The Fall Will Probably Kill Ya: Robert Redford 1936-2025

Robert Redford, the movie star with the face of a homecoming king and the vision of a scrappy iconoclast, died Tuesday, Sept. 16 at the age of 89.

His early success as an actor drew heavily on his easy roguish charm – as a bickering bandit in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; as an ingratiating con man in The Sting; as a fumbling newlywed in Barefoot in the Park. He could have built a comfortable life just doing variations on that theme for the rest of his career. But Redford had broader ambitions both for his own artistry and for the capacities of American film. Which is why, when he jumped into directing early on, he chose for his first project a depressing story about depressing people in a family who was voted “Most Depressing” in Lake Forest Magazine several years running, and he won a Best Director Oscar for the effort.

His directorial subjects continued to be off the beaten path (game show cheats! New Mexico bean farmers!), but Redford didn’t stop there. He parlayed his success into establishing the Sundance Film Festival, which quickly became the premiere launch pad for indie and idiosyncratic filmmaking in the United States. Naming the festival after his character in Butch Cassidy – because I guess calling it Bob Woodward would have been confusing – Redford’s festival is responsible in large part for introducing the world to the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, Kenneth Lonergan, Todd Haynes, Robert Rodriguez, Catherine Hardwick, Miranda July, Lee Daniels and Robert Eggers. He also gave us Garden State, but nobody’s perfect.

Could Redford have so successfully realized his goal to broaden and reshape the traditions of American cinema if he hadn’t had such ruggedly exquisite bone structure? Very possibly, actually. His deceptively laconic cowboy chill overlaid a fierce intelligence, a stubborn diligence and the cinematic good taste of an aesthete. But he started his professional life as an actor, and revisiting some of his indelible screen performances may be the best way to remember him. Despite the fact that he only ever got nominated once for an acting Oscar, Redford’s understated genius as a performer disarms the viewer and effortlessly suspends disbelief. Thanks to Redford I actually believed that Butch and Sundance could survive jumping off that cliff. That Roy Hobbs could smack the cover right off a baseball. And that I should pay good money to see Legal Eagles. I’ve mostly forgiven him for that last one.