The world's golden boy

Hollywood hero who hated Tinseltown

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FROM the moment he swaggered on screen in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, Robert Redford was cinema's golden boy, a gorgeous, charming, acting talent but one who refused to be boxed in by his status as a Hollywood heartthrob.

And after his death aged 89 yesterday, Redford will be remembered, yes, for his looks, but also for the diversity of the roles he played, for his Oscar-winning talent as a director and for building the globally respected Sundance Film Festival.

Confirming his death, his publicist Cindi Berger said he passed away peacefully "surrounded by those he loved". She did not specify the cause of death.

Redford had defined what it meant to be a movie star but he also tore up the rule book by refusing to play the game on Hollywood's terms.

Audiences adored him as an outlaw alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and as a charming grifter in The Sting when they teamed up again in 1973.

But he became one of the industry's most versatile stars, playing a CIA analyst caught in a deadly conspiracy in the 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor, followed by his role as crusading Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in All the President's Men in 1976.

He may have hated being a sex symbol but that is what he was. Film critic Pauline Kael said of his role in the 1973 romance The Way We Were: "Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand's infatuated eyes."