Robert Redford names the biggest regret of his career: “It was a mistake”
There wasn’t much Robert Redford didn’t manage to achieve during his legendary career, which is why it’s perfectly acceptable for the iconic actor and filmmaker to admit he wasn’t one for dwelling on the past or be left to rue the things that could have been but never were.
He was one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most charismatic and dynamic leading men, carrying himself with an innate sense of cool that made him the definition of the old ‘men want to be him, women want to be with him cliche’, but he wasn’t interested in being typecast as a performer who was all style and no substance.
Redford was only nominated for a solitary Academy Award for acting, but his on-camera efforts did net him a Bafta and a Golden Globe. When he tried his hand at directing, he mastered it at the very first attempt when his feature debut Ordinary People won him the Oscar for ‘Best Director’ and claimed ‘Best Picture’.
His contributions to the overall landscape of cinema speak for themselves after he co-founded The Sundance Institute in 1981, and the associated festival remains one of the most notable events on the industry calendar and arguably the marquee hub for independent cinema from all over the world.
That’s without even mentioning the countless classics he appeared in, a list that includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting alongside his great friend Paul Newman, in addition to All the President’s Men, The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, The Natural, Out of Africa, and more.
Redford once said, quite literally, that “I have no regrets because I’ve done everything I could to the best of my ability.” On a personal level, the moment that stings the most was his mother passing away before she could witness her son becoming an international superstar, confessing how “my regret is that she passed away before I could thank her” after she died when he was only 18 years old.
That might make it sound like there’s nothing about his professional life that he’d take back. That’s true up to a certain point, which makes it all the more ironic that Redford’s biggest regret over his career was that he went public and confirmed it was ending after he’d shot David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun.
“I think it was a mistake to say that I was retiring because you never know,” he told People. “I did feel like it was time, maybe, to concentrate on another category. I shouldn’t have said that because it draws attention away from the film.” That actually turned out to be fairly prophetic because The Old Man & the Gun wasn’t Redford’s final credit.
His last live-action role came when he made a cameo appearance in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, and he narrated the fantasy dramedy Buttons, which was released less than three months after his ‘final’ film. Bizarrely, unless something drastic changes, the last entry in Redford’s filmography will be the part of Lokia The Dolphin Monster, a character he voiced in 2020’s animated anthology movie Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia.
