Robert Redford was never known as a "great actor." He was a solid professional who rose above his limitations on several occasions to play memorable characters with skill and subtlety.
He was, however, a great director whose films were quiet reflections on family and tragedy, mirroring his own life, where tragedy visited far too often.
According to a publicist, Redford died in his sleep at his home in the mountains outside of Provo, Utah. He was 89.
With his matinee-idol looks and suave demeanor, Redford could have been typecast as a male ingenue for most of his career. Certainly, he played those roles early on. He was Wade Lewis, a bisexual playboy in the quirky Inside Daisy Clover in 1965. He played a railroad manager wooing Natalie Wood in Tennessee Williams' This Property Condemned, directed by Sydney Pollack.
It was his turn as the Sundance Kid, starring with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that ignited his career. The film eventually grossed over $100 million and made Redford a huge star.
Redford was not enamored of Hollywood. He preferred the mountains and valleys of Utah, where his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, a Mormon, grew up. He bought two acres outside of Provo, saying of Utah, “It doesn’t invite you in and then kick you in the shins" like Hollywood.
The body of work Redford compiled as an actor is mostly impressive, if unevenly received by critics. Several critics torched his turn as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, including Robert Mazzocco, a critic for The New York Review of Books, who wrote that Mr. Redford “has the emotions of a telephone recording from Con Ed.”
However, several Redford films were box office gold and critically acclaimed. He teamed with director Sydney Pollack once again to film Jeremiah Johnson, a film shot entirely in the Utah mountains. Telling the story of the quintessential American "Mountain Man," the film held up well through the decades and is still mentioned as one of Redford's finest efforts.
The hugely entertaining grifter caper, The Sting, where Redford paired once again with Paul Newman, and the romantic tear-jerker, The Way We Were, co-starring Barbara Streisand, made 1973 Redford's most successful year. Both films catapulted him into superstardom.
Redford made his biggest impact as a director with Ordinary People, his directorial debut that won an Oscar for best picture. The story of a family dealing with tragedy echoed events from his own life. Redford lost his mother in his late teens and a daughter to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
The quiet classic A River Runs Through It tells the story of a family in pre-World War I Montana whose preacher father taught Bible lessons with the same gentle good humor that he taught his two sons fly fishing.
In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, "a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices," according to the New York Times.
He took over a struggling film festival in Utah in 1984 and renamed it after the institute a few years later. (He had been a local since 1961, having spent some of his early earnings as an actor on two acres of land in Provo Canyon. He often said he liked Utah because it gave him a sense of peace and was the antithesis of Hollywood superficiality.)
The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, became a global showcase and freewheeling marketplace for American films made outside the Hollywood system. With heat generated by the discovery of talents like Steven Soderbergh, who unveiled his “Sex, Lies and Videotape” at the festival in 1989, Sundance became synonymous with the creative cutting edge.
To Redford, environmental activism was personal. He fought the construction of a six-lane highway near his home and lobbied against the construction of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that business leaders felt would generate hundreds of jobs. He may have been a hero to the greens, but townsfolk who would have benefited from the plant called him a "liberal carpetbagger" and burned him in effigy.
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Redford was a "luxury" environmentalist. He used his fame and wealth to champion causes that impacted him personally or played to his sense of how the natural world should be protected.
It's hard to keep his mostly magnificent body of work as an actor and director separate from his activism. But I doubt he will be remembered 50 years from now as an "activist." Many of his films that deal with universal subjects like love, loss, truth, beauty, and the power of myth will live on long after the rest of us are dead.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article said that Robert Redford played Butch Cassidy. We apologize to our readers for this error.
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