Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Featured Icon: Robert Redford

Charles Robert Redford Jr. (born August 18, 1936), better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, model, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. His popular films include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Sneakers (1992). As a filmmaker, his notable films include Ordinary People (1980), A River Runs Through It (1992), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000).

Redford's career—like that of almost all major stars who emerged in the 1950s—began in New York, where an actor could find work both in television and on stage. Starting in 1959, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including The Untouchables, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate and The Twilight Zone, among others. He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962). One of his last television appearances was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.

While still largely an unknown, Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), co-starring with John Saxon in a film set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the debuts of Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt. After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. In Inside Daisy Clover (1965) he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood, and rejoined her for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966)—again as her lover. The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. Fonda and Redford were paired again in the big screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967) and were again co-stars in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).

Redford became concerned about his blond male stereotype image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman. The film was a huge success and made him a bankable star and cemented his screen image as an intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy.


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Video: Tribute to Robert Redford
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUur0VbSdz0

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