Robert Redford: Hollywood 'golden boy with a darkness in him'

Beneath the surface was a shy and sensitive actor who used his looks to his advantage, insisting on starring in and later directing movies with weight, says Nathan Abrams

- Nathan Abrams

ROBERT REDFORD, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, was perhaps everybody's idea of a classical Hollywood movie actor.

His conventional good looks - his blond hair, boyish charm and chiselled chin - led him to be cast as a sex symbol and a romantic lead opposite Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973), and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985).

Dustin Hoffman described him as a “walking surfboard”. But the Californian golden boy belied his appearance. No airhead, beneath the surface was a shy and sensitive actor who used his looks to his advantage, insisting on starring in and later directing movies with weight. These included a series of anti-establishment and countercultural films that reflected his anti-corruption and pro-environmental activism.

From the early 1960s through to the 2020s, Robert Redford appeared in some of the most iconic, if unconventional, films of the second half of the 20th century.

Those of us born in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew up with Redford. He came to attention as the timid, newly married Paul Bratter in Neil Simon's Broadway play, Barefoot in the Park, in 1967, before starring in the movie of the same name.