream industry, with a hand in every aspect of film from first draft to awards ceremony.
It seems indecent that one man could be so good-looking, so talented and so successful. And yet the film-goer today is likely to know him only for headline roles in cowboy and gangster movies such as The Sting, and later in romances including out of Africa.
Intensely private, and suspicious of the superficial razzmatazz that has always accompanied cinema, he long ago relinquished box office superstardom to embrace the aspects of film-making that meant most to him — directing, running the independent Sundance movie festival and supporting emergent directors.
In the early Seventies, he was the biggest star since Clark Gable.
William Goldman, who wrote redford’s 1969 breakthrough film, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, said: ‘No star in my time has had such heat focused on him.’
A hint of mystical mumbo-jumbo followed redford around, because he gave nothing away about himself.
His old friend and acting partner in two of his greatest hits, the late Paul Newman, once said: ‘I have known the man for over 40 years and I don’t know him, not really.’
His announcement, at the age of nearly 82, that he is to retire from acting after The old Man And The Gun, caused shockwaves across Hollywood.
Yet the career of the man who once had armies of fans queueing to swoon almost stumbled at the first step.
Steve McQueen had been invited to play Butch Cassidy, the sassy train robber who finds himself on the run with a laconic and dangerous sidekick, the Sundance Kid.
NEWMAN was to play Sundance. But the director decided to swap the roles, and McQueen threw a strop. Unable to have his favoured role, he refused to make the film at all. At Newman’s urging, the studio agreed to hire redford, though he had only one medium success to his name — Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot In The Park, costarring Jane Fonda.
The result was dynamite. But redford had been preparing a long time for this moment, from his first TV bit-parts in serials Maverick and Perry Mason, in 1960.
He followed Butch And Sundance with well-received movies. But it was his reunion with Newman in The Sting that sent his career into the stratosphere.
If most of the audience couldn’t follow every twist of the plot, no one cared. The stars looked as though they were best friends, having the time of their lives. In truth, redford was struggling in the glare of stardom. He tried to live by a code of privacy so defensive it was almost paranoid: rule No.1: Accept you will be treated like an object by people who don’t know who you are. rule No.2: Understand it is almost impossible to avoid becoming that object. rule No.3: Don’t let yourself become the object — or it will kill you.
Born in Santa Monica, on the coastal outskirts of Los Angeles in 1936, redford’s upbringing was poor. His father, Charles, was a milkman who paid little attention to his son, and after his mother died his father remarried.
The teenage robert was devas- tated. Drinking heavily, he lost his college baseball scholarship for stealing from locker-rooms and breaking into empty houses, where he would have solitary binges.
But acting saved him. After enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Art in LA, he fell in love with a Mormon girl called Lola van Wagenen, and eloped with her, aged 21, in 1957.
A year later, when redford was in his first Broadway play, they had a son, Scott. But when the boy was ten weeks old, he died in his cot.
redford once said: ‘We didn’t know anything about sudden infant death syndrome, so as a parent you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals.’
The couple also had two daughters, Shauna and Amy. But in 1985, the redfords’ 28-year marriage broke down.
rumours swirled around his love life. And his leading ladies didn’t silence the gossip, with many confessing they had been smitten.
Meryl Streep, his co-star in 1985’s out of Africa, was also said to be his lover — a rumour both have always denied.
His career enjoyed another surge with Indecent Proposal, in which he played an amoral billionaire who offers Woody Harrelson $1 million to sleep with his wife, Demi Moore. Howls of derision went up from women who said that if redford ever proposed a night of passion to them, their husbands would have no say in the matter.
But these successes seemed almost irrelevant to redford.
As well as his passion for environmentalism, he was immersed in his Sundance film festival, staged far from the LA lights, in Utah.
The aim was to celebrate American film-making and encourage first-rate independent movies.
Yet redford never won an oscar for an individual performance. His only Academy Award was a consolation prize, for Lifetime Achievement, in 2002 — though he did win as director for 1980’s ordinary People, his debut behind the camera.
As he turns his back on the screen, Hollywood will miss him — but he won’t miss it. once, he said, he used to ride his bike around the streets of LA, past the palm trees and the studios during the era of black-and-white stars.
But then his mother died. ‘I left LA and I never went back,’ he said. ‘I have no horror of LA, but there’s a sadness when I’m there.’
It is a sadness that cast a shadow over the most brilliant of the movies’ golden boys.