Robert Redford “had no idea” he had made TV history: “That was really special”
The phrase ‘living legend’ gets thrown around a lot, not always deservedly, but one person who has definitely earned that moniker is Robert Redford. A connection to a bygone age of Hollywood, Redford embodies a sense of class and intrigue like few others.
Through movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and All the President’s Men, plus all the great films he’s directed, the star has more than earned his place among the elite.
While he might be best known as a big-screen icon, Redford has also had plenty of impact on the smaller one. Like many actors of the day, he got his start in the medium, appearing in a number of TV shows in the early 1960s. He rarely appeared in more than one episode, but he collected credits on the likes of Naked City, The Untouchables, and several Alfred Hitchcock productions.
His most memorable appearance on TV was easily in a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone. A 26-year-old Redford played Harold Beldon, a police officer who is shot and badly wounded outside the door of Gladys Cooper’s Wanda Dunn. Wanda is old, frail, and terrified of dying. She initially hesitates to help the young man, as she fears that he is actually the Grim Reaper, come to collect her soul. When she does eventually let him in, a series of strange events begins to afflict her.
“It was a wonderful script,” Redford told an audience at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2014. “I just love the idea of playing that character, because he had to be absolutely the opposite of what you would think of as ‘Mr Death’. He had to be kind and compassionate and… it was a wonderful, um, dynamic between she [Cooper] and I, because she was so frightened that, if she ever opened the door, then death would come in.”
As it turns out, Redford wasn’t the only one who was a big fan of ‘Nothing in the Dark’. “l got a note from… the company that produced that show… A little certificate saying that [the] show is the most often viewed Twilight Zone there was,” he revealed, adding, “That was really special. I had no idea that it was going to have that kind of impact.”
Exact viewing figures for each episode of The Twilight Zone are hard to come by, but the third season, which contains ‘Nothing in the Dark’, seems to be one of the more popular ones. A number of episodes from this season were remade as part of Twilight Zone: The Movie, an attempted reboot of the series that famously resulted in real-life tragedy.
The Twilight Zone is one of the greatest TV shows of all time, with many famous fans going to bat for it over the decades. The fact that Redford’s episode is the most-viewed out of all of them, and one of the most highly regarded, is testament to every single person involved. Just as Harold Beldon was a harbinger of death, this episode was an indicator of the incredible career that was to come for one of its stars.
