The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (343 page)

In 1940, he and Jane Wyman were married (divorce was final in 1948, after her career had surged ahead of his and she was heard to lament his dullness). He was with Wyman in
Tugboat Annie Sails Again
(40, Seiler);
The Bad Man
(41, Richard Thorpe); a crack airman in
International Squadron
(41, Lothar Mendes); a piano player in
Million Dollar Baby
(41, Curtis Bernhardt); a newspaperman in
Nine Lives Are Not Enough
(41, Edward Sutherland);
Desperate Journey
(42, Raoul Walsh); a fruit picker in
Juke Girl
(42, Bernhardt); winning note and a catchphrase in
King’s Row
(42, Sam Wood), playing a man whose legs are amputated and who comes round after the operation to ask, “Where’s the rest of me?”

He entered the air force, but was prevented from combat mayhem by his short sight: he had very narrowed eyes from an early age, an attribute that could have cast him in villainy if there had been a spark of mischief. After the war, as his Rooseveltian attitudes hardened, he became president of the Screen Actors’ Guild from 1947 to 1952. As such, he was a bureaucrat of McCarthyism, and a shortsighted searcher after redness. His acting career was foreshortened by office work (at least, that’s the story): a vet in
Stallion Road
(47, James V. Kern);
The Voice of the Turtle
(47, Irving Rapper);
The Girl from Jones Beach
(49, Peter Godfrey);
The Hasty Heart
(49, Vincent Sherman); with Patricia Neal in
John Loves Mary
(49, David Butler); and
Night Unto Night
(49, Don Siegel).

He left Warners to freelance:
Louisa
(50, Alexander Hall); with a chimpanzee in
Bedtime for Bonzo
(51, Frederick de Cordova);
Hong Kong
(51, Lewis R. Foster);
The Last Outpost
(51, Foster); the D.A. in
Storm Warning
(51, Stuart Heisler).

In 1952, he married the actress Nancy Davis—Madame Fulcrum—and appeared in
She’s Working Her Way Through College
(52, H. Bruce Humberstone); as pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in
The Winning Team
(52, Seiler);
Law and Order
(53, Nathan Juran);
Tropic Zone
(53, Foster);
Cattle Queen of Montana
(54, Allan Dwan);
Prisoner of War
(54, Andrew Marton);
Tennessee’s Partner
(55, Dwan); with Nancy Davis in
Hellcats of the Navy
(57, Juran).

This faltering career was helped out by his work as host on TV’s
G.E. Theater
(54–61), and then
Death Valley Days
(65–66). (As president of SAG, he had assisted deals with MCA and others that made TV series more lucrative for producers.) His last movie role was as the villain in
The Killers
(64, Siegel), in which he slaps Angie Dickinson around—the manifest petulance of someone giving up the ghost.

But America and story were at hand. Rescue was managed. The rest would be history—and he did seem rested. To paraphrase Gore Vidal, the wisdom and integrity of someone told where to stand and what to say for twenty years were made manifest. The fraudulence of the presidency was revealed so that the office could never quite be honored again.

Robert Redford
, b. Santa Monica, California, 1937
1980:
Ordinary People
. 1988:
The Milagro Beanfield War
. 1992:
A River Runs Through It
. 1994:
Quiz Show
. 1998:
The Horse Whisperer
. 2000:
The Legend of Bagger Vance
. 2007:
Lions for Lambs
.

He went to the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship and tried to become a painter before acting tempted him. Eventually he entered the AADA and made a stage debut in
Tall Story
in 1959 (as a baseball player). He then worked in TV and, apart from a small part in
War Hunt
(62, Denis Sanders), did not go into movies until
Situation Hopeless, But Not Serious
(65, Gottfried Reinhardt). His first important parts came in 1966 with
This Property Is Condemned
(Sydney Pollack),
Inside Daisy Clover
(Robert Mulligan), and as the hunted Bubber Reeves in
The Chase
(Arthur Penn). He seemed both decent and detached, sympathetic but disillusioned.

That promise has never been fully realized. There is some restraint in Redford that resists exploration of humor or anger, or even sex—all of which seem on his cards. After
Barefoot in the Park
(67, Gene Saks), which he had played on Broadway, he refused
Blue
and appeared in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(69, George Roy Hill). An immense success, that film offered a debilitating, modish glamour instead of real character.
Downhill Racer
(69, Michael Ritchie), about an obsessive skier, was so close to Redford’s heart that he produced it himself, and
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
(69, Abraham Polonsky) used his natural reserve well.

But did he have the personality or interest to impress himself upon films as more than a handsome athlete?
Little Fauss and Big Halsy
(70, Sidney J. Furie) and
The Hot Rock
(72, Peter Yates) suggest not. And while looking every bit the Kennedyesque venturer into politics for
The Candidate
(72, Ritchie), he seemed overawed by the legendary resonance of
Jeremiah Johnson
(72, Pollack). His lonely trapper should have become elderly, solitary, and eccentric, but Redford retreated behind a bushier beard and makeup scars.

By the mid-seventies, cinemas were clotted with his effacing handsomeness. The enervated neatness of
The Way We Were
(73, Pollack) wasted an intriguing subject, while his fending off of reality helped to take any venom out of
The Sting
(73, Hill). It was a perfect fit of periods that he should inhabit the hollow shell of
The Great Gatsby
(73, Jack Clayton). Fitzgerald’s fascinating lacuna turned into an archetypal hollow man, so that the movie seemed a dilatory commercial for hair dressing, lawn fertilizers, and those absorbent tissues that take away difficulty. That we liked him so much was an unnerving sign of our need for tranquilizing actors. His third film for George Roy Hill was
The Great Waldo Pepper
(75).

It was not easy to swallow him as a minor operative in an obscure part of the CIA in
Three Days of the Condor
(75, Pollack), and that film’s sinister intrigue never threatened Redford’s anxious but lovely eminence. Playing Gatsby, his greatest failure had been his helpless gestures toward the social transformation the character had undergone. He seemed musclebound by gloss and charisma, unwilling or unable to tease his own godlike image—he was much less keen on risk or extravagance than Barbra Streisand.

How could he be a lowly reporter making good in
All the President’s Men
(76, Alan J. Pakula)? Instead, he was one of nature’s Galahads coming sweetly and inevitably to the surface to still the ugly disturbance of American politics. All credit to Redford for producing that movie, and for appreciating its commercial chance so early on. But melodramatic simplifications cruelly exposed the limits of his disquiet. Political paranoia can be a very naïve emotion in the mind of a great star. In the next two years, Redford delivered a bare half-hour of screen time, as a gallant officer in
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough), for which, allegedly, he was paid $2 million.

He played in
The Electric Horseman
(79, Pollack) and
Brubaker
(80, Stuart Rosenberg). He then won the Oscar for best direction for
Ordinary People
(80), a decent, concerned, pained story told with grim restraint bordering on numbness.

Few observers dared notice the lack of character in
Ordinary People
, and Redford’s status as icon was enhanced when he founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, a forum for independent filmmaking, a retreat and a resort, a way of thinking well of oneself, and eventually, a gift catalogue. Sundance has had its successes, and it embodies a view of the arts and nature that is sweetly Utopian. But Sundance is the kind of institution that seeks to sanctify the necessary rough edges and raw meat of American moviemaking. Its true destiny may be to provide the locus for a great satire.

Redford was a deeply mature baseball phenom in
The Natural
(84, Barry Levinson), one of the most unreal sports films ever made, not to mention its damage to Bernard Malamud—if Redford had done similar wrong to a bald eagle in public he would probably have had to shave his head in contrition. (What would he look like bald?) He was a very dapper “English” hunter in
Out of Africa
(85, Pollack), this time carrying the ethos of the Banana Republic catalogue.
Legal Eagles
(86, Ivan Reitman) was a famous disaster and further proof of his paper-thin range as an actor.

Since then, he has been executive producer on
Promised Land
(88, Michael Hoffman) and
Some Girls
(89, Hoffman), projects that had grown out of Sundance. He directed
The Milagro Beanfield War
(88), a looser and more intriguing work than
Ordinary People
. He could do nothing to avert the commercial disaster of
Havana
(90, Pollack), and he did begin to look as if he’d spent an undue part of his more than fifty years out in the sun. He had his most interesting part for years in
Indecent Proposal
(93, Adrian Lyne), but the script was so undeveloped, and the sex so absent, we were left with time to see how far Redford resembled used wrapping paper.

In 1992 he also directed again—
A River Runs Through It
—a spectacular tribute to nature, running water, and fly-fishing, but also a movie of subtlety and force, with Brad Pitt giving a fine performance as just the kind of wild, dangerous kid Redford has never let himself play. As a director, Redford has improved, but as an actor he is as hidden as ever. If only he would play a scoundrel, an enemy to eagles—something more challenging than
Sneakers
(93, Phil Alden Robinson).

Instead, he was close to fatuous in
Up Close & Personal
(96, Jon Avnet) and followed everywhere by a nimbus of gold back-lighting in his own
The Horse Whisperer
. What was it that appealed in those aging male-dream roles? What permitted the sentimentalizing of his own appearance? After all, that would never have been tolerated in
Quiz Show
, the best and sharpest film he has directed, the last proof that he is awake and thinking, as opposed to dozing in his own dream.
The Legend of Bagger Vance
was one more dud, but then he seemed to regain an appetite for acting with two weird throwbacks:
The Last Castle
(01, Rod Lurie);
Spy Game
(01, Tony Scott).

He then set out to play a significantly older man in
The Clearing
(04, Pieter Jan Brugge). And as J.Lo’s father-in-law in
An Unfinished Life
(04, Lasse Halström).
Lions for Lambs
was his greatest failure yet as a director. Playing with Cruise and Streep, Redford seemed to have no sense of the rare charm that once protected him.

Lynn Redgrave
(1943–2010), b. London
When Lynn Redgrave won a supporting actress nomination for her fusspot Hungarian housekeeper to James Whale in
Gods and Monsters
(98, Bill Condon), she showed a kind of expertise that suggested she could have rivaled Thelma Ritter in nominations. But, in truth, it’s a strange career, which includes several shows on American TV—
Not for Women Only, House Calls, Teachers Only
, and
Chicken Soup
—as well as commercials for weight reduction plans.

She was the younger sister of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave and the daughter of Rachel Kempson and Sir Michael. She had a varied stage career, which included playing Ophelia to Peter O’Toole’s
Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Hay Fever, Black Comedy, The Three Sisters, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
, and her one-woman show,
Shakespeare for My Father
.

In movies, she began with supporting roles in
Tom Jones
(63, Tony Richardson) and
The Girl with Green Eyes
(64, Desmond Davis) before her breakthrough in
Georgy Girl
(66, Silvio Narizzaro), taken from the Margaret Forster novel. It’s a strange film, all the stranger in that there was a real romance between Redgrave and her male lead, James Mason.

Films followed, but there was no strong pattern:
The Deadly Affair
(67, Sidney Lumet); with Rita Tushingham in
Smashing Time
(67, Davis);
The Virgin Soldiers
(69, John Dexter);
Last of the Mobile HotShots
(70, Lumet);
Every Little Crook and Nanny
(72, Cy Howard);
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask
) (72, Woody Allen);
Don’t Turn the Other Cheek
(73, Duccio Tessari), a comic spaghetti Western;
The National Health
(73, Jack Gold); as Xaviera Hollander in
The Happy Hooker
(75, Nicholas Sgarro);
The Big Bus
(76, James Frawley);
Sunday Lovers
(80, Bryan Forbes);
Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home
(87, Alan Smithee, Paul Aaron);
Getting It Right
(89, Randal Kleiser);
Midnight
(89, Norman Thaddeus Vane); with her sister, Vanessa, in a TV remake of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(91, David Greene); as the wife to David Helfgott in
Shine
(96, Scott Hicks).

She was also a regular in the TV series
Rude Awakening
, as the drunken mother. Her résumé was absurdly crowded with minor work:
All I Wanna Do
(98, Sarah Kernochan);
The Annihilation of Fish
(01, Charles Burnett);
Varian’s War
(01, Lionel Chetwynd);
Spider
(02, David Cronenberg);
Unconditional Love
(02, P. J. Hogan); the voice of Cordelia in
The Wild Thornberrys Movie
(02, Jeff McGrath and Cathy Malkasian); the witch in
Hansel & Gretel
(02, Gary J. Tunni-cliffe);
Anita and Me
(02, Metin Hüseyin);
Charlie’s War
(03, David Abbott);
Peter Pan
(03, P. J. Hogan); outstanding as a witness in
Kinsey
(04, Condon);
The White Countess
(05, James Ivory);
The Jane Austen Book Club
(07, Robin Swicord);
Confessions of a Shopaholic
(09, Hogan);
My Dog Tulip
(09, Paul Fierlinger).