Robert Redford, star of Hollywood classics such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and later an Oscar-winning director, has died aged 89.
Redford played Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in the 1976 political thriller “All The President’s Men,” about the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. He also starred in the 1972 political comedy “The Candidate” as Bill McKay, a lawyer who agrees to run for the U.S. Senate.
In 2016, Redford was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama. Although Redford was often a critic of Donald Trump, the U.S. president paid tribute Tuesday, telling reporters before leaving for a state visit to the U.K.: “Robert Redford had a series of years where there was nobody better. There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.”
Away from movies, Redford was also an activist who campaigned on environmental issues, including as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
Here are some of his thoughts on politics and politicians …
Trump the ‘dictator’
As a liberal, Redford was unlikely to be a fan of Trump, although he said in 2017 that the Sundance Film Festival he founded would “stay away from politics” and remain “focused on the stories being told by artists.”
However, in November 2019, Redford wrote an opinion piece for NBC about a “dictator-like attack by President Donald Trump on everything this country stands for.”
He went on: “As last week’s impeachment hearings made clear, our shared tolerance and respect for the truth, our sacred rule of law, our essential freedom of the press and our precious freedoms of speech — all have been threatened by a single man.”
“It’s time for Trump to go,” he added.
He ‘shakes things up’
Redford wasn’t always so down on Trump. In 2015, after Trump threw his hat into the ring to be the Republican candidate for the presidency, Redford told Larry King: “Look he’s got such a big foot in his mouth, I’m not sure you’re going to get it out. But on the other hand, I’m glad he’s in there.
“I’m glad he’s in there because him being the way he is, and saying what he says the way he says it, I think shakes things up and I think that’s very needed. Because on the other side, it’s so bland, it’s so boring, it’s so empty.”
Feeling ‘out of place‘
By 2018, a year into the first Trump presidency, Redford said he felt “out of place” in his country, without mentioning the president by name.
“For the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life,” he wrote in a (since deleted) article for the Sundance Institute. “For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade.
“How can we expect the next generation to step up and serve, to be interested in public life, and to aspire to get involved when all we show them is how to spar, attack, and destroy each other?” he wrote.
Backing Biden and memories of FDR
In a 2020 piece for CNN, Redford urged people to vote for Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, in the upcoming election.
Redford said he remembered being a child and “listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talking to us over the radio.
“It was a voice of authority and, at the same time, empathy. Americans were facing a common enemy — fascism — and FDR gave us the sense that we were all in it together,” he said.
Redford wrote that another four years of Trump “would degrade our country beyond repair” and said “the toll it’s taking is almost biblical: fires and floods, a literal plague upon the land, an eruption of hatred that’s being summoned and harnessed, by a leader with no conscience or shame.”
The star said he didn’t normally publicly say who he was voting for, “but this election year is different. And I believe Biden was made for this moment.”
Nixon was ‘so boring’
Promoting his 2007 film “Lions for Lambs,” Redford told the Indie London site that he wasn’t a fan of politics when he was younger.
“I grew up in Los Angeles and Richard Nixon was my state Senator and he was so boring. I thought: ‘If that’s what politics is, I don’t want to be any part of it!’ They were boring people in suits saying boring things so I never paid any attention to politics … I didn’t think about politics until I came to Europe.”
Redford moved to Europe at the age of 18, spending time in Paris and Florence. In France, he “stayed in a bohemian section of Paris with a lot of other students, who were from medical school, science school, and art school. We all lived in a kind of communal way and I was challenged politically, because I didn’t have a clue and they would ask me questions about the Algerian War, which was very big in France in the late ’50s.
“I was humiliated and ashamed that I didn’t know much about my own country’s politics … and so I would learn about my country from the points of view of Italy and France and from conservative and liberal newspapers. And by doing this, I realised that the point of view was very different from the point of view that I had been raised with.”
Redford vs. Redford on oil pipeline
Redford was a vocal critic of the planned Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. In a video clearly aimed at the White House, Redford said the pipeline plans would bring huge profits for oil companies but make everyone else “suffer.”
In response, Alberta Premier Alison Redford (no relation) said she questioned “how people who are using energy flying on planes can make these sorts of comments and assume that they’re going to have any credibility.”
In 2015, Obama rejected plans for the pipeline and Redford said it marked “a huge turning point in our fight to leave a better future for our children and generations to come.”
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