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As an actor, director, and co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Charles Robert Redford left an indelible mark on American cinema. The archetypal leading man, he appeared in political thrillers, crime capers, and romantic dramas over his 60-year career; in films about baseball, skiing, sailing, the rodeo, and several about journalism. And buttressing many of those performances are some wonderful leading ladies, from an adolescent Scarlett Johansson to the likes of Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, and Meryl Streep—each of whom Redford worked with on multiple occasions.
Across the board, his costars have praised his integrity, his kindness, and his remarkable good looks, making the convincing case for Redford as a once-in-a-lifetime star. Here, as we mourn the recent announcement of his death, at the age of 89, we look back at some of the movies—and the women—that have helped shape his iconic filmography.
Elizabeth Ashley
On Barefoot in the Park’s opening night in 1963, Redford—cooly reticent even as a 20-something newcomer—declined to attend the post-show party at the Tavern on the Green, presided over by the play’s director, Mike Nichols. His co-star Elizabeth Ashley, however (who had appeared with Redford in the 1959 flop The Highest Tree) didn’t fault him for it. “We always forgave Bob because that’s how Bob was,” she says in the documentary Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age. “He was smarter and more artistic and better than us because all we wanted was to be in a hit play, but Bob wanted finer things than that.”
Natalie Wood
Redford did two films with Natalie Wood (not counting her brief cameo in 1972’s The Candidate): Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and This Property Is Condemned (1966, pictured). “I had a wonderful time working with Natalie, not only because of her innate talent, but she also loved to laugh and joke around on the set, and we would tease each other a lot,” Redford said in a tribute to Wood for TCM. “Natalie had this mannerism when she acted, where she would swish her head to one side and give a puzzled look. She adopted this as part of her screen trademark, I guess, so I would do it back to her, exaggerated. And there we’d be, two cocked heads looking at each other.”
Jane Fonda
Redford starred with Jane Fonda in four films: 1966’s The Chase, the 1967 screen adaption of Barefoot in the Park (pictured), 1979’s The Electric Horseman, and 2017’s Our Souls at Night. “The only problem with working with Bob is that I just look into his…I kind of fall into his eyes and forget my dialogue,” Fonda told Ellen DeGeneres in 2017.
Katharine Ross
This isn’t a Redford story, but it’s a sweet one: Katharine Ross, who played opposite Redford and Paul Newman in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had a secret admirer on set. “My wife, Katharine Ross, and I both worked on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I didn’t dare try to talk to her then,” the actor Sam Elliott revealed to AARP The Magazine in 2015. “She was the leading lady. I was a shadow on the wall, a glorified extra in a bar scene. It wasn’t until we made The Legacy [in 1978] that we actually interacted.” Ross and Elliott went on to marry in 1984.
Barbra Streisand
It wasn’t easy getting Redford to agree to play Hubbell Gardiner in 1973’s The Way We Were. “They were talking about other people because he had turned it down so many times,” Barbra Streisand told Oprah Winfrey in 2010. (His reservations came, in part, from Hubbell’s initial characterization as a one-note, East Coast golden boy: “[It] felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me,” Redford said.) “I was hoping and praying, but it didn’t look good,” continued Streisand. “And then, I was in Africa making a movie and…a friend of mine at the time sent me a telegram, and it said ‘Barbra, Redford,’ and I knew he had signed on.”
Mia Farrow
In her 1997 memoir What Falls Away, Mia Farrow describes shooting 1974’s The Great Gatsby—in which she played Daisy Buchanan to Redford’s Jay Gatsby—amid the Watergate hearings, “which riveted Bob Redford and me to the television set in his dressing room, and provided us all with an endlessly fascinating topic for discussion.” A few years later, of course, Redford would help dramatize the Watergate scandal in 1976’s All the President’s Men.
Faye Dunaway
On playing opposite Redford in the 1975 spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, Faye Dunaway offered this saucy reflection in 2008: “We had some trouble, I have to say, because my character was kidnapped by him and in mortal fear of [harm coming to her]…and you can’t have those feelings about Redford. You just say, ‘Yes! Fine! Good!’ because he’s so gorgeous and he has such a kind of wonderful charisma.”
Mary Tyler Moore
“I saw her as a victim,” Mary Tyler Moore once said of Beth Jarrett, the steely matriarch in 1980’s Ordinary People, Redford’s directorial debut. “I saw her as very reminiscent of my own life, and so I had to do that role. And I thank God for Robert Redford, who had the vision to believe that I could, in fact, pull it off…. He said that when he first read the [original Judith Guest novel] he had me in mind for it; and then after we had this first talk about it, he then went on to spend three months auditioning every actress in town—and he came back to me.” Moore’s performance would earn her a nod for best supporting actress at the 1981 Oscars.
Glenn Close
Asked to rank her all-time best movie husbands in 2019, Glenn Close gave Redford’s Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984) the top spot. She discussed the halting reconciliation between Roy and her character, Iris, two long-estranged high-school sweethearts; they’d been apart for 16 years, and Roy had likely fathered the child that Iris raised alone. “I love that scene because you would think she’d just completely throw herself into his arms, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what kind of man he’s become, and she doesn’t want to expose her son to him, unless it’s right, unless he’s a good guy,” Close explained. “I don’t know how many women in movies have actually thrown Robert Redford out of their apartment!”
Meryl Streep
“I developed this huge crush on him,” Meryl Streep quipped of Redford, her co-star in Out of Africa, when the film was released in 1985, “which made it easier to do the love story. He’s really wonderful to work with. He has an unusual quality for a man—he has a very receptive way about him and is an incredibly good listener. That’s an attribute people usually associate with women. So for women, he’s very easy to talk to.” In 2007, Redford and Streep would team up again for the drama Lions for Lambs.
Michelle Pfeiffer
What do you get when you combine Redford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stockard Channing, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and the song “Because You Loved Me”? The 1996 romantic drama Up Close & Personal, naturally. In 2020, Pfeiffer fondly recalled the project on Instagram with a behind-the-scenes image of herself seated on Redford’s shoulders. “#TBT. Frolicking with Mr. Redford. #UpCloseAndPersonal,” her caption read.
Scarlett Johansson
For a young Scarlett Johansson, appearing alongside Redford in 1998’s The Horse Whisperer (which he also directed) was a formative experience. “Bob [Redford] was so amazing with me in that film,” Johansson said in 2003. “He was so gentle with me and would literally take me through the entire story to get where I was supposed to be in that scene, no matter how long it took. It was the first real direction I had gotten.”
Cate Blanchett
The 2015 film Truth, about the Killian documents controversy of 2004, starred Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as the CBS News producer Mary Mapes; an exciting pairing. “He’s very generous and he—without even knowing that he’s doing it—he raises the bar,” Blanchett said of Redford in an interview with People. Even as an elder statesman, she noted, he showed no signs of ego: “He parks that at the door.”
Sissy Spacek
Redford and Sissy Spacek made very charming co-leads in the biographical crime-caper The Old Man & the Gun (2018). Although the pair had never worked together, they’d first met decades earlier, when Spacek was just starting out. “I was about 18 and he wasn’t that much older, maybe in twenties still,” she told Rolling Stone. “It turns out that the same casting director, Marion Dougherty—God rest her soul—separately took he and I under her wing and gave us our starts in the business […] But I met him once in her office when I’d stopped by to talk to her, and I was so nervous I called him ‘Bobert.’ ”
