Remembering the career and legacy of Robert Redford

Images via Oregon Live, Biography and Rolling Stone

On Tuesday, Hollywood lost one of its greatest faces and creators when Robert Redford passed away at the age of 89.

Robert Redford was born in Santa Monica in 1936. He attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, but heavy drinking in his first year-and-a-half lost him his scholarship and his admission. He travelled around Europe for some time later, spending considerable time in Spain, France, and Italy, before going to study paining at the Pratt Institute and then take classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He started his career in stage and television in the 1960s. He had a great Broadway career and guest stared in numerous television hits such as Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Virginians. He won his first Golden Globe, in the now-discontinued category for Best New Star, for the film Inside Daisy Clover, where he co-stared with Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, and Roddy McDowall.

His recurring roles of a specific type of character made him worried that he would be typecast, so he refused roles in famous movies such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. But he would find all that he was looking for when he stared alongside Paul Newman in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for which he won a BAFTA.

This began a good relationship with actor Paul Newman, whom would also star alongside him in the 1973 Best Picture-winner, The Sting. Earlier that year, he stared alongside Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, and later would star as the titular enigmatic character in The Great Gatsby. He worked with Dustin Hoffman in the ripped-from-the-headlines adaptation of the Woodward and Bernstein memoir All the President's Men, based on their caper to uncover the Watergate Scandal.

Redford longed for work behind the camera, and when given his chance, he directed the 1980 film, Ordinary People, staring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, and Timothy Hutton. The film won four Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Hutton), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and won Redford his sole Oscar, in the category of Best Director.

Other great hits of his lifelong career include A Bridge Too Far, the Best Picture-winner Three Days of Condor, Out of Africa, Indecent Proposal, A River Runs Through It, All is Lost, and The Natural. He leaves behind a legacy of suave but deeply human characters and a screen history that will be looked at with great fondness for the years to come.