Robert Redford (1936–2025)

Actor, director, activist, and mentor: Robert Redford was all of them. After his passing on September 16, 2025, a tribute to him could expound on any of these roles he played in his amazing life and still feel inadequate. For a generation, he was one of the most charismatic actors of his day, a performer who knew how to play both the smartest guy in the room and the everyman, an actor who somehow felt simultaneously relatable and larger than life. That was his draw.

When I think of Robert Redford, I think of three things. First, I think of seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and falling in movie love with Paul Newman and Redford, and especially Redford, when his Sundance Kid is backed into admitting “I CAN’T SWIM!” to Butch as they are about to be stampeded by ill-meaning pursuers and have no choice but to cliff-dive into the rapids of a river below.

This admission of vulnerability from a true golden boy of cinema made Newman’s Butch crack up. I, on the other hand, was full of concern. And I watched the film’s final scene with my hand in front of my eyes, peering through frightened fingers, not wanting to witness the bloody end of the lovable outlaws. Mercifully, director George Roy Hill resolves the picture with a sepia-tinted freeze-frame — we only hear the rifles that take them down.

I think of an anecdote related by the author and historian Mark Harris in his books Pictures at a Revolution and Mike Nichols: A Life. Mike Nichols had first worked with Redford in the early 1960s, for the Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, in which Redford and Elizabeth Ashley playing post-honeymoon newlyweds beginning tumultuous life in New York City. The1967 film version, also starring the pair, was directed by Gene Saks. Redford was keen to play the role of Benjamin Braddock in Nichols’ upcoming The Graduate. The part, as written, might not have been a bad fit — Benjamin is the child of a steadfast WASP family. Playing pool with Nichols one evening, Redford broached the subject. Nichols had a question for him. “Look at you. How many times have you struck out with a woman?” Redford was unselfconsciously dumbstruck.

Redford would never play a guy who struck out with a woman per se, but he would frequently lose his love, most unforgettably in The Way We Were, which paired him with Barbra Streisand. In the decades-spanning love story Redford is Hubbell, the breezy, talented, apolitical novelist; Streisand’s character is Katie, a pre-Stalin Marxist. Caught up in the tides of the McCarthy era, their marriage founders when Hubbell can’t, or won’t, match Katie’s ideological commitment. Redford played callow well — if he was too “good looking” to embody Jay Gatsby entirely, he captured a good deal of that character’s baseline immaturity in director Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Almost immediately after skyrocketing to superstardom in 1969’s Sundance Kid, he worked for the once-blacklisted Abraham Polonsky — who had not directed a film since 1948’s remarkable noir Force of Evil — on Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a fact-based miscarriage-of-justice story.

And from that point on, Redford continued to use his clout to motor some of the most vital films of the 1970s, some of them exhilarating entertainments, others consistently offered bracing critiques of American culture and politics while also celebrating the way we the people have gotten things right every now and then.

Michael Ritchie’s 1969 allegorical ski-competition movie Downhill Racer was memorably downbeat even as it chronicled a rising star. Ritchie and Redford made an arguably even more decisive strike with The Candidate, about a politico who’s all surface and doesn’t really mind that circumstance.

In 1972 he played master thief John Dortmunder in one of the best adaptations ever of a Donald E. Westlake crime novel, The Hot Rock; director Peter Yates conducted the proceedings with admirable dispatch while Redford completely sold the character as a charismatic mastermind.

What can be said that hasn’t been already about Redford’s re-teaming with Paul Newman, 1973’s The Sting, one of those rare movies that’s pure unadulterated pleasure from the first frame to the last? With 1974’s Three Days of the Condor, he got in on the ground floor of the American paranoid thriller, and with 1976’s All The President’s Men he illuminated a real-life political scandal engendered by a paranoid president.

It was with Men that Redford got into the nitty-gritty of filmmaking, buying the rights to the best-selling book by Woodward and Bernstein, overseeing the script, and hanging out at the offices of the Washington Post with co-star Dustin Hoffman to soak up newsroom atmosphere.

He was all of forty years old by the time Men was released, but the picture gave him something of an elder-statesman status in Hollywood. He would continue to play youthful — his credibility in Barry Levinson’s 1984 baseball fable The Natural depended on that ability — but in the likes of 1985’s Out of Africa, for instance, he played a more weathered kind of heart-stealer as he ambivalently romances Meryl Streep.

Africa was directed by Sydney Pollack, the filmmaker with whom Redford collaborated most frequently. Beginning with This Property is Condemned, in 1966, co-starring Natalie Wood, they went on to 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson, the aforementioned Way We Were and Condor; The Electric Horseman, a reteaming with Fonda and a mild sendup of Redford’s cowboy image; Africa, and finally, 1990’s Havana, a critical and box-office dud that deserves a second look anyway.

He kept at acting for almost his entire life, announcing his retirement in 2020 after his second Marvel picture (Avengers: Endgame), but pursued other interests more enthusiastically.

You may have heard of the Sundance Film Festival, which Redford re-christened after founding the Sundance Institute in Utah, and seeing the potential of the US/Utah film festival that had launched in 1978. He took a quiet pride in his baby; I was privileged to attend a dinner there that he attended and he had the look of a man well-satisfied but not in the least smug. He was constantly engaged, it seemed, by the idea that film could change the world. The films he championed courted controversy, and he had no fear of that. He was an executive producer of Walter Salles’ 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries, about the young, pre-revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara taking consciousness-raising chopper excursion across South America. Redford actually went to Cuba to show a print of the film to Guevara’s widow.

As a director, Redford came out of the gate very strong. His domestic drama Ordinary People won a Best Picture Oscar, a Best Director Oscar, and more. In his subsequent directing efforts he showed an acute social consciousness; his 1994 Quiz Show was a remarkable, understated expose of the rot at the heart of all-American entertainment.

His directorial debut, 1988’s The Milagro Beanfield War, was a lively “save-the-local-farmer” entertainment. 1992’s A River Runs Through It was a near-epic tale of brotherly entanglements that introduced the world to Brad Pitt — who resembled Redford in his goldenness but would go on to become a rather different performer than Sundance.

The movie was also indirectly about ecology, a longtime Redford cause — he was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He turned on the star power with 2007’s Lions for Lambs, casting himself, reupping with Meryl Streep, and introducing Tom Cruise to his rep company. And he kept challenging himself, collaborating with indie maverick David Lowery on what would be his final film, the antic and poignant gentleman bank-robber story (shades of the Kid!) The Old Man & The Gun.

Until Redford’s passing, he led an epic life and career, but that life had its share of tragedy. He lost his mother when he was only 18, and he would see two of his children pass from this world: the first, Scott, died of SIDS in 1959, while his son James succumbed to liver cancer in 2020, at age 58.

Robert Redford was a titan. In a year when it feels like we’re losing too many of our legends, this loss feels like one of the deepest, but the thing to keep in mind is that Redford used all 89 years of his life to make a difference. His legacy isn’t just intact; it will continue to flow.

As both a man and a movie star, he was one of those rare beings of which it truly can be said: we will not see his like again.