{"id":2032925,"date":"2025-09-18T22:58:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T22:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2032925"},"modified":"2025-09-18T22:58:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T22:58:03","slug":"robert-redfords-impossible-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/robert-redfords-impossible-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Redford\u2019s Impossible Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n Redford\u2019s coiled energy and easygoing elegance were entrancing.
\n Photo: Ron Galella\/WireImage<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n

There\u2019s a moment in the 1975 Sydney Pollack thriller Three Days of the Condor that captures what made Robert Redford one of the great movie stars. Redford\u2019s Joe Turner is a bookish CIA analyst who leaves the office for lunch one day and returns to find that all of his colleagues have been murdered. He then goes on the run, forcing a photographer, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), to let him use her basement apartment as a safe house. Then her doorbell rings. It\u2019s a mail carrier who says he has a package for her and she needs to sign for it.<\/p>\n

Kathy is in the shower when the doorbell rings. Joe\u2019s in the kitchen. He and the postman make eye contact through Kathy\u2019s front window. Joe says Kathy\u2019s not home and to leave the package on the stoop. When the carrier tells him, \u201cWell, you can sign,\u201d Joe lowers his guard and steps outside. When the man\u2019s cheap pen doesn\u2019t work, Joe goes back inside to find another. What saves Joe\u2019s life is a brief backward glance that takes in the man from head to toe, ending on his shoes: tan suede with leather laces and racing stripes, definitely not the clodhoppers postmen wore in the \u201970s. As Redford moves from the background into a close-up, we see a chain of thoughts race through his character\u2019s mind, ending with a look of horrified clarity. The movie cuts from the assassin pulling a machine gun from his bag to Joe hurling a pot of hot coffee at him, igniting a close-quarters battle that trashes the place. Though the scene unfolds at incredible speed, Redford makes it legible as well as believable. He takes us from \u201csomething is amiss\u201d to \u201cpostmen don\u2019t wear shoes like that\u201d to \u201cI must kill him\u201d in three seconds and four footsteps.<\/p>\n

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\n Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor (1975).
\n Photo: Everett Collection<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Redford, who died yesterday at 89 at home in Provo, Utah, was a legend on multiple fronts. In addition to his acting, he founded the Sundance Institute to champion independent film and then its eponymous festival. His original goal was to help emerging filmmakers avoid the setbacks and indignities he had faced in the late 1960s when he shepherded the skiing drama Downhill Racer, his first project as both star and producer, through the remnants of the old studio system. He produced and directed eight features, the best being his multiple-Oscar-winning directorial debut, Ordinary People, about repressed Wasps struggling to grieve a death in the family. Redford directed two other exemplary films about repressed people coping with loss: A River Runs Through It (starring Brad Pitt in a doomed-golden-boy role Redford would\u2019ve crushed in the \u201960s) and The Horse Whisperer. He also made the ethics drama Quiz Show, about the cheating scandal that rocked NBC\u2019s Twenty-One in the 1950s when Redford was a theater student in New York. \u201cThe actor in me looked at the show and felt I was watching other actors,\u201d he told the Los Angeles Times<\/a>. It\u2019s a film organized around the idea that acting is a part of life.<\/p>\n

But just a part. As a celebrity, Redford was the total package: an avid reader, an outspoken political activist (mainly on behalf of Native American rights and environmental protection), and an all-around athlete who skied, swam, sailed, rode horses, and played baseball, football, and tennis. He used all of it as raw material for performances and a reference point in directing other actors. His well-roundedness gave range to an artist who was so handsome he had no choice but to lead with his looks.<\/p>\n

Redford\u2019s coiled energy and easygoing elegance were entrancing. You believed this goldenest of golden boys as soulful rancher (The Electric Horseman, The Horse Whisperer), an Olympic-caliber skier (Downhill Racer), a vengeful mountain man (Jeremiah Johnson), a war veteran turned respected writer (The Way We Were), a CIA desk jockey (Three Days of the Condor), a pioneering computer hacker with unshakable countercultural values (Sneakers), a lone sailor trying to survive a shipwreck (All Is Lost), a supercool diamond thief (The Hot Rock), and a comic-book boss (Captain America: The Winter Soldier).<\/p>\n

The screenwriter William Goldman, who composed or contributed to five of the star\u2019s \u201970s films, theorized<\/a> that Redford and his contemporary Clint Eastwood \u201cwere so terrific [because] they didn\u2019t make it early. Eastwood was still digging swimming pools when he was 29.\u201d Redford gave many solid performances in the first few years of his film career, but it was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, produced when he was already into his 30s, that made him a movie star. Written by Goldman and directed by George Roy Hill, it perfected the buddy movie: a rollicking western starring Paul Newman as the sardonic, world-weary Butch and Redford as the Kid, a prodigious gunslinger with a hot temper. It was a career-defining role, a quiet killer, nearly an antihero. In one scene, when the Kid is accused of cheating at poker, Hill holds on Redford\u2019s face in close-up for 60 seconds \u2014 an eternity for a Hollywood studio picture, even then \u2014 as Newman tries to de-escalate. Save for a quick glance at his adversary, Redford fixes his eyes on the out-of-focus holster in the foreground, a cobra waiting to strike. Finally, the Kid stands up and heads for the door. We think Butch has talked him off the ledge until he turns back, blasts the man\u2019s gun from its holster and makes it skip across the saloon floor.<\/p>\n