The movies that almost made Robert Redford quit acting: “I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue”
The idea of Robert Redford quitting acting before the end of the 1960s isn’t just unthinkable based on what he went on to achieve; it would have had a massive impact on cinema as a whole.
The actor emerged as one of Hollywood’s leading lights and most popular A-list talents, but it was away from the set where he made his biggest mark. There are plenty of names who’ve left behind monumental legacies onscreen, but there are exponentially fewer performers who’ve contributed to the landscape of the industry in quite the same way Redford did when he founded the Sundance Institute.
Even though he was a household name, a sex symbol, and a gifted thespian, Redford always preferred making smaller films. When he had enough of a reputation to write his own ticket, he decided the best way to leverage his star power would be to benefit the entire independent circuit, with Sundance having been established as one of the calendar’s biggest tickets for decades.
And to think, none of it would have come to pass if Redford had followed through on his desire to abandon acting altogether before he’d even punctured the mainstream. The first decade of his professional life ended on a high note when he anchored Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alongside Paul Newman in his last outing of the ’60s, but he was ready to wash his hands of it long before then.
In only his second credited role, Redford played a closeted bisexual actor in Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover. Due to the attitudes of the time, it was a risky part for anyone to play, especially a relative newcomer. As a result, the blowback placed him at a very early crossroads.
“What happened was I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue my career,” Redford told Geeks of Doom of how things looked in the wake of Inside Daisy Clover. The movie was critically eviscerated and an unmitigated box office disaster, which wasn’t ideal even without Hollywood’s less-than-progressive types sneering at the actor’s decision to play a bisexual character in his third-ever picture.
Fortunately, he quickly signed up to play a convict opposite Jane Fonda in The Chase and a mysterious drifter in This Property Is Condemned. “It was three different characters, and they were all jammed together,” Redford explained of his conscious decision to try new things, which still didn’t convince him that acting was where his future lay.
“I then decided that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be in this business, so I went to Spain for a year and rented a small home in a tiny town in the south of Spain,” he said. “I thought I might want to go back to being an artist.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen, even if it remains fascinating to think that Redford almost fell on his sword and ended his film career before it had even truly gotten started.
