To get straight to the point, Robert Redford (born 18 August 1936 – died 16 September 2025) was an idol of my youth. I remember well watching ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ in 1969. At that time, there was still a cinema in Bergisch Gladbach, where I went to school. When the two outlaws, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, arrive at a godforsaken train station in Bolivia, a Dutch exchange student spontaneously says, ‘'Like the bus station in Bergisch!’
Redford was one of the defining actors in New Hollywood cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was cool and rebellious, an anti-hero in a world of conformist philistinism. That's why we adored him. Women loved him because he was so handsome, blond and blue-eyed. His looks were enormously helpful for his career in Hollywood, but it was his rebellious, non-conformist nature that fascinated us. In ‘The Candidate’ (1972), he plays an idealistic young lawyer who is nominated as a candidate for election to the Senate. In the course of the campaign, his progressive ideas are increasingly watered down, ultimately reduced to the slogan ‘Bill McKay – The Better Way’.
Director Michael Ritchie had shot TV commercials for the Democratic senator John Tunney, screenwriter Jeremy Larner was part of Senator Eugene McCarthy's campaign team in 1968. Looking back over the last few decades, ‘The Candidate’ emerges as a prophetic film that exposes the mechanisms of American politics in media-driven election campaigns and leaves the viewer with a deep sense of disillusionment. Robert Redford, without whom the project could not have been realised, called it ‘a labour of love’, while critic Roger Ebert praised the film's ‘sharply observant, almost documentary realism’.
Redford has repeatedly used his star appeal for independent, socially conscious films. One example is ‘Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here’ (1969), based on the true story of a Native American who is pursued by a mob of white bounty hunters shortly after the turn of the century. It was the first feature film directed by Abraham Polonsky in 20 years, after he was blacklisted as a communist in the 1950s.
Robert Redford came from a modest background. In his youth, he spent some time travelling around Europe and tried his hand at painting. His experiences in post-war America had a lasting impact on him. ‘My memory begins with the end of the Second World War,’ said Redford, born in 1936, in an interview. ‘So I grew up with a lot of propaganda as a kid. There was a lot of red, white and blue going on, you know, and I bought into it. And then, as time went on and I grew up and went out into the world, I realised that there was a big grey area out there, where life was much more complicated. I said, I think I like to make films that are about that, that grey zone.'
Back to ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’, which was poorly received by the critics when it premiered but is now celebrated as a cult film. Screenwriter William Goldman spent eight years working on the story of two real-life outlaws who fled to Bolivia when they were hunted down in the United States. The studio boss in charge didn't like it at all. ‘I don't give a damn. All I know is John Wayne don't run away."[. Redford was asked to shave off the moustache he had grown for the shoot. He refused, arguing that this was how outlaws looked at the time. Against all odds, ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ became a huge box office success and established Redford as a star. It was one of his favourite films and provided the inspiration for the Sundance Institute and film festival.
At the end of the 1980s, Redford took over a small film festival in Park City, Utah, which he turned into a showcase for independently produced films. ‘In the beginning, we only had one cinema. I was standing on the corner trying to get people to watch the film.’ Today, Sundance is the most important film festival in the United States, a springboard for unknown filmmakers, including big names who showed their first films here, directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, David O. Russell, Ryan Coogler, Robert Rodriguez, Chloé Zhao, Ava DuVernay and many others. Over the years, the small festival for independently produced films has become a glamorous event, which Redford did not like at all. ‘I want the ambush marketers — the vodka brands and the gift-bag people and the Paris Hiltons — to go away forever,’ he told a reporter in 2012. ‘They have nothing to do with what's going on here!’
“Unlike other stars of his caliber, he took risks by exploring dark and challenging material,” wrote the New York Times. For Redford, cinema was also a moral institution. “I don’t like the word message, I prefer to speak of a purpose.” Early on, he bought the rights to the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had uncovered the Watergate scandal. ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976) was a huge success. Redford co-produced the film and played the lead role alongside Dustin Hoffman. ‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975) was similarly engaging and even more politically radical. Directed by Sidney Pollack, Redford plays an introverted CIA employee who analyses novels for potential threat scenarios. When he returns from his lunch break one day, he finds his colleagues murdered and knows that he too is in danger.
Redford often had a hard time with the critics. He was simply too good-looking and was marketed by the studios as a sex symbol. ‘Film critics loved to kick Mr. Redford,’ as the New York Times wrote. Most of the malice was directed at his role as Jay Gatsby in the film adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald's famous novel. ‘“The Great Gatsby” has become the movie to hate. Slaughtered by the critics, the film is also being insulted in the subways: “This movie stinks”’ (Foster Hirsch 1974 in the NY Times).
No wonder he was only nominated for an Oscar once as an actor and never won one. Redford had more luck as a director. His debut, Ordinary People (1980), was a huge success and won four Oscars straight away, including Best Film and Redford as Best Director. His later films, such as A River Runs Through It (1992) and Quiz Show (1994), were also well received by the critics.
Although he was one of the biggest stars of American cinema for decades, he always had an ambivalent relationship with Hollywood. When asked at a press conference in Cannes in 2013 about his film ‘All Is Lost’ how he had survived Hollywood, Redford replied: ‘Perhaps I survived because I was in the Hollywood system and at the same time I kept away from it. I built a house in the mountains because I wanted to keep a distance from the temptations of Hollywood. I felt that Hollywood wouldn't be good for my artistic desires.’ In the mountains of Utah, Redford became a committed environmental activist who also championed the interests of Native Americans.
As an actor, Robert Redford shaped the critical cinema of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like few other stars of his generation, he managed to successfully continue his career afterwards and establish himself as a director. With the Sundance Institute and the film festival of the same name, he has supported independent cinema and opened the doors to a career for young filmmakers. In doing so, he remained true to his critical attitude and committed himself to films that have a social significance. For example, he made Walter Salles' project about the young Ernesto Che Guevara, ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ (2004), possible as a producer. Robert Redford embodied a better, more moral America, which in the era of Donald Trump is in danger of being marginalised.