Robert Redford, who died Sept. 16 at 89, paid a visit to the Dartmouth campus during the height of his stardom, where he was honored by the Dartmouth Film Society at a ceremony in Spaulding Auditorium.
During the Feb. 4, 1987, visit, Redford posed for photos in front of the Hopkins Center for the Arts and on the Green, spoke at a seminar with drama and film studies students, and then attended the tribute, where he received the Dartmouth Film Award.
“I spent most of my life feeling like an academic failure, largely because it was true. One of the reasons was because of my father’s dream that I go to Dartmouth,” Redford joked during the tribute, according to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
Redford attended the University of Colorado but didn’t graduate, and later studied art for a time at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, according to The New York Times.
His self-deprecation aside, Redford had a major impact, says Mary Desjardins, professor emeritus in the Department of Film and Media Studies.
“Robert Redford, blessed with movie star looks and committed to an understated acting style, epitomized one kind of male star in ‘the new Hollywood’ of the 1960s-80s, moving easily from playing ‘male buddy’ film characters to romantic leading man in a series of mega box office hits, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and All the President’s Men, to The Way We Were, Electric Horseman, and Out of Africa. The ‘Sundance Kid’ made him an icon of a beautiful ‘cool’ which, captured in photos of him in character, circulated as posters that adorned college dorm room walls in the late 1960s-70s,” Desjardins says.
“This coolness took on another meaning to the millions of female fans of The Way We Were, in which he played the devastatingly handsome and talented man just out of reach. To many, his role as Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men exemplified the Redford persona: intelligent, professional, moving in circles of power but not wanting to embrace its corruption.”
“Redford was not the first Hollywood star to turn producer and director (winning an Oscar for directing Ordinary People in competition with Martin Scorsese that year), nor the first to champion social causes (protecting the environment and Native American rights in his case). However, through his Sundance Institute, Redford was singular in using his own success to enable others—such as Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, and Wes Anderson—to develop, make, and showcase films made outside the Hollywood corporate system, launching new careers and promoting auteur-driven independent cinema,” Desjardins says.
