Modern movie audiences, who find their actors on small screens in their living rooms or on their smartphones, may have trouble grasping what it meant to be Robert Redford — an iconic actor who defined movies for the mid-1960s and 1970s.
Redford’s legendary status as an actor was built gradually, role by role, over a six-decade career. But some performances and parts stood out. Here are seven that helped define how we see Redford as a movie star.
‘The Twilight Zone: Nothing in the Dark’
As a struggling young actor in New York, Redford counted on TV gigs to pay the bills. His best-remembered one was in a 1962 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in which he played a kindly angel of death who persuades a frightened woman (Gladys Cooper) to open the door — and shows her that Death is not to be feared but ultimately welcomed.
Robert Redford, playing an uptight newlywed in the 1967 movie version of Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park."
‘Barefoot in the Park’
Redford’s star-making turn on Broadway was as an uptight newlywed in Neil Simon’s 1963 play “Barefoot in the Park.” Redford was a natural fit to reprise the role in the 1967 movie version. The movie paired him with Jane Fonda — a great bit of movie chemistry, which they repeated in “The Electric Horseman” (1979) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017).
(Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox / Utah Film Commission) Paul Newman, front, plays outlaw Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford, top right, plays The Sundance Kid, and Katharine Ross plays Etta Place, in the 1969 Western "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid."
‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’
The studio didn’t want Redford to play the gruff half of the legendary outlaw duo. But Paul Newman, who was signed as the garrulous Butch, went to bat for Redford. The results in this 1969 classic Western were dynamite (literally), as the pair of antiheroes robbed trains and wooed Etta Place (Katharine Ross). The movie established Redford as a star, and gave his later enterprises — a ski resort, an arts institute and a film festival, among them — a name that symbolized working outside the system.
(Sean P. Means | The Salt Lake Tribune) A promotional pin for the 1972 movie "The Candidate," showing Robert Redford in his role as Senate candidate Bill McKay.
‘The Candidate’
In the early 1970s, Redford grew restless as an actor, so he started producing movies outside the Hollywood studio system. “Downhill Racer” (1970) started Redford on a theme about the price of winning in America, which he continued with Michael Ritchie’s verité 1972 comedy-drama, “The Candidate.” Redford played Bill McKay, a long shot Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in California, who tries to maintain his ideals as the possibility of actually winning gets closer. His final line — “What do we do now?” — resonates today, defining the difference between campaigning and governing.
‘The Natural’
As Redford turned to directing films and getting the Sundance Institute off the ground, he appeared in only four movies in the 1980s. One of them, “Out of Africa,” won the Best Picture Oscar. But the ‘80s role that still shines brightest is as Roy Hobbs, the aging baseball phenom struck by tragedy and scandal, seeking redemption years later. Some chastise the 1984 movie for changing novelist Bernard Malamud’s ending, or for casting Redford when he was in his late 40s — but what’s on the screen remains luminous.
‘All Is Lost’
In this underappreciated gem from 2013, Redford worked alone and almost entirely without dialogue as a lone sailor trying to survive in a sailboat damaged in the Indian Ocean. Redford did many of his own stunts and even lost hearing in one ear as a result. The movie’s most effective special effect is Redford’s ageless charisma, which still commands the screen.
‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’
In movies, Redford never really played a bad guy before this 2014 thriller — perhaps the best installment in the Marvel canon — playing Secretary Alexander Pierce, Nick Fury’s boss and secret Hydra mole. The movie works because it evokes the paranoid political thrillers of the ‘70s, like Redford’s “Three Days of the Condor,” for a new generation. (Redford reprised the role in 2019 in “Avengers: Endgame,” a postretirement surprise and the only time Redford ever played a role twice.)