Actor Robert Redford, Hollywood's golden and committed smile, dies.

BarcelonaAmerican actor and director Robert Redford died Tuesday at his home in Utah at the age of 89, according to reports. The New York Times, which cites her representative, Cindi Berger, as a source. A Hollywood legend and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, her filmography includes films such as The coup, All the President's Men and Two men and one destiny. He won an Oscar as director for his directorial debut, Ordinary people (1980), and in 2002 an honorary Oscar for his entire career.

The actor reached stardom in the late sixties, when the studio system was already dying, but his classic heartthrob appeal, the nobility of his gaze and the winning smile made Redford an old-fashioned star, almost from the golden age of Hollywood. He lived without problems with his status as a sex symbol, but he did not exploit it at any price; on the contrary, as soon as he gained power in the industry he used it to support projects with a marked political character, such as All the President's Men (1976), a gripping chronicle of the journalistic investigation into the Watergate scandal, and the corrosive political satire The candidate (1972).

In some ways, Redford was one of the first to shape the archetype of the committed actor, especially through the creation of the Sundance Institute, the birthplace of the most important independent film festival in the United States, which he founded himself. However, his cinema as an actor and director always moved within the aesthetic orbit of Hollywood. He starred in films as popular and emblematic of his time as buddy movie par excellence Two men and one destiny (1969), one western about the bandits Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Redford), which was not his first success, but it did establish the actor's image as a film star: skeptical, biting and with the charm of eternal losers.

Productive societies

The absolute chemistry that Redford and Newman had in the film – two friends who shared everything, even their wife, and who faced death with a sardonic laugh – was attempted to be captured again in the thriller of scammers The coup (1973), also directed by the efficient George Roy Hill and featuring a wonderful soundtrack of ragtime piano melodies by Scott Joplin. Redford was an actor whose iconic presence was enough to fill the screen, but he knew how to establish interesting partnerships; for example, with Jane Fonda, the co-star of his first film success, the film adaptation of Neil Simon's play Barefoot in the park (1967). Fonda and Redford, Hollywood royalty who shared an interest in politics and had already met in The hunt –starring Marlon Brando–, they met again in 1979 in the stimulating neowesternThe electric rider.

His status as a cinematic myth was established during the 1970s, his most inspired and productive period, when he displayed charisma and vulnerability in a classic of the western twilight like Jeremiah Johnson (1972), signed by Sydney Pollack who would direct him again to the jewel of the thriller modern conspiracy theorist, The Three Days of the Condor (1975), in which he plays a secret agent caught in an internal US government conspiracy that resonates strongly in our present.

With Pollack's endorsement as director, Redford made his two most popular forays into romantic melodrama: Just as we were (1973), a bittersweet and nostalgic journey through the history of the marriage formed by Redford and Barbra Streisand, and the most successful Out of Africa (1985), the Oscar-winning and hugely popular adaptation of Isak Dinesen's autobiography. The death of Redford's character in that film, actually played by the great Meryl Streep, also marked the actor's farewell as a romantic lead, likely because at fifty he understood it was time to stop playing the leading man.

Beginnings as a painter

Redford was born in 1936 in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in a working-class family with no connection to the arts. While his childhood was uneventful, his youth was more turbulent due to the death of his mother in 1955. His alcohol consumption and erratic behavior caused him to lose his scholarship and be expelled from university, an incident he took advantage of to pack his bags and travel around Europe while trying to train as a painter. The lack of interest in his paintings led him back to the United States, where he studied drama and, aided by his good looks, got his first acting jobs in plays and television series.

During his early years, Redford could not afford to give up the roles that exploited his undeniable canonical appeal as a white, Anglo-Saxon man, but throughout his career he established a more complex relationship with his image. sex symbol, for example when he played the tycoon who offers a million dollars to spend a night with Demi Moore in An indecent proposal (1993). In some ways, Redford was one of the first Hollywood actors to manage the dilemma of sex symbol And, like his friend Paul Newman, he turned out well. His beauty was an addition to his characters, not the element around which they pivoted. That's why he was able to play such rich characters as the prison warden who pretends to be a prisoner. Brubaker (1980) to reveal the institutional corruption of the center, the social climber Gatsby from the 1974 adaptation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel or the journalist from the Washington Post investigating Nixon's dealings in All the President's Men.

The Sundance Man

The turning point in Redford's career came in 1980 when the Hollywood Academy awarded his first film as director, the family melodrama about loss and grief Ordinary people, with a shower of Oscars: best film, director, supporting actor (Timothy Hutton) and screenplay. After having done everything as an actor, Redford begins to give priority to projects as a director and to promote the activity of the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Festival, a project that begins discreetly but during the nineties grows extraordinarily and becomes the epicenter of a cinematographic movement, that of cinema indie American: Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith are some of the filmmakers who are making their name with their first works in the context of the festival, which takes its name from the character of Two men and one destiny.

The irony is that the vast majority of Sundance filmmakers have very little in common with the cinema directed by Redford during these years, more typical of a Hollywood that was politically committed at heart but conventional in form. The ecological concerns ofA place called Miracle (1988), the fascination with rural life and the beauty of natureThe river of life (1992) or The man who whispered to horses (1998) had no place in the postmodern genre grinder that was American cinema in the 1990s. Director Redford's most interesting works are perhaps the most explicitly political: the black comedy about the game show scam Quiz show (1994) and Pact of silence (2012), one thriller about a former member of a far-left group who can't escape his past.

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