I have a Mount Rushmore of actors that I grew up with as a child. Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Redford are on that list. Jack Nicholson is next in line for me. They epitomized what it was like to be a Hollywood star for me. I have come to terms with myself that I was going to start losing my childhood heroes, if you will. Not superheroes but real, live men who brought me more joy than I could ever say. I’ve lived with the films of these men for quite a while. They’ve become part of me. The first of them to go is Robert Redford, the founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Oscar winner for Best Director for Ordinary People, and an all-around philanthropic man. He lived up to the lofty place I put him because he deserved it.

The early films of Redford I fell in love with were Jeremiah Johnson, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men. Johnson follows a wanderer in the mountains who goes through life fending off would-be assassins from the Blackfoot Tribe of Native Americans. That gif mistakenly thought to be Zach Galifinakis, all bushy and smiling as the camera moves in, is Redford as the titular character. In Butch Cassidy, he and Paul Newman played real-life bank robbers in the Old West all the way to their climactic showdown in Bolivia. In Condor, Redford plays a CIA researcher who discovers his co-workers have all been killed in their secret New York office and tries to find out who is responsible, while in All the President’s Men, he and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, and investigate the Watergate scandal, leading to President Nixon’s resignation. These are all great films, and he showed me who he was as an actor at this time in his career. 

In the 80s, he was equally successful as an actor as well as a director. He won his first and only Academy Award for directing the tear-jerker family drama Ordinary People, which also won Best Picture. This is a great film, but I’ve always had resentment towards it because two of my favorites, Raging Bull and The Elephant Man, didn’t win that. Plus, The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t even nominated, as Star Wars: A New Hope was. That’s on the Academy, not Redford, so I should be upset at him. Another film I loved in the 80s was The Natural, where he played a baseball player who survives a shooting and makes a comeback years later. “Pick Me Out A Winner, Bobby,” is a quote that I will always remember. Out of Africa was a good film as well, also winning Best Picture (from producer-director Sydney Pollack), with Redford and co-lead Meryl Streep having great chemistry as lovers in colonial Kenya.

The 90s were another good decade for him with the erotic drama Indecent Proposal, the crime-comedy Sneakers, and the newsroom romantic drama, Up Close & Personal. On the directing front, he had three big films under his command. In 1992, he directed Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It, 1994’s Quiz Show, about the infamous gameshow fixing scandal of the 1950s which earned him another Oscar nomination for Best Director, and 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, a Western that Redford first directed, which he also acted in, where he helps a teenage riding prodigy (Scarlett Johansson) recover from a devastating injury. The last two decades had him slowing down a bit, but still directing solid films such as The Legend of Bagger Vance, Lions for Lambs, and The Conspirator, as well as acting in Tony Scott’s thriller Spy Game, the adventure-drama All Is Lost, and even joining the Marvel club with a role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and his final on-screen performance in Avengers: Endgame.

Not only was Robert Redford a great actor and director, but he also used his power as a celebrity to create The Sundance Film Festival, the biggest independent film festival in the world. It is here in Park City, Utah (now moving to Salt Lake City), that the careers of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Damien Chazelle, and so many others began. The workshops for writers and directors have been an incredible asset to the film industry, spawning many other film festivals based on Sundance. His philanthropy to film and other major causes, such as promoting environmentalism, will always be remembered in Hollywood. 

When I use the word hero, I’m serious. Men like him were a replacement in my life for not having a great father figure. I lived vicariously through Jeremiah Johnson, Bob Wardward, The Sundance Kid, Joseph Turner, and Roy Hobbs. These characters took me places like the Old West, a dilapidated ballpark in the 1930s, a newspaper room in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, and many other places. I even got to see a struggling middle-class family in the early 80s have difficulties I only thought my family had. Actors like Redford brought us to places and times you never thought you’d see in your lifetime, except in movies. That’s why he, among others, is one of my true heroes in life because he did things nobody else could do. They gave me an imagination I wouldn’t have ever had had I not watched his films. Redford is the first of my true heroes, after the passing of Gene Hackman, to move on to their next life. 

He won’t be the last, and I’ve come to realize that. He will be dearly missed, and every time I watch one of his films, I’ll remember what a great man he was. Rest easy, Mr. Redford.

Dan Skip Allen