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Biography
Born Charles Robert Redford Jr.
on August 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, CA, he attended the
University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship. After spending a
year as an oil worker, he traveled to Europe, living the painter's
life in Paris.
Upon returning to the U.S., Redford
settled in New York City to pursue an acting career and in 1959
made his Broadway debut with a small role in Tall Story.
Bigger and better parts in productions including The Highest
Tree, Little Moon of Alban, and Sunday in New York
followed, along with a number of television appearances, and in
1962 he made his film debut in Terry and Dennis Sanders'
antiwar drama War Hunt.
However, it was a leading role in
the 1963 Broadway production of Barefoot in the Park which
launched Redford to prominence and opened the door to
Hollywood, where in 1965 he starred in back-to-back productions of
Situation Serious but Not Hopeless and Inside Daisy
Clover. A year later he returned in The Chase and This
Property Is Condemned, but like his previous films they were
both box-office failures. Offered a role in Mike Nichols' Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Redford rejected it and then
spent a number of months relaxing in Spain.
His return to Hollywood was met
with an offer to co-star with Jane Fonda in a film
adaptation of Barefoot in the Park, released in 1967 to
good reviews and even better audience response. However, Redford
then passed on both The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby
to star in a Western titled Blue. Just one week
prior to shooting, he backed out of the project, resulting in a
series of lawsuits and a long period of inactivity; with just one
hit to his credit and a history of questionable career choices, he
was considered a risky proposition by many producers.
Then, in 1969, he and Paul
Newman co-starred as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
a massively successful revisionist Western which poised Redford
on the brink of superstardom. However, its follow-ups -- 1969's Tell
Them Willie Boy Is Here and The Downhill Racer -- both
failed to connect, and after the subsequent failures of 1971's Fauss
and Big Halsey and 1972's The Hot Rock, many industry
observers were ready to write him off. Both 1972's The
Candidate and Jeremiah Johnson fared markedly better,
though, and with Sydney Pollack's 1973 romantic melodrama The
Way We Were, co-starring Barbra Streisand, Redford's
golden-boy lustre was restored. That same year he reunited with Newman
and their Butch Cassidy director George Roy Hill for
The Sting, a Depression-era caper film which garnered seven
Academy Awards, including Best Picture honors. Combined with its
impressive financial showing, it solidified Redford's new
megastar stature, and he was voted Hollywood's top box-office
draw.
Redford's next project cast
him in the title role of director Jack Clayton's 1974
adaptation of The Great Gatsby; he also stayed in the
film's 1920s milieu for his subsequent effort, 1975's The Great
Waldo Pepper. Later that same year he starred in the thriller
Three Days of the Condor before portraying Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward in 1976's All the
President's Men, Alan J. Pakula's masterful
dramatization of the investigation into the Watergate
burglary.
In addition to delivering one of
his strongest performances to date in the film, Redford
also served as producer after first buying the rights to Woodward
and Carl Bernstein's book of the same name. The 1977 A
Bridge Too Far followed before Redford took a two-year
hiatus from the screen. He didn't resurface until 1979's The
Electric Horseman, followed a year later by Brubaker.
Also in 1980 he made his directorial debut with the family
drama Ordinary People, which won four Oscars including
Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (for Timothy
Hutton).
By now, Redford's interest
in acting was clearly waning; he walked out of The Verdict
(a role then filled by Newman) and did not appear before
the camera again for four years. When he finally returned in
1984's The Natural, however, it was to the usual rapturous
public reception, and with 1985's Out of Africa he and
co-star Meryl Streep were the focal points in a film which
netted eight Oscars, including Best Picture. The 1986 film Legal
Eagles, on the other hand, was both a commercial and critical
stiff, and in its wake Redford returned to the director's
chair with 1988's The Milagro Beanfield War.
Apart from narrating the 1989 documentary
To Protect Mother Earth -- one of many environmental
activities to which his name has been attached -- Redford
was again absent from the screen for several years before
returning in 1990's Havana. The star-studded Sneakers
followed in 1992, but his most significant effort that year was
his third directorial effort, the acclaimed A River Runs
Through It.
In 1993 Redford scored his
biggest box-office hit in some time with the much-discussed Indecent
Proposal. He followed in 1994 with Quiz Show, a pointed
examination of the TV game-show scandals of the 1950s which many
critics considered his most accomplished directorial turn to date.
After the 1996 romantic drama Up Close and Personal,
he began work on his adaptation of Nicholas Evans' hit
novel The Horse Whisperer. The film, co-starring Kristin
Scott Thomas and Sam Neill, was a labor of love that
unfortunately failed to win over most critics, who complained that
the film was overly long and indulgent. However, more than one of
these critics did acknowledge that despite the film's flaws, the
sight of the rugged Redford squinting winsomely from
beneath a cowboy hat still produced a decidedly unequivocal
allure.
The filmmaker was back behind the
camera in 2000 as the director and producer of The Legend of
Bagger Vance, a period drama about the fortunes of a
faded golf pro (Matt
Damon), his mysterious caddy (Will
Smith), and the woman he loves (Charlize
Theron). The film's sentimental mixture of fantasy and
inspiration scored with audiences, and Redford next turned
back to acting with roles in The Last Castle and Spy
Game the following year. Though Castle garnered only a
lukewarm response from audiences and critics alike, fans were
nevertheless primed to see the seasoned actor share the screen
with his A River Runs Through It star Brad
Pitt in the eagerly anticipated Spy Game.
In addition to his acting and
directing work, Redford has also flexed his movie industry
muscle as the founder of the Sundance Institute, an organization
primarily devoted to promoting American independent filmmaking. By
the early '90s, the annual Sundance Film Festival, held in
the tiny community of Park City, Utah, had emerged as one of the
key international festivals, with a reputation as a major
launching pad for young talent. An outgrowth of its success was
cable's Sundance Channel, a network similarly devoted to
promoting and airing indie fare; a circuit of art house theaters
bearing the Sundance name was also planned.
~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide |
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