Why we can’t help but love Robert Redford and his reel of charming rogues

Robert Redford has said Old Man & the Gun will be his final film role. If so, it’s a fitting bookend to a career defined by charming American rogues

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The story of Forrest Tucker, a career criminal and prison escapee, is brought to life with Redford as the titular old man. Photograph: Eric Zachanowich/Entertainment One

“Every human blessing is a curse,” wrote US Esquire magazine, in 2013. “Consider Robert Redford’s face: Not only once upon a time—in 1967, say, in Barefoot in the Park, in which Jane Fonda, all legs, bouffant, and sexual torque, seems downright unpretty beside the banked flame of Redford’s physical perfection … but somehow even now, 76 years old, sun-baked and wind-whipped and ungorgeous at last, he’s a handsome sumbitch, a rugged harmony of pure American manhood.” Esquire, launched in 1933, had by the time of that profile spent eight decades in thrall to various versions of “pure American manhood”. For a large proportion of American men, however - hell, men everywhere, Esquire included - the benchmark was set in stone not in 1967 but in 1969.

Redford is fine in Barefoot In The Park - except that he’s not really Redford yet; not Redford-the-icon. He’s playing against type, as a cautious, overly conservative, stuffed-shirt attorney. It was two years later when he arrived, seemingly all at once, as a major star. Fully formed.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was more than a box-office hit. It was a vision of American manhood as Americans—hell, men everywhere—wished themselves to be. And though his ‘curse’ irritated him, “this constant reference to me being the way I looked”, Redford’s appeal has always been more than physical.

Now 82, Redford’s career has been hallmarked by charismatic larrikins. Roles for which a certain level of attractiveness is a given, but also just a starting point.

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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid legacy lives on at Madame Tussauds, Hollywood

From a grifter gunning for the big time in The Sting (1973), to a rodeo-star who defies his paymasters in The Electric Horseman (1979), to a reporter who defied Nixon in All The President’s Men (1976), Redford has been defined by laconic charm. Whether he’s making indecent proposals (Indecent Proposal) or an indecent run at the US Senate (The Candidate), his American rogue is a distinct and personal brand: easy-going, clear-eyed, handsome, enigmatic. If he’s in on the con, that’s okay; we’re in on it with him.

Redford worked out early that, as he told Rolling Stone in 1994, “that persona that’s created by some mix of media and the public” can come to define you, regardless of your intentions.

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Redford photographed in April 1970, months after the release of Butch Cassidy. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

“Butch Cassidy,” he noted, “was where [that public perception of him] went beyond, into an international situation.” But if Redford wasn’t entirely comfortable with his American icon status, even then, his efforts to avoid the limelight remained playful. Definitely more fitting of the playful rascals he’d become famous for than a celebrity uncomfortable with fame.

Don't miss Robert Redford in his final film

“The only way I remember being able to deal with it was with humor, to make a great, grand game of it,” he said. “So I remember playing mad games with my new celebrity. Changing my name, saying I was an exchange student from Bogota, wearing disguises to a Knicks game, wearing a disguise on a ski hill, only to have the disguise slide halfway up my head and me not know it and have people look at me like I was from outer space.”

As he grew, Redford branched out. He’s been an actor, director, chairman of the Sundance film festival, environmentalist, a committed LGBQI and native land rights activist. But both professionally and personally, since 1969, at some level he’s inescapably been Robert Redford, American icon as the ideal American man. Not to mention, as English writer Tom Nicholson noted this year, Hollywood’s “foremost practitioner of finding one good haircut and keeping it for the rest of your life”. Everything is seen through that filter.

Now, as Redford slows down after a lifetime of great roles, he’s leveraged that legacy. And like Clint Eastwood since Unforgiven, Redford’s personal brand elevates his third act in a way that only he could.

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The film sees Redford reunite with director David Lowery, who rose to prominence at the 2013 Sundance film festival, an event Redford has shepherded since 1978. Photograph: Eric Zachanowich/Entertainment One

In The Old Man & the Gun, Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a magnetic, octogenarian stick-up man with a familiar twinkle in his eye.

Tucker, a real-life figure, died in 2004, aged 83. As a career criminal, Tucker developed a reputation for charming bank tellers as he fleeced them, often while wearing a three-piece suit and ascot. The old lag was also an accomplished escape artist, having absconded from prison, in his words, “18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully”. As he’s depicted in the film (occasionally in flashback clips, cribbed from Redford’s earlier roles) the aging robber’s personal creed fits Redford like a glove. “It’s not about making a living,” says Tucker. “It’s about living.”

Redford has said that The Old Man & the Gun will be his last acting role - a declaration he’s since walked back. But even if it’s not, it’s easy to see Forrest Tucker as a natural corollary to characters such as The Sting’s Johnny Hooker or Harry ‘The Sundance Kid’ Longabaugh.

Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper

“It’s not a literal sequel to some of the films [Redford has] played before, where he played an outlaw,” writer/director David Lowery told Vanity Fair. “But in a spiritual way, it feels like a successor to those films, in that it almost captures the spirit of those characters at a later stage in life.”

In September, Redford offered his own take on Tucker’s motivation; the old charmer who doesn’t need the cash, but can’t leave the thrill of the game behind.

“It’s just about getting away with something,” he said. “And also putting a smile on the whole thing. The guy’s having such a good time. Let’s enjoy ourselves. He wants the people he’s robbing to enjoy it, too.”

Every human blessing is also a curse. But when you’re a rugged harmony of pure American manhood, nobody complains about having their heart stolen. Like Tucker, Redford makes sure the people he’s robbing are in on the fun.

The Old Man & the Gun is out in selected cinemas on November 15th, and read our review here.

Poster Comment:

Robert Redford is a national treasure.