Appreciation Indecently handsome A-lister who seduced Hollywood

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, it wasn't cool for star actors to be good-looking.

- Peter Bradshaw

The style was more a scuffed, grizzled, bleary, sweaty, paunchy and shlubby realness. The fashion was for leading men like Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen. Even a very beautiful man like Paul Newman had a kind of rugged, daylit quality.

But Robert Redford was very different. Here was a supremely beautiful movie star who went on to direct, produce and then be the guardian and gatekeeper of commercial-indie US cinema at his Sundance Institute. And he was always an outlier.

When movie audiences thrilled to George Roy Hill's western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, they knew that in breakout star Redford they had an almost indecently attractive male, however much he might dress it down with buckskins and moustaches, playing the devil-may-care Sundance Kid. His sardonic charisma and sexiness shone through. And when he cleaned himself up for other roles, teaming up again with Newman in 1973 for the Jazz Age conmen caper The Sting, the effect was electric. Neatly trimmed and shaved, Redford was just outrageously handsome, incandescently handsome, he was handsomeness on legs. His photograph was in the dictionary next to “handsome”.

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman might be permitted to entertain Katharine Ross with his wacky stunts on a bicycle, to the accompaniment of Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head. But it was blond bombshell Redford who was going to have sex with her.

Redford was a throwback to the era of Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, the Hollywood era of gasp-inducing matinee idols and swoonworthy dreamboats, absurdly handsome men whose beauty seemed to have been nurtured in a Hollywood petri dish.