Robert Redford was his own kind of Hollywood icon

0:00Bob Mondello:A while back, NPR asked Jane Fonda and Robert Redford to sum each other up in three words. The old friends had just co-starred in the movie Our Souls at Night. This is how Fonda described Redford.

0:13Linda Holmes:Complicated, profound, and deeply creative.

0:18Bob Mondello:But Redford jumped in to add one more word. I would use the word beauty in terms of myself.

0:26Linda Holmes:No, I'm kidding. He's funny, too. That's another thing.

0:29Bob Mondello:Redford died early Tuesday morning, according to his publicist. He was 89 years old. The truth is he was beautiful and bankable, a go-to leading man. But as Fonda said, he was also complicated, an understated performer who never won an acting Oscar. Here's critic Carrie Rickey.

0:48Linda Holmes:He tended to be a minimalist on screen, often interrupting himself to make it sound like actual speech.

0:53Bob Mondello:He eventually became an Oscar-winning director, but he never seemed completely comfortable with celebrity. Here he is on NPR in 2003.

1:02Linda Holmes:I'm certainly grateful for what it's done for me, but I do think that celebrity is overdone in our society. I think it's got a dangerous side to it. I think that people should be paying a lot more attention to other issues rather than who's the top ten this, or who's the top five, or who's the sexiest, or the most beautiful, or this or that.

1:19Bob Mondello:Redford used his celebrity as a platform for environmental activism, before that became a Hollywood cliché, and for independent filmmakers. He founded Sundance as a way to highlight the kinds of movies he thought the industry wasn't interested in, the kind that had defined his life, as he told WHYY's Fresh Air in 2013.

1:40Linda Holmes:I wanted to tell stories about the America that I grew up in. And for me, I was not interested in the red, white, and blue part of America. I was interested in the gray part, that were complexity lies.

1:53Bob Mondello:Consider this. Robert Redford was his own kind of Hollywood icon. Ahead, our critics break down a career that shaped the movie industry. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

2:17Bob Mondello:It's Consider This from NPR. Robert Redford once said, To climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top. We're going to look back at a life spent scaling the mountain of cinema. And for that, I'm joined by Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, and film critic Bob Mondello. Thank you both for being here.

2:36Linda Holmes:Good to be here.

2:37Bob Mondello:Hello, Ari. Let's start back in the 60s. Redford became a huge star with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring opposite Paul Newman. What version of Robert Redford did we see in that Western?

2:50Linda Holmes:Well, audiences at that point knew him as a handsome lug opposite Starlet's. Natalie Wood in This Property is Condemned, Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park, which he'd also played on Broadway. That was a light Neil Simon comedy. So transitioning those partnership skills to a Western and to a what we would later call a bromance with Paul Newman was kind of a big jump, as in the most famous scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when they're cornered on a ledge high above a river. Ready? No, we'll jump. Like hell we will. Yeah.

3:28Bob Mondello:And as a buddy movie and as an adventure movie, this is a little bit subversive. I think without spoiling it fully, I'll just say the ambiguity of the ending, its kind of lack of a clear triumph are not really what a contemporary audience would expect if you sat them down with a film like this, right? They would expect the two guys to like trade some quips at the end. They had a long day. That's not what this movie is. And so in that way, it really is kind of a – it was a little bit striking out from the norm. Love your sensitivity to spoilers for a movie that came out in the 60s. Moving ahead to the 70s, he was the centerpiece of so many huge movies.

4:06Bob Mondello:Can you just like go down a list of some of them?

4:07Linda Holmes:Well, there was Jeremiah Johnson in 1972. He sort of tamped down his beauty a bit with that beard. He was rugged in that one. The Way We Were in 73, Pauline Kael said that he was never more easy on the eyes than when you saw him through Barbra Streisand's eyes in that one. The Sting, also from 73, where he reprised his bit with Paul Newman. And it was his only nomination for Best Actor.

4:32Bob Mondello:Yeah, and I particularly love a trio of thrillers that he made. All the President's Men and Three Days of the Condor are kind of classics. But I would also mention Sneakers, which is from 1992. Oh, yeah. Which is a really, really fun movie with an incredibly stacked cast. Sidney Poitier is in this. David Strathairn, River Phoenix, who was very funny in one of his last movie roles, and Robert Redford. He did a kind of a callback to Three Days of the Condor, in particular when he appeared in Captain America Winter Soldier, which was very much influenced by those 70s paranoid thrillers. And the fact that Redford kind of stepped back into that part was, I thought, very cool.

5:13Bob Mondello:Such a huge range. But he wasn't fully comfortable being a glamorous Hollywood star. How did he relate to that niche? Well, you know, I think without reducing him to his handsomeness, he was good at times in sort of weaponizing that element of his physicality, right? In 1962, he was in an episode of The Twilight Zone called Nothing in the Dark, where he played death. But part of what the episode is about is that death is not ugly or scary, and you don't need to fear it because it comes in this very kind of charming young man package. You could actually say a similar thing about Indecent Proposal, which is a film from the 90s.

5:50Bob Mondello:That's about a rich man played by Redford who pays a couple a million dollars to spend one night with the wife. And the insecurity of the husband in that film really requires Redford to be so charming and handsome that you kind of believe maybe she's genuinely tempted by him.

6:09Linda Holmes:Now, if Redford were moderating this conversation, he would at this point want us to talk about his directing and about Sundance because he was really uncomfortable with his role as this beautiful actor. Of course. And he said so. Here he is on fresh air talking about that in 2013. So suddenly you're seeing yourself kind of in a glamour category and you're saying, well, wait a minute. The notion is that, well, you're not so much of an actor. You're just somebody that looks well. And that was always hard for me because I always took pride in whatever role I was playing, I would be that character.

6:46Bob Mondello:Okay, well, let's talk about who was he as a director. Yeah, his directorial debut was a huge one. Ordinary People in 1980, which won Best Picture and he won Best Director for this story about this kid played by Timothy Hutton. I was supposed to take care of it!

7:02Linda Holmes:And that wasn't fair, was it? No! And then you say, hang on, hang on. and then you let go.

7:08Bob Mondello:Yeah, that's a really tough story. It's about a family that's experiencing a lot of grief and it could be just a lot of crying and sobbing and there's some of that, but I think the direction is one of the things that kind of keeps it under control.

7:21Linda Holmes:And it also made people think about psychiatry in a way they hadn't before, at least in the films. And he saw something in Mary Tyler Moore that no one had ever seen before him and he followed up with Milagro-Grabinfield War and River Runs Through It and Horse Whisper and Quiz Show about TV quiz show scandals in the 1950s. And he got more Oscar nominations for that one.

7:43Bob Mondello:And of course, you can't talk about Redford's legacy without talking about the Sundance Film Festival.

7:47Linda Holmes:That's right. He championed the kind of movie that he was too big to star in himself. His presence would have sort of morphed it into something else. He liked these independent, scrappy, experimental, edgy, issue-driven films. films, and he made space for filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Ava DuVernay.

8:06Bob Mondello:Yeah, I think anybody would acknowledge that Sundance has its own, you know, big money relationships to Hollywood stuff at some times. But it has definitely been a place for movies to get discovered that would have had a hard time getting discovered before. That's NPR's Linda Holmes and Bob Mandela remembering Robert Redford, who has died at age 89. Thank you both. Good to be here. Thank you. This episode was produced by Mallory Yu and Connor Donovan. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Claire Lombardo, with audio engineering by Jay Sizz and Ted Meebane. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

8:44Bob Mondello:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.