Make a list of American poets. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Maya Angelou. Don’t forget to add Robert Redford.
When interrogated by Robert Redford, who asked “Why do you want to write about me?” Robert Rayner, a journalist who would eventually prove successful in profiling the actor in 1998, replied that Redford’s life was a “great American story.”
When Robert Redford, 89, died last Tuesday, Jane Fonda, his five time co-star on “Tally Story,” “The Chase,” “Barefoot In The Park,” “The Electric Horseman” and “Our Souls At Night,” said that he “stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.”
California-kissed locks, a laid-back authenticity seen in how he seamlessly blended the West of his bootcut denim with the Northeast of his Raybans, and of course, his personification of American beauty, most obviously displayed on his face, physically made Redford an American icon. But, there is poetry in his life, extending far beyond his good looks. It surpasses the timelessness of his cool, how he sought to escape the superficiality of California, his birthplace, and found lifelong solace in the picturesque mountains of Utah, his deathplace. Robert Redford, as poetry, is shaped by a story not uncommon, by how he found purpose in the accidental but necessary.
Redford never meant to take on acting. Whereas Nick Cage was literally born into his acting prowess and a young Timothée Chalamet’s cheekbones matured in the halls of his alma mater LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and Performing Arts, Redford initially took on painting. He studied the visual art form at the University of Colorado, from where he would be expelled, and later the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Acting was an afterthought, a career shift following a particularly discouraging art critique during his time as a student at the Académie Julian in Paris and a street artist in Europe. When he returned to the United States, he began taking acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
His first acting roles were on television, guest starring on a “Perry Mason” episode titled “The Case of The Treacherous Toupee” and three episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” as an armed burglar, the little brother of a boxer and a death row criminal, respectively.
“There was an arrogance when I started to act,” he told The New Yorker. “I knew I could do it better than a lot of people. And I don’t know why.”
Something undoubtedly flowery surrounds how Robert Redford almost effortlessly fell into acting, pursuing a means of work out of necessity to provide for himself, but having the courage to own what was initially unwanted. He found his own hypotheses within a footnote. Redford embodied a reluctant hero, reckoning between a true passion and a destined talent. As he somewhat settled into the Hollywood stardom he was never truly comfortable embracing, Redford found himself on a path not usually expected from his actor and celebrity colleagues.
“He was independent of power structures. He had his own set of deep beliefs in what kinds of films he wanted to make, what kind of films he wanted to participate in, and he had a moral code to what he wanted to do, that he adhered to, for his entire life,” said Mike Barnacle, television commentator of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and an occasional guest star alongside with Redford.
Redford believed in the value of storytelling as a means for commentary on issues larger than himself and, accordingly, was intentional in the stories he chose to tell. “All The President’s Men” saw Redford quick on his feet to buy the rights and produce the movie’s namesake book into a film, contributing to the collective American pursuit of truth and trust in the aftermath of Watergate. “The Candidate” saw Redford come as close to being a politician as he would ever be, the film an analysis of the winners and losers in the American political system as a byproduct of overdependence on image over substance. “Ordinary People,” his directorial debut that earned him his only Oscar win (beating out Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull!), saw Redford challenge societal taboos, bringing the agitated relationships behind the all-American faces of upper-middle-class Midwestern parents and their son to the surface. His films are hard-hitters, a genre that never seems to hit the box office anymore.
“I held some fantasy out of my head that I would return to art,” Robert Redford told CBS “Sunday Morning” in 1994. “And then finally, one day, I just looked at myself in the mirror and I said ‘Who are we kidding? This is what we do. This is what you do well and like it. Give up this idea that you’re going to maintain this career in art.’”
But, Redford did maintain an artistic career, just one that eventually focused more on uplifting other artists rather than his own art.
Redford believed in advocating for new filmmakers and small films that would get their footing at the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States and a Robert Redford creation intended to foster a home for independent storytelling. The festival, annually held in Park City, Utah, saw the first audiences of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” the premiere of Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi”, the debut film of Paul Thomas Anderson “Hard Eight” and the debut feature of Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape” (which would eventually win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes the year following its Sundance showing).
Like most anything Redford-related, it is poetic that one of his beginning roles was about the end itself. A 1962 “Twilight Zone” episode titled “Nothing In The Dark” finds Redford playing the personification of Death, carefully guiding an elderly woman to her end, a conclusion she dreaded to the point of obsession.
“The running’s over,” he, everything she fears, tells her. “It’s time to rest.”
She only takes his hand after some reassuring words and a look into his eyes, which implore her to trust the thing she is most frightened of — him. She finally accepts what is supposed to be, the natural expiration of life.
“You see? No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion, is like a whisper,” he says. “What you thought was the end, the beginning.”
