A look inside the Hollywood legend’s decision to retire from his successful acting career at 81.
THE MOVIE ICON LOOKS BACK OVER HIS CAREER — AND FORWARD TO AN EXCITING NEW LIFE
It’s one of the most famous endings in movie history. In 1972’s satire The Candidate, Robert Redford’s newly elected senator blankly asks his campaign manager, “What do we do now?” Since he’s announced his own acting career will end with his elegiac role in The Old Man & the Gun (due Sept. 28), Robert might ask himself the same question. He’s answered it time and again, transforming himself from artist to actor to director to activist to indie-film advocate. Now he may come full circle, returning to the drawing and painting he loved as a young man. “With what time you have left, you want to keep it full,” the 81-year-old star says. “Going back to sketching — that’s where my head is right now.”
Robert first pursued this passion after the sudden death of his beloved mother, Martha, at 40 in 1955, when he was only 18. He left Southern California, where he had lived with his milkman turned accountant father, and headed for Europe. “He was a young man struggling with his existence,” Jack Brendlinger, who roomed with Robert for seven months when he lived in Florence, Italy and Paris, tells Closer.
The young artist sat in cafés and sketched strangers, imagining what their lives were like. “That experience of traveling around, listening and watching, was probably the beginning of [my interest in] acting,” he says.
THE NATURAL
Cut to more than 50 years later, and Robert has reigned as one of Hollywood’s most popular stars of all time. It happened almost by accident, after he returned to the States and his stepmother suggested he study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I didn’t start out to be an actor,” Robert says. “It took me a while to accept.”
It didn’t take long for him to find work on television and in films, thanks to his goldenboy good looks. But Robert wasn’t comfortable with the level of superstardom he eventually achieved. “When I started to get noticed after [1969’s] Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I thought, There’s danger here,” he recalls. “I made three notes to myself: If you’re treated like an object, you’ll begin to behave like an object, and if you’re not careful, you’ll become an object.’ ”
Robert has avoided that fate, allow-
ing himself to age gracefully on-screen and eschewing plastic surgery. “For many, it’s become a sick obsession — they lose some of their soul when they go under the knife and end up looking body-snatched,” he says. “People should preserve their time in history. I’m happy to make the best of what I’ve got.”
He’s also avoided coasting on his appearance by reinventing himself as a director, starting with 1980’s Ordinary People. After the searing family drama won big at the Oscars, Robert again heeded the warning signs and refused to believe his own hype. “I said, ‘There’s something dangerous in the air here,’ ” he remembers. “‘I just need to be grateful, but I think it’s time to take stock, stop and regenerate. Otherwise, you’re going to start repeating yourself.’ ”
So he left the bright lights of Hollywood and headed to where the air is clear: Utah. When he started making money as an actor, he’d bought 2 acres for $500 and built a cabin with running water. Along with first wife
Lola van Wagenen, a Utah native he’d wed in 1958, he’d periodically escape from Hollywood with their three kids: Shauna, James and Amy. Their firstborn, Scott, tragically died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959 and is buried there. “It created a scar that never really heals,” he says.
The end of his marriage to Lola coincided with Ordinary People’s worrying success, and Robert decided to relocate full-time to Utah, where he focused on his work as an environmental activist. “Speak out for what you believe and what you feel,” he says. “Or don’t. You have to live with yourself.”
“It’s in the making of something — that’s where the joy is. That’s your reward.”
— Robert
THE SUNDANCE KID
Robert also saw the type of grounded, gritty films he’d made in the ’70s like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men give way to big-budget, special-effects extravaganzas like Star Wars and decided to build a refuge for independent-minded filmmakers. “It’s like cotton candy, and you think,
Where’s the story?” Robert says of contemporary Hollywood blockbusters.
Using the land he owned in Utah, Robert put together the Sundance Film Festival. “I wanted to move on to new things and maybe create new opportunities for other people — other actors and directors,” he says. “We wanted to keep things offbeat and we still do, because it’s more interesting.”
Robert’s restless spirit makes his choice of The Old Man & the Gun a fitting coda to his screen-acting career. It’s the real-life story of Forrest Tucker. “He robbed 17 banks and he got caught 17 times and he went to prison 17 times, but he also escaped 17 times,” Robert says. “So it made me wonder if he was not averse to getting caught so he could enjoy the real thrill of his life, which is to escape.”
He may be running away from Hollywood stardom, but Robert isn’t giving up on creative pursuits. Biographer Michael Feeney Callan tells Closer the doting granddad wants to “spend some time on personal issues, family issues and certainly art is a big thing.” He adds of Robert’s second wife, Sibylle Szaggars, whom he married in 2009, “She’s an abstract artist, and that was influential on refocusing himself on painting.”
AN UNFINISHED LIFE
“I’m not afraid of aging,” Robert says. “It’s a fact of life.” And he hasn’t let age slow him down. “He’s hungry for experiences in life, which I love about him,” Mary Steenburgen, who co-starred with Robert in 2015’s A Walk in the Woods, tells Closer. “He was telling me about going to [the outdoor-music festival] Burning Man! He and his lovely wife are very artistic, brave, fascinating people.”
Adds Callan, “He has arthritis, aches and pains. The frailty of old age comes on everyone, but he more than most will resist it. Bob’s way of treating illness and infirmity is to keep moving and fight through it. He has an awful lot more stamina in him.”
Robert finds inspiration in two of his favorite characters: the titular mountain man in 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson and the unnamed sailor battling the elements in 2013’s acclaimed indie All Is Lost. “When times are tough and survival looks impossible, some just quit; they give up because it’s obvious they can’t go any further,” he concludes. “Others keep going. They don’t know anything more than to just continue. And I guess that goes for me, too. I will just keep going.”