On September 16, 2025, at the age of 90, Robert Redford, perhaps the last Hollywood icon, died. What made his acting so great?
One of his last films, All Is Lost, is something of a legacy for the great actor Robert Redford. He plays a lone sailor in the Indian Ocean, fighting for survival. Except for a few quiet curses and an attempted SOS using the broken radio, the blond actor remains silent for 100 minutes. What speaks in the silence is his gaze. In theater, posture and gestures are significant; in film, it is the eyes. Redford looks at the clouds, the rigging, the compass, and then inward as he tastes what little fresh water he has left. How much a look can convey, especially when it seeks nothing but is in dialogue! “I’m sorry” is the first sentence we hear in the film, read from the farewell letter he finally writes. Perhaps many great artists have this sentence on their lips as their legacy: equipped with incredible talent for an entire generation, maybe they feel that there could have been more than the immeasurable amount they have given. What a story: the sailor loses his boat, loses his life raft, loses the strength to keep swimming, and then, from the depths of the water, sees the lights of a rescue boat above.
Lonely in Company
Redford is alone in All Is Lost, but this is true of many of his films, even when he is surrounded by other people. In the film adaptation of Karen Blixen’s novel Out of Africa, he plays a wild adventurer who can’t be held back by Meryl Streep. In Indecent Proposal, he is a billionaire who can buy anything but remains solitary. This aloneness carries a certain grandeur in Redford’s portrayals. Consider the popular 1998 film The Horse Whisperer. Thirteen-year-old Grace and her horse are seriously injured by a truck. Grace’s lower leg has to be amputated. Mother, daughter, and horse travel halfway across the continent to visit the reclusive horse therapist, played by Redford.
Film critics may dismiss the story as a superficial romance, but there are sequences in it that have touched the hearts of millions of people with their profound insight into the human soul, like the moment when Redford encounters the battered horse in the paddock: he kneels—a single shot that says more than a thousand words. And then it’s his gaze, which moves from the wounds on the four-legged animal’s trembling coat up to the animal’s eyes. This is followed by a second lesson: he can only help the horse if the owner, young Grace, supports him. The mother wants to intervene, but Redford stops her: it is up to the girl to decide, because after all, she will ride the horse again later. The girl, caught up in self-pity, rebuffs him. “Do you have a problem helping me?” Looking at her prosthetic leg, she adds, “Isn’t it obvious?” “Not to me,” replies the horse and youth whisperer. When the mother tries to intervene again, he remains steady, “With all due respect, that’s Grace’s decision.” Once again, it’s the look in his eyes: he challenges and encourages the girl, helping her to overcome her trauma and heal the relationship between daughter and mother.
Always on Equal Footing
Status plays a major role in drama—it’s the power imbalance between two characters. Who influences whom? What Rudolf Steiner calls “the positive and negative human being” or what Jörgen Smit distinguishes as “wax and rubber people,” is high and low status in theater. In Robert Redford’s acting, this choreographed system of oppression and openness, of dominance and inferiority, is not at work. When he dominates in a role, he remains receptive; when he plays the loser, he retains his dignity. Somehow, the interaction is always on equal footing. How does that happen? Some film obituaries featured a scene from one of his early films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the two bandits are on the run and must jump from a cliff into the water. Redford hesitates and then admits, “I can’t swim.” Strength in weakness.
This coexistence of strong and weak, confident and lost, masculine and feminine is probably what makes his characters on screen so deeply human. There is always a centeredness, a middle ground, and at its core lies a high degree of credibility. It is therefore not surprising that Robert Redford established his own academy for young artists and championed the protection of nature and minorities. Although Redford’s performances in the more than 100 film productions in which he has appeared may stray far from the center for dramatic reasons, thanks to his acting, which gracefully combines spiritual contrasts, they are at the same time lessons in the beauty of human centeredness.
Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.—Robert McKee1
Translation Laura Liska
Image Robert Redford campaigns against the demolition of the Santa Monica Pier during the filming of The Sting, 1973. Source: Ken Dare, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0
As an expat Californian, Robert Redford was one of the few native kids that captured the spirit of a State (Calif) that became a nation from the upheaval of the 1960’s & 70’s .. when the counterculture had expired into a permissive and abusive drug music noise orgy many of those millions of rebellious young hippies returned to their places of origin all around the US & Canada and western Europe. Those tumultuous times shifted to other capital cities, but left LA in a cultural artistic collapse that culminated in riots and racial inequality that triggered shock waves of social upheaval that caused waves of youth unrest and dissatisfaction that drove a large portion of young Californians to seek their futures elsewhere. Like dandelion seeds on the wind we drifted around Europe and many countries around the Mediterranean looking for a place to live an authentic life. Redford found that place in Idaho and made it the centre of his life’s work in how humans communicate with their fellow inhabitants. Many of us returned to celebrate his annual gatherings of aspiring film creators that had a stage to show their ideas and productions of visual & acoustic forms of music & cinema. Above all Redford remained a ‘real’ character that always remained true to his inner conception of himself although he portrayed different characters it was always through his own lens (eyes) rather than pretending to be someone else. We can only hope that the likes of such actors will appear again through the legacy of the Sundance Film Festival.