Robert Redford and the Perils of Perfection
Robert Redford on the set of “Quiz Show,” in 1994.
Photograph courtesy Everett
The most golden of golden boys, he was too burnished by Hollywood but kept a lonely chill that was all his own.
By September 18, 2025
Gentleman, preferred, blond: such was the job description of Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday, at the age of eighty-nine. Onscreen, he and his buddy Paul Newman were partners in crime, in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Sting” (1973), though the crimes were no more wicked than practical jokes. Offscreen, the two men were good sports—friendly, athletic, devoted to decent causes, and, like most major stars, a little hard to know, keeping something back in a bid to leave us hungering for more. Both were a byword, too, for male beauty, fully alive to the almost laughable impact of their handsomeness, yet ill at ease, now and then, with their perches on the pedestal. “You’re always dressed right, you always look right, you always say the right thing. You’re very nearly perfect.” So says Jane Fonda to Redford in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), in which they play newlyweds. “That’s a rotten thing to say,” he replies.
The pressure of perfection starts to tell on Redford’s character, Paul, who winds up drunk, in Washington Square Park, in broad daylight, tipping garbage over himself. Do we really believe in that loss of control? There’s something embarrassing in his effort to look wacky and wild; already, in the springtime of Redford’s career, he seems more at home embodying self-command. His minor role in “War Hunt” (1962) had been that of a U.S. private who quits his post during an enemy assault in Korea and huddles in the corner of a trench, his fine features seized by terror. But such emotional nakedness was unbecoming to Redford, and he knew it. When the Sundance Kid—less than a decade after “War Hunt”—confessed that he couldn’t swim, and didn’t want to jump in the river, the audience understood that his cowardice was no more than one note, amusingly off key, in an otherwise pure melody of relaxed heroism. Like the lady said, very nearly perfect.
Redford’s run of hits in the nineteen-seventies, including “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), “The Sting,” “The Way We Were” (1973), “The Great Gatsby” (1974), “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), and “All the President’s Men” (1976), suggested a canny ability to roam across genres. The first film on the list gave Redford a beard, a rifle, and a cabin in the Rocky Mountains; the last took him to the Library of Congress and the offices of the Washington Post. As Redford instinctively grasped, one way to secure a spot as the all-American guy in the public imagination is to plant yourself in as much of America as you can. He swapped the naval uniform of “The Way We Were,” seraphically white and tailor-made to conquer Barbra Streisand, for the evening garb of Gatsby. Gradually, Redford turned into the star—our collective idea of what a leading man should do and be. People stuck his image up on walls, as if he were a saint, and welcomed him into the language. “Oh, he’s no Robert Redford,” they would say of some ungainly doofus. Movie critics were helpless, and pointless, in the face of such enormous adulation, as they had been since the era of Rudolph Valentino. When an actor charms the pants off us, nothing, especially a writer with a ballpoint pen and bad hair, can persuade us to put them back on.
Was there a turning point in Redford’s stardom, or was it just the motion of the heavens? If there was, it came with “The Natural” (1984), in which Redford played a fictional baseball player named Roy Hobbs—a middle-aged rookie, with mysterious lacunae in his past, who transforms the fortunes of a struggling New York club. Commercially, the film was another success, demonstrating that pretty much anything Redford touched would turn to gold; the trouble was that, by now, the camera couldn’t help turning him to gold, with every touch of light. At the climax, bleeding from an old stomach wound, Hobbs breaks his favorite bat, takes a replacement from an adoring batboy, and hits a home run with his final swing. The ball smashes into the floodlights, and Hobbs sets off on his victory trot, in slow motion, with sparks cascading behind him like fireworks. All of which is, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, “idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford.”
The movie works, no question, even at the peak of its absurdity. As a viewer, however, you can feel yourself being worked on, even more shamelessly than you were in “The Sting.” This worshipful attitude to Redford continued in “Out of Africa” (1985) and beyond, into the following decade; by the time of “Up Close & Personal” (1996) and “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), the gilding—literally, the illumination of his famous countenance—was sometimes difficult to watch. Hollywood’s leading performers, venturing into the dark vale of middle age, have often been kindly treated by directors of photography, if not by screenwriters. What one longed to know was what Redford, a smart and reflective soul, made of such honeyed flattery. Did he grin and bear it? Consider it his due? Accept it, with an inward sigh, as part of the deal? Or secretly despise his own connivance?
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One wistful way to follow Redford’s career is to trace the paths not taken, and to set them beside the adventurous ones pursued by his contemporaries and forbears. Think of Burt Lancaster, tapped by Luchino Visconti to play the Sicilian prince in “The Leopard” (1963), and radiating, even when dubbed into Italian, a grizzled and effortless grandeur. Think of Henry Fonda—Jane’s father and, like Redford, an upright liberal—agreeing to play a murderous villain for Sergio Leone, in “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). Fonda arrived in Rome with his blue eyes darkened by contact lenses, the better to convey malevolence. Leone immediately told him to remove the contacts; he wanted the blueness, by way of contrast. Would Redford, whose eyes were just as sapphirelike as Fonda’s, have acceded to such a plan?
Even within the United States, it is remarkable, and regrettable, how few opportunities of that sort fell to Redford. Whether he rejected them or chose not to seek them out is a matter for his biographers. The fact remains that Martin Scorsese cast Paul Newman opposite Tom Cruise in “The Color of Money” (1986), whereas no directors of Scorsese’s stature and adventurousness appear on Redford’s résumé. Redford did direct Cruise, as well as Meryl Streep, in “Lions for Lambs” (2007), but it is not a film to which many folks, even Redford fans, will return with unalloyed delight. He also stars in it, as a West Coast professor, two of whose students, encouraged by his idealism, join the Army and die in Afghanistan. A noble tale, but, sad to say, on the cinematic map the road to dullness is paved with good intentions, and with causes dear to the hearts of actors and directors alike. One can only guess at the mixed feelings with which Redford will have witnessed the tenacity of Clint Eastwood—six years his senior, his opposite in politics, and a rival vision of manliness, whose record as a filmmaker has been as searching as it is durable.
Yet that is not the whole story. As we mourn Redford and begin to gauge his achievements—not least his founding of the Sundance Institute—there is one aspect of his work as an actor that should lay hold on our attention and which may, in years to come, assume a quiet weight. He was, that is to say, a lord of loneliness. Whether because of his extreme allure, which in some stars can be a kind of unbreachable barricade, or because of some innate shyness or hesitancy in his being, he had a habit of withdrawing from our gaze, even as we were staring at him on a movie screen. Likewise, the characters around him, inside the plot, could reach out toward him and find themselves denied, or fended off. The agog kept being met by the aloof.
The solitude is evident, by definition, in the character of Jeremiah Johnson, the legendary mountain man who elects to be an outcast from what he scorns as civilization. In the midst of New York City, too, the C.I.A. analyst played by Redford in “Three Days of the Condor” seems to flinch from human contact, for fear—completely justified—that almost anyone, including a mailman, might want to kill him. That is why, when he finds another loner (Faye Dunaway), their encounter is the most touching, and the most unsettled, in all of Redford’s work. Both of them, you sense, are constantly tempted to shrink back into their shells. I can’t help wishing that the pair had made further films together, the way Alan Ladd (another diffident blond) and Veronica Lake did.
It is in two smaller movies, however, forty-four years apart—“Downhill Racer” (1969) and “All Is Lost” (2013)—that Redford’s urge to be alone grows overwhelming. In the first, he plays a skier, David Chappellet, who makes the U.S. Olympic squad and goes for gold. (I won’t tell you what happens. See for yourself.) Put like that, it sounds like any other spirit-boosting sports flick; but this one, directed by Michael Ritchie, was written by James Salter, no less, and it has an air of implacability that consorts all too well with the icy terrain. Single-minded and fairly humorless, Chappellet is impelled but seldom impulsive. “He’s not for the team, and he never will be,” one of his fellow-skiers remarks. “Well, it’s not exactly a team sport, is it?” another replies. Indeed not. We accompany Chappellet on his vertiginous runs, a boot-level camera whooshing us down the slopes at a frightening lick; what’s going on inside his helmet, though, in the stronghold of his head, heaven knows. He hails from Idaho Springs, Colorado, and, on a trip home, he is asked by his father, in the kitchen, why he does what he does. “I’ll be famous. I’ll be a champion,” he says. But his voice is as flat as a frozen lake, and he just sits there, eating Ritz crackers out of the box.
It’s hard to picture a more chilling rebuke to “The Natural” than “Downhill Racer,” though “All Is Lost” comes close. Directed by J. C. Chandor, the movie stars Redford and nobody else at all. He plays a sailor, adrift in the Indian Ocean, whose boat gets struck by a shipping container, tossed in a tempest, and capsized. There are few words in the film: exasperated oaths, mostly, and a letter narrated in voice-over. The Redford we get here is natural: tough, cussed, all too vulnerable, and continents away from the land of the pretty boy. Forget the white uniform in “The Way We Were”; this is the way he is now, all by himself with a bilge pump. There are hints that much has gone wrong in the character’s life, and that he has fled his woes, whatever they are, to do battle with the sea. He doesn’t even have the basic comfort of a name; in the end credits, we are simply told that “Our Man” was played by Robert Redford. It’s a consoling thought: up close and personal, the Sundance Kid—the shining star—turned out to be one of us.
Anthony Lane is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”
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