Robert Redford
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Can’t believe he’s in another movie! What will be his legacy?
the DataLounge
No, R12, he was nothing of the kind. He kept the wife and kids in Utah or Malibu or the NYC apartment and fucked around to his heart's content. He's even semi-admitted it in an interview at least once when discussing going to parties in Hollywood.

He said the girls were on offer in the pool and he jumped right in and took them (although professing some shame about it now). Look at the scene in Havana with the two girls, directed by Redford's close friend of many years, Sydney Pollack. That's drunk Redford was like with one night stands./party girls. Back when he was married to the first wife he would fuck a girl for a while and then dump them brutally when he got bored or they got clingy. One phone call, it's over. Done.

Conservative and buttoned down? You know nothing. Are you the same dumb cunt who has been posting that tired crap every time we discuss Redford here? Because you're not fooling anyone and I don't know why you bother. The last time, or maybe it was the time before that, another DLer cracked, "Who knew he had PR working online?"

He was married to Lola the Mormon for a hundred years. They had four children, the first died of crib death when they were a young couple. They went on to have two daughters and a son. There was something with the son, Jamie, a serious illness of some kind but I don't remember the specifics. He survived. Lola and Redford divorced when the kids were older, in the mid-80's. No muss, no fuss, nothing untoward in the papers.

He went through several relationships and eventually married a German artist about ten years ago. They are still married.

So with all this philandering and alcoholism and whatnot what’s kind of amazing is that he has never had any negative gossip about him - basically ever. Was never in the gossip columns I don’t even think at the peak of his fame. How did he manage to dodge that bullet and keep such a lily white reputation?

Mind you I think he’s an overall good guy, but things like the above - especially for a star of his magnitude - almost always get reported. I guess what I’m saying is it’s amazing how much of his private life he managed to keep private and I don’t really know how he managed to do that. But good for him.

I was very disappointed when I heard that he wanted to do "The Verdict" but only on the condition that the script be rewritten so that the lead character, Frank Galvin, was no longer an alcoholic. Clearly Redford had no understanding of the character at all. And he was fired or abandoned the film.

Paul Newman did the role as written and got an Oscar nomination. In fact, Newman once said he would have liked to do a follow up movie about the character to find out what had happened to him.

Finding out about Redford insistence on changing the basics of that main character removing his flaws reminded me that in almost all of his movies he plays the good guy. Nice guy. Rather flawless.

(Someone also told me that Redford had demanded similar changes in "The Horse Whisperer".)

Exception is "Downhill Racer" which was early in his career and perhaps that movie he did with Woody Harrelson (which I never saw).

Unlike Newman who was a far superior actor and loved the Galvin character and who was not afraid to play nasty guys - thinking of "Hud".

Redford was undoubtedly handsome but not a very brave actor.

And his still hanging onto that "surfer boy" image at his age is just silly.

Redford was a much better actor than Armie Hammer, but he never really made the transition to character actor that comes with age. Newman remained a leading man but in essentially character parts. Newman started out a "star" and more pretty than skilled as an actor, but he developed with time. Redford gave some good performances and hass given back to the profession through Sundance, but seems more stunted as an actor and a bit too vain to come up with a more realistic way to age. In a way, he's old Hollywood in that way, but even those oldtimers knew when to stop. Cary Grant retired when he was too old to play Cary Grant, leading man. Of course, the point was that he retired rather than let his vanity get the better of him. John Wayne was able to play ancient versions of his Western characthers but he came to realize he was awful in modern dress parts.

I think the most famous instance about him not being brave as an actor is in The Way We Were and having the reason for the breakup of the marriage cut out of the film.

To be honest if I were the producer of the film I would have wanted it out as well. It would have left too bitter a taste in people's mouths for such a big epic romance. Who wants their romantic hero in a Hollywood film to turn out to be a sniveling shit? Sorry Arthur but you were wrong.

Gary Oldman on Redford:

I will always say this to students of acting—we talk about phone acting… There’s an example in Darkest Hour when I’m on the phone with Roosevelt. Often you’re not speaking to the other actor; someone is reading the lines in the room or you’re not even getting any of the feed. There are people who are very good at it and people who are not good at it. In All the President’s Men, there is one take of Redford switching phones, talking to different people; it’s about six or seven minutes long. Very, very slow push in on Redford. And I would say to students, “You want to see phone acting? That is the Michelangelo of phone acting.”

Arthur Laurents never stopped talking about his resentment about the cutting of the film though he made a fortune off it, more than Redford or Streisand, due to L Bernstein's brilliant sister who was his agent.

The reason the couple break up is because as a communist she will harm his career in Hollywood. His ambition and wanting to look good in front of McCarthy is more important to him than any great love. He will not look like a communist sympathizer. So he dumps her. It's a bit more nuanced than that but it's basically what happens.

"His ambition and wanting to look good in front of McCarthy"

R102, who is McCarthy? Sen Joe McCarthy? He went after the State Department in the 1950s and had nothing to do with the story in The Way We Were. HUAC did.

The real reason Streisand and Redford split in The Way Were was because her college boyfriend (James Woods) named her before the committee (HUAC), and she was called to testify. Because she planned to refuse to name others as communists, which would have ended Redford's career, they divorced. She had to choose between her beliefs and her marriage, like how much of herself was she willing to sacrifice for her husband/the marriage.

In previews, the audiences hate these scenes, so Pollack took scissors and cut them out himself in the projection room (his words). They were out of the final print delivered to theaters when the movie opened on Oct 73. The original storyline could have been saved with 3-4 minutes added to a couple of scenes to explain it when they originally filmed, not the 15-20 of scenes that Pollack eventually cut.

But Pollack was not the sharpest guy in the world. Wasn't it he who Arthur Laurents credited with the line that went something like "you wrote such a beautiful love story even though you're a homosexual."

Redford's blondness came out of a bottle his entire career. I think he handsome heartthrob status would never have happened without the bleach, because his looks were far less compelling with his natural reddish brown. However, there are limits. Being blonder at 45 than you were at 35 is absurd. Here he is a child in natural, if he had been a real blond, it would have been almost white-blond at this age: