Robert Redford embodied an American ideal, and often lived the part, too

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NEW YORK (AP) — Born during the Great Depression with sun-kissed California looks, Robert Redford never failed to epitomize something quintessential and hopeful about the American character.

Redford, who died Tuesday at the age of 89, left a movie trail etched into land. He seemed to reside as much across the American landscape as he did on movie screens. He was in the Rocky Mountains of “Jeremiah Johnson,” the Wyoming grasslands of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the Washington, D.C., alleyways of “All the President’s Men” and the Montana streams of “A River Runs Through It.”

“From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside,” Redford told The Associated Press in 2018.

Redford, a movie-star paragon, was surely savvy with how he played with and used his all-American image. No one who starred in the baseball drama “The Natural” (1984) and gave Bernard Malamud’s novel a storybook ending couldn't have some sense of self-mythology. But it was one of Redford’s greatest feats that, despite his fame, he remained innately connected to some aspirational American ideal. Redford, an open-air actor of easy, rugged charm, evoked the kind of regular guy decency that stars like Jimmy Stewart did before him — only Redford did it through an era of distrust and disillusionment.

“He was to me a throwback to the actors that I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies: real, classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie stars who were very, very redolent of some kind of American essence,” said Sydney Pollack, who directed Redford in “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Way We Were” and “Three Days of the Condor,” in 1993. “They were very much a part of the American landscape and they were heroic in a kind of understated way.”

That was most true, perhaps, in Utah. Wanting to escape paved-over Los Angeles, Redford first began buying land there early in his career. In Utah, he would fight to protect both untrampled wilderness and a spirit of moviemaking that had grown increasingly difficult in Hollywood. As a longtime trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, Redford was an outspoken environmentalist. In the 1970s, he successfully opposed a pair of rural Utah proposals: a six-lane highway and coal-fired power plant.

In the Utah mountains, Redford also launched the Sundance Institute. Beyond Sundance's annual festival for independent film, the institute has been a lifeblood young filmmakers. Its year-round laboratory — the part of Sundance that Redford was most proud of — has helped nurture some of the most vital voices in American cinema for decades.

“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford once said of his legacy. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard. The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told.”

That spirit of independence often infused his films, too. When Redford wanted to make “All the President’s Men,” the seminal 1976 film directed by Alan Pakula about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation, few in the film industry thought there was much drama to be found in a story that was then several years old.

“Nixon had already resigned, and the held opinion (in Hollywood) was ‘No one cares. No one wants to hear about this,’” Redford, who also co-produced the film, said in 2006. “And I said, ‘No, it’s not about Nixon. It’s about something else. It’s about investigative journalism and hard work.’”

If “All the President’s Men,” one of the greatest newspaper movies, detailed the hard-earned revelations of Watergate, “Three Days of the Condor” — one of the greatest political thrillers — captured the paranoia and disillusionment that followed. If anyone was completely unfamiliar with why Redford was so good, “Three Days of the Condor” would be a good place to start.

As a bookish CIA employee code-named Condor, he returns from lunch to his office to find, as he soon reports, “Everybody is dead.” Condor, untrained for such lethal spy activities, is left dangling in the wind.

“Will you bring me in, please?” he pleads by phone to his superiors. “I’m not a field agent. I just read books.”

Not so different from his Woodward of “All the President’s Men,” Redford is a fresh-faced novice thrown into a high-stakes scheme where few, including those in the government, can be trusted. No one has ever been better at playing the regular guy trying to think fast on his feet, and make sense of an ever-darker world.

Though some called for him to, Redford never entered politics, himself. He remained outspoken — he's in some way the model for the modern Hollywood activist — on a wide range of issues, including Indigenous and LGBTQ+ rights. The closest he came to running for office was Michael Ritchie's 1972 satire “The Candidate,” in which Redford played an idealistic lawyer enlisted to challenge a highly favored incumbent Republican senator. Redford’s candidate ultimately wins, but not without sacrificing his principles and seeing much of what he stands for diluted.

Redford’s place, instead, was outside politics. The perfect bookend to his ’70s movies is “Sneakers,” Phil Alden Robinson’s absurdly underrated 1992 caper starring Redford as a former ’60s radical now living under a false moniker and leading a band of security specialists. They stumble into possession of a computer device that brings the attention of the NSA, CIA, FBI and many others, forcing Redford to, yet again, try to figure out what’s moral in a dangerous (and now newly digital) America.

The world that Redford’s films often presciently depicted seemed to push him further into the wilderness, on screen and off. He largely retreated into retirement over the last decade. When Redford died, he was at his home in the Utah mountains, outside Provo. One of his last films was 2015's “A Walk in the Woods,” playing Bill Bryson ambling along the Appalachian Trail.

The most fitting and elegiac swan song, though was J.C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost,” a near-wordless 2013 drama about an old man at sea. Redford plays a solo mariner whose sailboat collides with a shipping container. Though terse, the movie reverberates with economic and ecological metaphor. A visibly older and weathered Redford — no longer the golden, freckled face of his youth — suffers through increasingly rough and stormy seas, improvising his survival.

For an actor who had covered so much ground, “All Is Lost” was one last frontier. Redford's unnamed character was credited only as “Our Man.”