Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack, Festival de Cannes 1972 © AFP
Forever Robert Redford
Forever Robert Redford.
Forever the cowboy, the fugitive, the candidate, the prisoner, the Great Gatsby, the con man, the student, the playboy, the loner, the codebreaker, the soldier, the reporter, the rodeo champion, the lover, the baseball star, the sailor, the man who whispered to horses… Over 70 roles, 9 films as a director, the creation of the Sundance Film Festival. And throughout a life devoted to cinema, an elegance unmatched — in his artistry, his commitments, and his fights.
Redford was more than a legend — he was an example.
Forever Robert Redford, an electric rider, forever free.
[Los Angeles, United States | AFP] – Robert Redford, an icon of American cinema over the past six decades, died Tuesday in Utah at the age of 89, according to the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets.
The actor starred in such classics as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), and All the President’s Men (1976).
With his striking good looks, he embodied a certain sunlit face of America: ecological, engaged, independent, and prosperous.
His death was announced to the New York Times by his agent, Cindi Berger. He passed away in his sleep early Tuesday morning “in the mountains near Provo,” she told the newspaper, without mentioning a specific cause of death.
A committed Democrat, a defender of Native American tribes and American landscapes, founder of the Sundance Film Festival—which became the international reference for independent cinema—the cowboy with long golden locks spent his life forging his own path, keeping his distance from Hollywood whenever he could.
Major studios offered him some 70 roles, most of them positive and engaged characters (Three Days of the Condor), romantic ones (The Great Gatsby), and always sympathetic—even when playing con men, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, or his final film, The Old Man and the Gun (2018).
He notably worked on seven films with Sydney Pollack.
Although he received an Academy Award in 2002 for his lifetime achievement, as an actor he was never honored for a specific film, despite several acclaimed performances in landmark works such as Jeremiah Johnson (Festival de Cannes, 1972), All the President’s Men (4 Oscars in 1977), and Out of Africa (7 Oscars in 1986), which established him as the archetype of the ideal lover.
