Robert Redford was one of the most beautiful movie stars to have ever lived. His face was made to be seen a hundred feet big—his lustrous golden hair and warm, twinkling smile more at home in the cinematic realm than in our own. His friend and frequent co-star Jane Fonda joked that working with him could be tricky because, “[she’d] just kind of fall into his eyes and forget [her] dialogue.” Yet, the reason Redford’s career and legendary status endured for more than half a century is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was like us. He wasn’t afraid to rumple his perfect image on screen—he could be goofy, he could be terrified, he could be clammy and awkward. He was not content to rest on the laurels of his dazzling face, and cinema has been all the better for it.
There are plenty of examples over his long career, but three from the 1970s spring to mind. In 1972’s The Hot Rock, Redford plays an expert bank robber, John Dortmunder. Almost as soon as he’s released from his latest spell in jail, his brother-in-law (George Segal) recruits him for another job. The movie follows their gang’s relentless quest to steal a priceless diamond, a quest that keeps getting foiled in increasingly ridiculous ways. Throughout the film, Dortmunder moves from ruffled, to agitated, to teetering right on the precipice of a nervous breakdown.
The Hot Rock is very funny, and the rest of the gang approach their mission with an optimistic verve, even as things fall more and more apart. By taking himself so seriously, it’s Dortmunder that looks the silliest. Redford leans hard into the discrepancy between the absurdity of the situations and his character’s determination to succeed: “I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in jinxes, but that stone’s jinxed me and it won’t let go. I’ve been damned near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed. And worse is going to happen before it’s done, so I’m taking my stand! I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me.”
Redford delivers that speech with such deliciously inappropriate gravity, it almost becomes a fourth-wall break—it’s easy to imagine Dortmunder picturing himself as a movie star as he orates, staring forcefully into the middle-distance. But then, who among us has not been driven to the point of madness by something that was ultimately very silly? Although Redford is at peak beauty in The Hot Rock, the publicity stills making him look like the achingly cool leader of the motley crew, his mounting delirium undermines that image at every turn.
In the end, it is Dortmunder that gets the diamond and not the other way around. The film concludes with a glorious 90-second scene following him walking down a bustling city street, processing his unexpected victory, then grinning to himself with disbelief and gleeful pride. He’s striding so jauntily, at times he’s nearly skipping. It’s a lovely sequence that radiates a recognizable combination of joy and relief.
This was not a combination that his character got to enjoy three years later in Three Days Of The Condor. There, Redford plays Joe Turner, a low-level research worker for the CIA, who returns back to the office from lunch one day to find that every one of his colleagues has been brutally murdered. He silently digests the horror of what he’s seen, and is thwacked with the realization that he is now in mortal danger. Though Redford doesn’t speak during the four minutes after he first discovers the carnage, he shows the waves of shock and sadness and terror crashing over Joe in real time. He’s not a field operative—such a grisly, terrifying sight is completely foreign to him. Redford looks as if he’s struggling to breathe; like he might be about to scream or throw up.
He does neither. Instead, he walks out into the street as gingerly as if he’s stepping out into an active minefield. He’s so distracted by the fear a woman is about to pull a gun out of her baby stroller, he almost gets run over by an irate cab driver. Redford gives Joe’s terror both a mental and a physical tangibility; as he stumbles about in the street, eventually finding his way to a phone booth to call his handler, his total overwhelm overwhelms the movie, pulling us inexorably to his side.
There are shots from this film—where Redford looks like a runway model as he exhibits the full potential of a peacoat and aviators—regularly cited as examples of why Redford was the epitome of ’70s style. Yet they work within the context of the narrative, because the clothes function as a “fake it till you make it” costume for Redford’s jittery performance; armor for a panicking man to hide behind while he struggles to work out what on earth he’s going to do next.
Unlike Three Days Of The Condor, 1974’s The Great Gatsby was a misbegotten production, bloated and tedious, a critical flop. And yet, Redford’s casting as the titular charismatic grifter, the self-made legend, was a work of genius. There’s a scene where Redford’s Gatsby first meets Sam Waterston’s Nick that sums up the essence of the Gatsby character. It’s not even a whole scene—just a simple smile.
He appears out of a doorway to greet Nick, one hand on his hip, an anxious look in his eyes; “How do you do, old sport? I’m Gatsby.” There’s a beat, and then he slowly parts his lips in a vaguely upward direction, to reveal his teeth clenched tight. It’s technically a smile, but rarely has one seemed so effortful. In that simple gesture, Redford exhibits all the work Gatsby goes through every day to invent himself. Tuxedo on, not a hair out of place, he certainly looks the part, but once again, Redford’s twitchy affect underlines the artificiality of his surface’s outward polish. Although there’s comedy to how awkward his Gatsby seems, there’s existential tragedy there, too. What must it be like to live that way? To be so profoundly uncomfortable in your own skin?
At first blush, you might not think an actor as impossibly handsome as Redford would have access to vulnerable feelings like that. But—despite the infamous anecdote about him being turned down for the lead role in The Graduate because Mike Nichols couldn’t believe that a woman had ever rejected him; “I never did look like a 21-year-old kid just outta college who’d never been laid,” Redford quipped—he of course did. He was both a human being, and a terrific actor well aware of his natural gifts. He used his perfect exterior as a formidable tool in his actor’s kit, to illustrate the vast gulf there is between the face we show to the world and the tumult inside of us.
He could do the smooth, cool movie star thing as well as anyone who’s ever appeared on the silver screen, but he was always at his most interesting when he was portraying the goofy, the sweaty, the desperate, the ill at ease. How rare it’s been for his suave A-List successors, the Brad Pitts and the George Clooneys, to take roles where they’ve seemed fallible, harried, vulnerable; like complex people with anxieties and neuroses. In those few-and-far-between films, they’re excellent. But Redford did it constantly.
That willingness to perpetually humanize himself away from the concept of “movie star” was the very reason why his stardom endured so richly for so long, and will continue to do so. In essence, he exemplified two of the core reasons we go to the movies: We want to look at beautiful people and we want to see ourselves on screen, writ large in all our messy glory. Redford gave us both at once.
