Robert Redford, legend of 20th and 21st-century cinema, has sadly passed away at the age of 89. To celebrate a six-decade legacy, we've rounded up here some of his greatest ever performances. He was an all-rounder with charm, intellect and dazzling looks who parlayed early success into one of the most enduring careers in Hollywood. As an actor, director and producer he'll be remembered with the greats.
From paranoid thrillers to buddy comedies and rom-coms, these are some of his finest moments – along with details on where you can watch them right now. Don't stop here – there are plenty more where these came from...
Barefoot in the Park
Hollywood has never been short of blond-haired, chiselled young Californian men, and Redford hovered in the background for years. He was a hit in the Broadway debut of Neil Simon's play about troubled young newlyweds, and when it transferred to the big screen four years later, he became a superstar almost overnight. His chemistry with Jane Fonda – he's stuffy and conservative, she's free-spirited – was undeniable and still strikes a chord today with anyone who believes that opposites attract.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
It was a pairing of a different kind that cemented Redford's position as a superstar, and created a whole new genre at the same time: the buddy comedy.
Playing the laconic, dead-shot Sundance Kid (a name he would later give to his Utah ranch and subsequently the independent film festival he set up there), he provides raw charisma while screen partner Paul Newman, himself no shrinking screen presence, charms the pants off everyone he meets. It set a new template for male stars on screen, proving you could have two megawatt personalities working in tandem and taking the audience along for the ride.
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The Sting
With Redford pairing once again with Newman, the two found entirely new notes in their on-screen duet: this time Newman was world-weary, knowing and smart, while Redford was more of an ingenu.
As Depression-era con men taking on the gangster who killed their buddy, it's a perfect Swiss watch of a con-job story, prefiguring the likes of Ocean's Eleven. It's also a treat to see Jaws' Robert Shaw in one of his other signature roles as the thoroughly nasty Doyle Lonnegan.
Three Days of the Condor
As the '70s progressed, the times grew darker and the movies more paranoid. Three Days of the Condor is one of the key titles in that era of thrillers, alongside The Parallax View and All the President's Men (about which more later...)
Redford stars as a bookish CIA analyst who returns from lunch one ordinary day to discover his colleagues murdered. He grabs a gun and flees.
What follows is a constant, nerve-shredding cat-and-mouse as Redford's Joe Turner seeks help only to find again and again that the powers that be are stalking his every move. The scene where he kidnaps a woman, only to earn her trust and later become her lover (problematic though that undoubtedly is as twists go) later became a touchstone and explicit reference for Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, where George Clooney's prisoner on the run talks about it with Jennifer Lopez's US marshal in the boot of her car – where he has taken her prisoner.
All the President's Men
Ready for more paranoia? This time the mistrust and political cynicism are entirely earned, because it's a true story. Based on Bob Woodward (played by Redford) and Carl Bernstein's (Dustin Hoffman) book about the investigations that led them to uncover the Watergate scandal, it leads the viewer through clattering newsrooms and sinister underground car parks on the trail of a seemingly simple crime – a hotel burglary – that eventually brought down a presidency and shattered trust in the US government forever.
Indecent Proposal
We guess 'silver fox' isn't quite the right term for a guy who was always golden-haired, but in his mid-fifties, Redford was the perfect fit for the millionaire who has it all but still wants more, or rather wants Moore – Demi Moore, as the Vegas-holidaying wife to whom he makes an offer she could maybe refuse, or maybe not depending on what she agrees with her husband Woody Harrelson.
A million dollars for a night of infidelity – it's the premise for a drama that came at the peak of the erotic thriller era, but actually deals more with sexual politics than sexual acts.
Quiz Show
Wait, what? No, Redford didn't star in Quiz Show – Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro had that honour – but it's worth remembering that as well as being a star and all-round Hollywood power player, Redford was a director of considerable stature.
1994's Quiz Show is, as they say, the kind of film they don't make any more. A period drama and true story about the TV quiz-show scandal of the '50s, it stars Turturro and Fiennes as a nerdy, Jewish quiz contestant and his aristocratic rival respectively, both of whom were revealed to have been given the answers in advance, all the better to please viewers while deceiving them about the nature of the show they were watching. It's elegant, perfect paced and still carries weight as an indictment of entertainment media's complicity in the corruption of US culture. Phew!
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Editor, Digital Spy Chris has over 25 years' experience as a writer and editor, having worked as a journalist covering TV and movies since the '90s. Starting out as a TV listings editor at the Press Association, he was quickly hired by the nascent Heat magazine, where he rose to become Senior Editor, interviewing the likes of Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and Paris Hilton. Over the years he has written about entertainment with clarity and wit for Heat, Elle, Q, The Telegraph and of course Digital Spy, and has served many times as a judge in the Royal Television Society awards. He has written and recorded a novelty single with Lord Lloyd-Webber, written scripts for the National TV Awards, made Noel Edmonds cry, accidentally punched an Inbetweener and stolen a small piece of rubble from the Battle of Hogwarts movie set. (They can't have it back.) LinkedIn
