Shooting star

In a film career that has spanned four decades and 34 movies, five of which he directed, Robert Redford has earned just a single…

In a film career that has spanned four decades and 34 movies, five of which he directed, Robert Redford has earned just a single Oscar nomination for his acting work - for The Sting in 1973, when the award went to Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger. Yet like his fellow sexagenarians Paul Newman, his co-star in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, and Clint Eastwood who, like Redford, successfully moves between acting and directing, Redford is one of the few actors of his generation whose status as a cast-iron movie star remains intact.

Perhaps it's because the whole concept of stardom is something which has never interested him greatly that Redford has been able to progress so unselfconsciously through decades of changing tastes and styles. That, plus his generally discriminating approach to the roles he takes - even though there have been lapses of taste and judgment along the way, especially in his sporadic output as an actor over the past 12 years or so. His acting output amounted to just six movies: the inane comedy, Legal Eagles; the overblown and utterly forgettable Havana; the mildly diverting heist yarn, Sneakers; the trashy Indecent Proposal (which reputedly earned Redford a small fortune from his share of the huge profits); the bland Up Close and Personal; and now a return to form for him as an actor with The Horse Whisperer.

Significantly, he directed four feature films over the same period, all of a higher quality - The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show and The Horse Whisperer, his first film as both actor and director. Like Clint Eastwood, Redford went on to win his Oscar as a director rather than an actor, when Redford's first directing project, Ordinary People, surprisingly pipped Raging Bull for the best picture and best director awards in 1980.

It's as if Redford has invested all his discernment and effort into the movies he directed, opting to star in less adventurous fare to pay the bills on his 5,500-acre estate and ranch in the Wasatche mountains of Utah, his apartment in Manhattan, his alimony payments and whatever else he needs to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed.

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Redford's trademark as an actor has always been his easy, laconic screen presence, which makes everything seem effortless. He's one of those natural actors in whom one never sees the process at work. "That's my intention," he said when we talked in London recently. "To me, that's part of the craft. It's a professional obligation not to let it show and to make the character accessible to the audience and have them believe in him.

"Acting is all work, unless you're just a straight personality who doesn't know how to act or doesn't care about acting, and just comes on as you are. There are whole films designed around people's personality. That doesn't interest me, even though I believe in bringing some part of yourself into the role. That's kind of your soul working. But the other part is the craft, and part of that is not making it noticeable."

Redford, who turns 61 next Wednesday, did not set out to be an actor when he was growing up in Santa Monica, California. He went to the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, but dropped out to pursue his ambitions as a painter while travelling around Europe for a year and a half. Returning to America, he enrolled as an art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at the same time began training as an actor at the American Academy for Dramatic Arts.

In 1958, when he was 21, he married Lola Van Wagenen, a 17-year-old bank teller from Utah. Their first child died aged five months from sudden infant death syndrome, into which Redford later funded research projects. They went on to have another three children - Shauna, now a 37-year-old artist, Jamie, a 36-year-old screenwriter, and Amy, a 27-year-old actress. Redford now has four grandchildren. He and Lola were divorced in 1985.

Redford made his Broadway debut in 1959, with a walk-on role as a baseball player in Tall Story and within four years had graduated to leading roles on Broadway, when Mike Nichols cast him in Neil Simon's Bare- foot in the Park. Redford worked busily in television - The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitch- cock Presents, Perry Mason - before entering movies in 1962 with War Hunt. That film also featured Sydney Pollack who would later direct Redford in seven feature films.

The young Redford's significant early movies included Arthur Penn's much underestimated The Chase and the movie of Barefoot in the Park, but his looks lost Redford the plum role of Benjamin in The Graduate. "He couldn't play a loser because of the way he looked," was the summation of Mike Nichols, who directed the film and gave the part to Dustin Hoffman.

When it came to finding a co-star for Paul Newman in the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Richard Zanuck, then the head of 20th Century Fox, wanted Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando - anyone but Redford. Zanuck eventually but relucantly caved in: the movie became a huge success and made a star of Redford.

While most successful actors nowadays set up their own production companies as a matter of form - and vanity, in many cases - Redford founded Wildwood Enterprises back in 1968 at a time when few actors exerted any control over their careers. "That's what it was all about - control," he says. "And a way of producing the kind of films I wanted to act in but which I knew would never get made otherwise. Those were the films that interested me, films that were different, like Downhill Racer, The Candidate and Jeremiah Johnson."

Redford and Newman were reunited for The Sting, a major Oscar winner and box-office smash, but just as they declined the prequel to Butch and Sundance, they firmly refused a sequel to The Sting. "I don't believe in sequels," says Redford. "Other people obviously do, because you've got Lethal Weapon 8, or whatever it is, out at the moment. I just can't get a hold of that. I don't even have to think about it. To me, life's too short to spend time doing sequels or remakes."

Their screen chemistry having shone through in their first two films together, he and Paul Newman went looking for other projects together - without success. "We've tried, but we've never found anything we wanted to do," says Redford. "It's not like we're averse to the idea. It's just that we're not going to roll over and do just anything that comes along just to be paid a lot of money to be doing the Paul and Bob show."

Redford describes the 1970s as "the most productive period of my life". He went from one hit to another - co-starring with Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, playing the title roles in The Great Gatsby and The Great Waldo Pepper, starring in the edgy thriller, Three Days of the Condor, and using his starpower to enable Alan J. Pakula to bring All the President's Men to the screen with Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, on the trail of the Watergate scandal.

"In the 1970s, I could make pictures about issues and the human condition," Redford says. "The Reagan era of the 1980s was such a down period in film that I just wasn't interested in the material that was out there and I concentrated on developing my own projects. This climate began in the 1980s when cartoons started to become fashionable as films. I was amazed when things I saw as a kid were beginning to pass for mainstream fare - at a cost of $60 to $100 million each, because it costs so much to create the effects that make Superman or Batman work.

"Films have now become so driven by effects and the technology of the industry rather than the humanistic side of film-making. Films that have strong narratives, intelligent scripts and real, well-developed characters are getting harder and harder to find. Most of the scripts I get now are made up of stage directions for how to blow things up. That's not exciting. In fact, it's really boring.

"To me, it's a frightening sign of the times and, I hope, not a sign of the future that films now have got more and more digitised characters, just like our society is being dehumanised by rendering more and more jobs useless and replacing people with automation and leaving them on the streets without anything to do.

"In a way, digitised characters are a form of control for the director and the producer. We all know about the tensions that have existed for years with the management of the industry trying to control the talent. The talent is wild, undisciplined, unpredictable - and that means danger, danger in the business. So digitising characters is a perfect way of dealing with that problem!"

Having established such a level of independence for himself so early in his own career, Redford went on to nourish the careers of young, independent film-makers when he set up the Sundance Institute in 1981, followed by its hugely successful offshoot, the Sundance Film Festival, in 1984, which now ranks as the most important film festival in the US.

Yet he manages to work comfortably within the Hollywood mainstream. I put it to him that while not biting the hand that feeds him, he does not shake that hand all that often. "That's a very good way of putting it," he says. "You just have to be careful in this industry because you can lose your art and your soul in an instant, because of the compromises that are forced on you by the corporate mentality.

"I don't have a lot of use for the business of the business. No matter what happens, the industry stays solid. I don't live in Hollywood and I don't get caught up in the social aspects of the industry because that doesn't interest me. Some other people live in the bubble of the industry and they do well on that.

"As long as you understand what the industry is, and what the terms are, then you have to work with it. And sometimes that working with it is like a battlefield. But you accept that as part of the deal. The problems arise when that becomes overwhelming, as it did in the case of poor Orson Welles. It really saddened me that someone with such ingenuity and inventiveness, someone as inspiring as Welles would be reduced to spending most of his time hustling for money, and acting in terrible films just to make the money to finance the films he wanted to make himself. That, to me, was very depressing."

The Sundance initiatives he describes as his "way of putting something back, an opportunity for new voices to come through when the mainstream had so many restrictions". He finds it "weird" that the Sundance festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, is such a wild and trendy success. "It started against all the odds," he says. "I remember pleading to get money for space and screens in Park City. Had we held it in Salt Lake City in the summer, it would have been impossible to raise any funding. But siting the festival in the mountains in the winter, a place that desperately needed some activity during a downtime in the ski season - that worked and we were able to get in there and make a few deals around town.

"Very few people came in the early years because so few people believed in independent film-making then. Hollywood wasn't interested because there was no charisma to it, no star/celebrity aspect to it. But we struggled on and began to draw the independent film people because there was something for them, and that in turn led to more and more people coming. And it just grew and grew, and now we have to turn sponsors away."

The commercial success achieved by some Sundance discoveries has encouraged most of the Hollywood studios to buy or set up their own specialist divisions for low-budget film-making. "That's just typical of Hollywood," Redford snorts. "Hollywood doesn't pay any attention until something succeeds and then it wants to gain control. So they set up what they call their independent film division - and that will last as long as there is any success at all. The moment there's no success in that area any more, then all those divisions will fold."

With his new film, The Horse Whisperer, Redford works on both sides of the camera for the first time. "There was a point, a low moment in the process, when I started to reconsider whether I should do both, acting and directing," he says. "It was turning out to be a much bigger movie than anyone could have expected and I hit this little blip where I wondered if I was up to doing both in the same film and should I maybe just act in it and get someone else to direct. But that feeling didn't last very long."

From Nicholas Evans's melodramatic, best-selling novel, Redford has fashioned a visually breathtaking and emotionally involving drama in which he plays a calm, patient Montana horse healer who provides physical and emotional healing for a young girl and her horse, both of them seriously injured in an accident, and for her mother, a high-powered and uptight New York magazine editor played by Kristin Scott Thomas. The inevitable culture clash between the laid-back farmer and the uptight city editor is never overplayed and the chemistry between Redford and Scott Thomas builds palpably.

Given that, in the novel of The Horse Whisperer, the character played by Redford is 45 years old, did he entertain any doubts about playing the romantic lead at his age - and opposite Scott Thomas, an actress who noted recently that she was nine when she first admired him as the Sundance Kid?

"I never thought about it," Redford says. "I think there's something awkward when the age difference becomes so apparent that it gets in the way, but I didn't think that problem applied here. Anyhow, I don't have any problem with getting older."

In recent years, Redford has been a regular visitor to Ireland, for holidays and to meet Michael Feeney Callan, who is writing a biography of him. It's not an authorised biography, says the actor, but he is co-operating with the author. "I come to see him in Ireland and he comes to see me in the States, so I go back and forward," Redford says. "I'm happy to do it, because I love Ireland, and I've got roots there."

His father, Charles, was Scots-Irish, and Redford traces his ancestry back to the Malone family. The song, Molly Malone, comes up and I tell Redford about the sculpture of Molly and her wheelbarrow at the junction of Grafton and Suffolk streets in Dublin.

She looks very voluptuous in the sculpture, I tell him. "Hah!," he laughs. "Maybe that's where it all started."

The Horse Whisperer goes on release in Ireland on August 28th