Legendary actor Robert Redford passed away in September, at the age of 89. One of the biggest movie stars of the 20th century, Redford had an accomplished career as a director, making such films as Ordinary People, Quiz Show, and A River Runs Through It. He also founded and supervised the Sundance Film Festival.
Redford famously tried out for The Graduate, but didn’t get the part, when director Mike Nichols asked him if he’d ever struck out with a girl, and Redford was unfamiliar with the concept. A fictional version of him was even the president of the United States for more than 25 years, in the alternate universe of the Watchmen comic books.
But Redford, above all, was known as a movie star, appearing in a variety of memorable films, in numerous genres, over a long period of time, including several Marvel movies in the last years of his life; Avengers: Endgame ended up serving as his final role.
Here are ten of the best, and as you can see from the clips below, his films tended to have great endings.
All the President’s Men
In 1976, Redford played Bob Woodward, to Dustin Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein, in the adaptation of the Washington Post reporters’ stories on the Watergate scandal, which helped bring down President Richard Nixon. That’s him, on the left typewriter.
The Candidate
In another political film from the ‘70s, Redford starred in director Michael Ritchie’s 1973 film as a handsome young liberal candidate who takes on a long-shot bid for a U.S. Senate seat. The film boasts one of the best-ever final lines.
The Way We Were
Also in 1973, Redford starred in Sydney Pollack’s film, which combined sweeping romance with politics. Redford played a wealthy WASP in a decades-spanning romance with Barbra Streisand’s Jewish leftist.
Jeremiah Johnson
The year before that, Redford starred as the titular mountain man in this Western, also directed by Pollack. Among other things, this film inspired a popular gif:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
One of the best Westerns ever made, George Roy Hill’s film starred Redford and Paul Newman as the famed outlaw duo, in a film written by the great William Goldman. It’s probably the only major Western in which the heroes flee to Bolivia in the middle of the movie.
The Sting
Redford would reunite with Newman and Hill four years later for the caper film The Sting. Combining a complicated plot with charismatic, movie-star performances from the actors, The Sting went on to win a truckload of Oscars.
The Natural
Sure, the 1984 film changed a lot from Bernard Malamud’s novel, starting with changing its ending message from “heroism is bad” to “heroism is good.” And Redford was too old at the time to play an active baseball player. But the film, starring Redford as mythical baseball hero Roy Hobbs, is one of the most iconic films about the game, starting with that Randy Newman theme song, which is hard not to get in one’s head when even thinking about this film.
Out of Africa
It might be as esteemed as some of the other Best Picture winners in the 1980s, and its politics haven’t held up so well. But 1985’s Out of Africa is another sweeping epic romance, also directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Redford and Meryl Streep.
Sneakers
In 1992, Redford teamed up with the director of another magical realism-dependent baseball movie, Field of Dreams’ Phil Alden Robinson, for this caper film, in which he starred opposite another 20th-century acting heavyweight, Sidney Poitier, in one of Poitier’s final big-screen movie roles before his retirement.
All is Lost
Redford’s final great role came in J.C. Chandor’s 2013 drama, which featured him, for the entire running time, lost at sea aboard a raft. Not only was it a difficult but successful acting exercise, but it led to one of the most memorable post-screening Q&A questions of all time:
