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NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Born during the Great Depression with sun-kissed California looks, Robert Redford<\/a> never failed to epitomize something quintessential and hopeful about the American character.<\/p>\n Redford, who died Tuesday at the age of 89<\/a>, left a movie trail etched into land. He seemed to reside as much across the American landscape as he did on movie screens. He was in the Rocky Mountains of \u201cJeremiah Johnson,\u201d the Wyoming grasslands of \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,\u201d the Washington, D.C., alleyways of \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d and the Montana streams of \u201cA River Runs Through It.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside,\u201d Redford told The Associated Press in 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n Redford, a movie-star paragon, was surely savvy with how he played with and used his all-American image. No one who starred in the baseball drama \u201cThe Natural\u201d (1984) and gave Bernard Malamud\u2019s novel a storybook ending couldn’t have some sense of self-mythology. But it was one of Redford\u2019s greatest feats that, despite his fame, he remained innately connected to some aspirational American ideal. Redford, an open-air actor of easy, rugged charm, evoked the kind of regular guy decency that stars like Jimmy Stewart did before him \u2014 only Redford did it through an era of distrust and disillusionment.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was to me a throwback to the actors that I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies: real, classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie stars who were very, very redolent of some kind of American essence,\u201d said Sydney Pollack, who directed Redford in \u201cJeremiah Johnson,\u201d \u201cThe Way We Were\u201d and \u201cThree Days of the Condor,\u201d in 1993. \u201cThey were very much a part of the American landscape and they were heroic in a kind of understated way.\u201d<\/p>\n Underscoring \u2018independence\u2019<\/p>\n That was most true, perhaps, in Utah. Wanting to escape paved-over Los Angeles, Redford first began buying land there early in his career. In Utah, he would fight to protect both untrampled wilderness and a spirit of moviemaking that had grown increasingly difficult in Hollywood. As a longtime trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, Redford was an outspoken environmentalist. In the 1970s, he successfully opposed a pair of rural Utah proposals: a six-lane highway and coal-fired power plant.<\/p>\n In the Utah mountains, Redford also launched the Sundance Institute. Beyond Sundance’s annual festival for independent film<\/a>, the institute has been a lifeblood young filmmakers. Its year-round laboratory \u2014 the part of Sundance that Redford was most proud of \u2014 has helped nurture some of the most vital voices in American cinema for decades.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, the word to be underscored is \u2018independence,\u2019\u201d Redford once said of his legacy. \u201cI\u2019ve always believed in that word. That\u2019s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren\u2019t given a chance to be heard. The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren\u2019t having a chance to be told.\u201d<\/p>\n That spirit of independence often infused his films, too.<\/a> When Redford wanted to make \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d the seminal 1976 film directed by Alan Pakula about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein\u2019s Watergate investigation, few in the film industry thought there was much drama to be found in a story that was then several years old.<\/p>\n \u201cNixon had already resigned, and the held opinion (in Hollywood) was \u2018No one cares. No one wants to hear about this,\u2019\u201d Redford, who also co-produced the film, said in 2006. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018No, it\u2019s not about Nixon. It\u2019s about something else. It\u2019s about investigative journalism and hard work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n If \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d one of the greatest newspaper movies,<\/a> detailed the hard-earned revelations of Watergate, \u201cThree Days of the Condor\u201d \u2014 one of the greatest political thrillers \u2014 captured the paranoia and disillusionment that followed. If anyone was completely unfamiliar with why Redford was so good, \u201cThree Days of the Condor\u201d would be a good place to start.<\/p>\n As a bookish CIA employee code-named Condor, he returns from lunch to his office to find, as he soon reports, \u201cEverybody is dead.\u201d Condor, untrained for such lethal spy activities, is left dangling in the wind.<\/p>\n \u201cWill you bring me in, please?\u201d he pleads by phone to his superiors. \u201cI\u2019m not a field agent. I just read books.\u201d<\/p>\n Not so different from his Woodward of \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d Redford is a fresh-faced novice thrown into a high-stakes scheme where few, including those in the government, can be trusted. No one has ever been better at playing the regular guy trying to think fast on his feet, and make sense of an ever-darker world.<\/p>\n A politician only on screen<\/p>\n Though some called for him to, Redford never entered politics, himself. He remained outspoken \u2014 he’s in some way the model for the modern Hollywood activist<\/a> \u2014 on a wide range of issues, including Indigenous and LGBTQ+ rights. The closest he came to running for office was Michael s 1972 satire \u201cThe Candidate,\u201d in which Redford played an idealistic lawyer enlisted to challenge a highly favored incumbent Republican senator. Redford\u2019s candidate ultimately wins, but not without sacrificing his principles and seeing much of what he stands for diluted.<\/p>\n Redford\u2019s place, instead, was outside politics. The perfect bookend to his \u201970s movies is \u201cSneakers,\u201d Phil Alden Robinson\u2019s absurdly underrated 1992 caper starring Redford as a former \u201960s radical now living under a false moniker and leading a band of security specialists. They stumble into possession of a computer device that brings the attention of the NSA, CIA, FBI and many others, forcing Redford to, yet again, try to figure out what\u2019s moral in a dangerous (and now newly digital) America.<\/p>\n