32 | Age Robert Redford was when he made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alongside Paul Newman. Steve McQueen had passed on the role, and Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, suggested they hire Redford, a little-known stage actor.
1 | Position the theme song The Way We Were held on Billboard’s year-end singles chart in 1974; the Barbra Streisand-sung tune also won Best Original Song at the Oscars. The film of the same name, starring Redford and Streisand, remains one of the most popular cinematic love stories of all time. “Every day on the set of The Way We Were was exciting, intense and pure joy,” Streisand wrote after her co-star’s death, calling him “charismatic, intelligent, intense – and always interesting.”
$450,00 | Amount Redford paid for the film rights to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation thriller All the President’s Men, which he starred in with Dustin Hoffman in 1976.
4 | Academy Award nominations Redford received. He was up for Best Actor for The Sting in 1973; and Best Director and Best Picture in 1994 for Quiz Show. His only win came in 1980 for directing the tragic family drama Ordinary People. And he was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2002, which he accepted saying, “I think the glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.”
15 | Aspiring filmmakers Redford invited to his ski resort in the mountains in Utah in 1981. That little workshop sowed the seeds of the behemoth Sundance Film Festival, which has helped launch the careers of groundbreaking independent filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Stephen Soderbergh and the Coen brothers.
9 | Jersey number of Roy Hobbs, the fictional baseball player Redford portrayed in one of his most famous films, The Natural. The actor says he chose the number as a homage to real-life Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams.
1.7 million | Acres of Utah wilderness Redford helped save from development. The land was eventually deemed protected by presidential decree during Barack Obama’s tenure.
80,000 | Mustangs in America. In his decades-long quest to protect their freedom to roam, Redford executive produced the 2021 documentary, The Mustangs: America’s Wild Horses, and wrote, “Horses are interwoven into the very fabric of what is America. What threatens them threatens us all.”
77 | Age Redford was still doing his own stunts. In the 2017 stranded-at-sea film All is Lost, he braved the watery action sequences: he was tossed around the boat by crashing waves, submerged to his waist on the sinking yacht and eventually made a nine-foot jump into the water. “They beat the hell out of me,” Redford said.
2019 | Year Redford stepped back as the face of the Sundance Festival (although his non-profit Sundance Institute still runs it), saying he wanted to spend more time with filmmakers and less time promoting the already well-known event.
2 | Marvel universe movies Redford appeared in. The king of independent cinema portrayed Alexander Pierce, the disgraced former director of S.H.I.E.L.D in The Winter Soldier and Endgame. “I wanted to experience this new form of filmmaking that’s taken over where you have kind of cartoon characters brought to life through high technology.”
$20 million | Box office take of The Old Man & the Gun, Redford’s final starring role, at age 82. In the independent film, he played real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker (who escaped San Quentin in his 70s and pulled off a series of heists), ending his career with a poignant callback to the Sundance Kid.
READ MORE about the actor’s status as a stylish icon of cool in our retrospective of his fashion codes.
