Robert Redford died, and it feels like a part of me died with him. To me, he wasn’t just a movie star. He represented how I imagined love and loss from an early age.
My introduction to Redford happened when I was a little kid. I remember seeing a sepia-toned album cover lying around my best friend Julie’s family room.
Julie’s mom was like a small private universe — a cool mom before the term even existed. She was divorced, made tapestries out of rug yarn and burlap and wrote in big bubbles that slanted to the left.
Julie and I would play with Barbies upstairs while the melancholic piano riffs from that album drifted up from the living room. We’d come down to find Julie’s mom asleep on the couch with an empty rocks glass beside her.
When I was a little older, I learned that Mrs. Rogers had what everyone called “a nervous breakdown.” I learned in fragments over time that she’d discovered the man she loved after he killed himself. She was hospitalized; there was talk of “electroshock therapy.”
I was just a kid on the edges of grown-up grief. But those edges shaped the way I heard that music — and saw the men who appeared against it.
So years later, when the opening titles rolled for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” I recognized the lonely melody immediately. And then I saw Redford. Emerging from the sepia shadows, his mysterious charm lodged in a place that already knew longing and loss.
That’s why the Sundance Kid simultaneously terrified and thrilled me. He made danger look beautiful. And I already knew beautiful things could break. Still, I fell for Sundance, not Paul Newman’s Butch always quick with a joke and easy conversation, the safe love connection.
Redford’s Sundance was a puzzle to be solved. The one who didn’t need to say much because his presence did all the talking. He promised adventure and freedom, but you always knew you could never quite catch him. Redford made that contradiction intoxicating, and danger became my drug of choice.
If Sundance was the outlaw I could never capture, Hubbell Gardiner in “The Way We Were” was the golden boy I thought I could hold — if only I were dazzling enough. Redford in that film is almost unbearably gorgeous. The blonde hair and boyish grin, careless in that way that only the truly privileged can afford.
Barbara Streisand’s Katie sees beyond that — sees him — with a love so fierce you almost believe it can be enough. That you could be enough. But Hubbell is the kind of man who doesn’t stay. He’s too perfect, too comfortable, too used to being adored to choose the woman who challenges him.
When Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City” talked about the “Katie girl,” a pang was felt in the hearts of women everywhere who knew exactly what she meant. To be the Katie girl is to be unforgettable but not sustainable. To be the woman who leaves a lasting impression on the moment but can never secure the future. It’s love as a trainwreck in slow motion.
Then there was Joseph Turner in “Three Days of the Condor.” Redford’s character, a bookish CIA analyst whose job is literally to read, stumbles across a conspiracy and finds himself hunted, paranoid and completely unsure who to trust. In the middle of all of this, he finds Faye Dunaway’s character. Which is to say he kidnaps her. Against all reason, she not only takes him in, she falls for him.
There’s an intimacy in “Condor” that feels different from the others. It’s born of desperation — two people pushed together by fear. Joseph Turner isn’t polished like Hubbell or magnetic like Sundance. He’s raw, vulnerable, unsettled. That intimacy looked like love — a man who opens himself only when he’s backed into a corner.
But what feels consuming in the moment can dissolve as quickly as it comes. Redford made me believe in that kind of love, too. Born in the shadows and shrouded in uncertainty.
What strikes me now is that while Redford’s characters rarely stayed, the man himself did. He chose Utah. He imagined Sundance. He built a home for artists and storytellers and dreamers. He gave permanence to what his characters never could.
Isn’t it ironic? The man who played outlaws and golden boys and enigmatic truth-seekers — who could thrill you just as surely as he could break your heart — became the man who stayed.
Still, I’m not sure what true love is. The kind that never leaves or the kind that takes your breath away and leaves you reaching for more.