The many lives of Robert Redford

HE enters the frame gently, as though aware of the weight he carries — not just as a character, but as a man who has lived many lives before us. In Ritesh Batra’s ‘Our Souls at Night’ (2017), Robert Redford’s performance is stripped of all vanity, touched by a quiet vulnerability that feels almost like a farewell. As Louis Waters, he moves with the slow deliberation of someone who knows that time is no longer a luxury, and yet every glance, every half-smile, holds decades of memory.

This tender restraint of a film didn’t just offer a late-in-life love story, it also allowed Redford to embody his own legacy. Watching him, you see more than just an ageing widower seeking connection in the dimming light — you see the Sundance Kid, the reporter chasing Watergate, the man who whispered to horses. You see the long arc of American cinema written across his face. In ‘Our Souls at Night’ then, Redford did more than just act — he became a vessel for his own cinematic history.

Redford, who passed away at 89 this month, was never just a movie star. He was a filmmaker, an activist, an institution builder, and above all, a believer in the power of story, in the voices on the margins, in the idea that cinema mattered in a world addicted to noise.

What made Redford truly unique among actors of his generation was his complete disinterest in Hollywood mythmaking. He had the looks, the charisma, the star power, and yet, he remained elusive, a man always slightly at a remove from the machine. He seemed less interested in fame than in curiosity. His performances often carried the weight of restraint — the sense of someone holding more back than they revealed. And it was that exact quality that made him so watchable: you leaned in, hoping to catch what he wasn’t saying.

I vividly recall that feeling while watching ‘All is Lost’ (2013), where he delivered a nearly wordless turn as a man stranded at sea. It was a one-man survival story that stripped acting to its core: movement, breath, resolve. In the film, everything is in the subtle turn of his head, the strained breath, the determination in every eye-glint. He is vulnerability and resilience, a man drifting between the ebb and the infinite, fighting back despair with nothing but survival instinct. Yet even in that silence, Redford could speak volumes.

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr in 1936, he entered the world of acting first on television. Redford debuted with ‘War Hunt’ (1962) but came into prominence in the late 1960s, a period when Hollywood was shifting. ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (1969) brought him leading man stardom. Youthful and magnetic, he became a symbol, starring alongside Paul Newman as the Sundance Kid, the charming outlaw and voice of a new era. Then came ‘The Sting’ (1973), another collaboration with Newman, a witty dance of cunning, deception and charm. You could say that the audiences saw in him something more than a pretty face: a restless soul attuned to both danger and poetry.

But Redford never allowed himself to be boxed into a single persona. Just as easily, he could turn his attention to politically-charged roles, most notably as journalist Bob Woodward in ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976), a film that doesn’t just dramatise the unraveling of Watergate, but exalts the slow, procedural work of uncovering truth. That role, more than any other, captured Redford’s deeper instincts: his sense that stories could be a form of resistance, that truth was something worth putting on screen — even if it didn’t come with car chases or neat endings.

He wasn’t content with doing that only as an actor. His work as a director mirrored that same sensibility: patient, humane, grounded in feeling. ‘Ordinary People’ (1980), a film of aching emotional excavation, won him an Oscar for Best Director. ‘A River Runs Through It’ (1992) is still one of the most poetic depictions of memory and masculinity to exist in American film history. He taught a generation of actors, filmmakers, and storytellers that subtlety could be more powerful than spectacle.

But to fully understand the weight of Redford’s legacy, it is important to look beyond the screen.

In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, an initiative that began as a modest workshop for young filmmakers in the mountains of Utah. Today, it is one of the most important incubators of independent cinema in the world. The Sundance Film Festival, which grew out of that vision, has launched the careers of countless filmmakers, right from Quentin Tarantino to Dee Rees, from Kelly Reichardt to Ryan Coogler.

At the time, it was the Oscar-winner’s answer to the lopsided system he saw: the stories dismissed at script stage, the filmmakers ignored because they lacked connections or budget. He believed independent filmmaking to be the heartbeat of cinema.

Through Sundance, Redford didn’t just fund a festival, he created an ecosystem that nurtured risk: low-budget documentaries, personal essays, voices and perspectives that mainstream cinema might bypass. “Sundance was started as a mechanism for the discovery of new voices and new talent,” he once said. That quote, simple as it is, carries weight: it tells you this was not vanity, not merely a side project — it was essential work.

Today, when I think of Redford, I don’t just see the characters he played. I see someone who believed film could be more than entertainment. Someone who believed that it could be a way forward for others. Someone who carved space — on screen, behind the camera, in the mountains of Utah — for voices that might otherwise never be heard.

When I’ll watch Redford’s films now, I won’t just see images; I’ll feel the wind, the salt, the weight of years. I’ll hear the silences, the long moments that speak between lines. He leaves behind an idea of cinema that is not just full of beauty, but full of possibility. And that, in the end, is his greatest role.

— The writer is a freelance journalist