Robert Redford didn’t outlive his legend; he refused to act it. In Hollywood, the standard career arc is a slow, ironic death by self-parody—actors playing variations of themselves until the mythology curdles. Marlon Brando ballooned into eccentricity, Al Pacino has been yelling for thirty years, and Robert De Niro has spent the better part of two decades mugging through comedies that make you wince. Even Dustin Hoffman, that seemingly brilliant bundle of neurosis, has occasionally leaned on the shtick. Redford, who died at 89, avoided all of that. He never winked, never coasted, never reduced himself to “Robert Redford". Until the end, he remained cinema’s most consistent adult in the room.

The story begins with television. In the early 1960s, Redford cut his teeth in what was left of the golden age of live TV, appearing opposite Anthony Perkins and Alec Guinness. He shared his earliest roles with Jane Fonda, another future rebel against Hollywood’s disposable culture. His breakthrough came in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), a small-town fever dream that put him on screen with Brando. A few years later, when Brando turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the slot went to Redford. What might have looked like luck was really the culmination of an apprenticeship: he had already chosen against the obvious career-makers, rejecting The Graduate (1967) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Not cowardice—clarity. He was unwilling to be typecast before he had even begun.

Paul Newman saw something others missed. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wasn’t just a buddy western; it was a coronation. Newman fought for Redford’s casting, handing him a platform, not a consolation prize. Their chemistry was so natural that when they reunited in The Sting (1973), the........

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