I was sitting at a table at a studio commissary many years ago and suddenly felt things shift. The room, which had been buzzing and humming with the usual lunchtime energy, felt somehow different.
That’s a pretty good working definition of movie star, when you get right down to it: someone who can walk into a room and everyone feels an invisible electric charge. And it’s not as if people fussed over Redford or stared. It was a movie studio commissary. Famous faces were all over the place. But Redford was different. People felt a change in the room before they knew that it was he who had caused it. They looked up from their Caesar salads, saw Redford walk to his table, and got an instant, three-dimensional definition of charisma.
I’m not sure who Redford was having lunch with that day. That’s the drawback of having lunch with one of the most famous people in the world: Nobody remembers who else was there. (And often the waiter doesn’t even remember anyone else’s order.) I had never seen him on the Paramount lot before, so it’s quite possible that he was in the preliminary stages of developing a film project. Redford was well-known for the unhurried care he took in his movies — the deliberate pace of his casting meetings and the glacial way he made story and script adjustments — so this was probably just another one of the famous Redford projects that would never quite get off the ground. That’s another way you can tell the difference between a merely famous actor and a genuine movie star. The famous actor eagerly moves to the next project. The movie star takes his own sweet time.
Robert Redford, who died on Sept. 16 at 89 years old, hadn’t made a movie in nearly a decade, but he never stopped being a movie star. Redford rose from the generation of Hollywood actors where it was just assumed that any leading man would know how to ride a horse — which Redford did, famously, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and a few years later in The Electric Horseman — but also how to look elegant in a dinner jacket, romantic in Ivy League tweeds, action-ready in whatever the script called for. Redford began working in Hollywood well after the era of studio contracts and studio-managed careers had faded, so he was forced to be his own studio boss, making choices and guiding his career from male ingenue romantic lead (Barefoot in the Park in 1967) to Oscar-winning director (Ordinary People in 1980). That’s a pretty amazing trajectory in thirteen years.
The tight grip he kept on his production choices and the deliberate way he went about his various businesses and interests — starting a famous film festival, serious-minded directorial projects, and carefully selecting acting roles — are artifacts of a very old-fashioned way of managing a show business career. It’s a tricky thing to balance the crass and grasping nature of celebrity with the elevated, almost aristocratic aura of movie stardom, but somehow Redford managed it.
He took it all seriously, but you wouldn’t know it from watching him onscreen. Redford was the master of what we call throwing it away, a kind of effortless delivery that great movie actors know how to do by some kind of supernatural intuition. He knew how close that camera lens is — too close for “acting” — and he knew just how to navigate a scene so that he never looked like he was watching you watching him, which is where a lot of otherwise fine actors get bollixed up. And despite his dazzling smile and terrific looks, it was never certain that his character would get out of whatever jam he was in. Watching him dash across the screen in Three Days of the Condor, pursued by a relentless professional assassin played by Max von Sydow, it felt entirely possible that he wouldn’t get out of the movie alive, despite the perfect way his jacket flapped in the wind and his blond hair waved in the breeze. Again: movie star. And sadly, maybe the last one.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
