As the story goes, when Robert Redford expressed interest in starring as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, director Mike Nichols famously told the actor, “You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.”
“What do you mean? Of course, I can play a loser,” Redford is said to have responded. To which Nichols asked, “Okay, have you ever struck out with a girl?”
Redford’s answer: “What do you mean?”
Robert Redford, who died earlier today at age 89, had all the looks, charm and charisma of an iconic leading man. “He could have lived another 200 years, and when he’d walk down the street, you’d still say, ‘There’s a movie star,’” Richard Rushfield says.
But unlike the tinge of irony surrounding Brad Pitt’s roles, Redford’s characters “just had this sort of melancholy all the time,” says Richard. “That’s what made him so compelling — there was this sadness right under the surface.”
His star turns included iconic ’60s and ’70s films from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The President’s Men, to Richard and Christopher Rosen’s sleepers like, respectively, The Great Waldo Pepper and Downhill Racer. But Redford’s career as a quintessential Hollywood leading man was only one-third of his story. As a director, he was nominated and won an Oscar for his debut feature, 1980’s Ordinary People, and was later nominated again for 1994’s Quiz Show. Then, amid all his work on set, Redford also founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, a non-profit focused on independent filmmakers. When the Sundance Institute took over the struggling US Film Festival in the mid-1980s, it renamed the event after itself: the Sundance Film Festival.
“He really had walked the walk as a filmmaker,” Katey Rich reflects, “and he recognized a problem in the industry” — that being, the inability for indie films to achieve a profitable model and thus get made and distributed. “As much as we talk about his earnestness and how it made people roll their eyes a little bit, he saw something so early before anybody else in the business did.”
Don’t miss the rest of Richard, Katey and Chris’ tribute to Redford, including the trio’s must-watch Redford gems, his continuing impact on the industry and Richard’s incredible run-in with the icon at the Los Angeles Times.
