After Paul Newman died of lung cancer at age 83 in 2008, Robert Redford spoke to ABC about his long-standing friendship.
Their beginning, he explained, was when they starred together in the successful 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“It was just that connection when you played those characters and the fun of doing it that really started the relationship,” Redford said at the time. And then, once the film began, once we moved forward, we discovered other similarities that only multiplied over time, a common ground that we both shared, interests, and so on, and differences.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a Western hybrid and buddy comedy that introduced the couple of actors as renegade outlaws involved in a train theft that goes wrong. The film won four Oscar awards, including best original screenplay.
Like his characters united on screen, what would remain in real life would be decades of love and admiration between the two, who could easily have been rivals given their position as Hollywood stars turned protagonists.
Redford died on Tuesday at his home in Sundance, in the mountains of Utah, the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved, according to a statement from his publicist, Cindi Berger, president and executive director of Rogers and Cowan PMK. He was 89 years old.
The two men had a lot in common.
Like Newman, Redford began his career in the theatre before moving on to the movies. Both took their craft very seriously, and it was Redford’s talent, he recalled, which led Newman to fight for the young actor to play Sundance Kid alongside his Butch Cassidy.
“He said, “I want to work with an actor,” Redford said. And that was very flattering for me, because that’s how we both saw our profession, that the performance was about technique, and we took it seriously.
Redford often credited Newman with helping him become the multifaceted star he became because Newman had bet on him in that film.
His energy of companions led them to another film that is now also considered a classic, The Sting of 1973, which further consolidated their friendship.
Both wanted to be respected for their craft rather than for their considerable physical appeal.
They were dedicated family men and, at one point, lived just over a kilometre away from each other in Connecticut. They also shared their penchant for philanthropy: Redford focused on the environment and independent cinema, and Newman founded the food company Newman’s Own, whose profits he donated to charity.
Redford once reflected on Newman’s commitment to The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, which Newman founded in 1988 to help children with chronic illnesses.
In a video in support of the camp, Redford said that even before working with Newman, he saw him not so much as a hero, but as a guy who defended what he thought was right.
“When we played friends, we became friends,” Redford said. And I was able to experience first-hand what that meant to Paul.
The man who was a bigger star than him before their first film together, and who fought for Redford to get the role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” he showed Redford what the art of acting meant to him, which his family meant, which was everything, he said in the video.
“So I couldn’t say enough good things about Paul, except he had a terrible sense of humor,” Redford added. And the worst part was that he laughed at his own bad jokes.
The affection was mutual.
During an appearance on “Film 82,” Newman shared that choosing Redford was initially an idea of his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, who, after reading the script and declaring it “maravilloso,” told him that the only one who could play him is Bob Redford.
“We had so much fun together,” Newman said of Redford. We complement each other very well.
The two had a habit of becoming eccentric heavy jokes, Newman added.
According to him, Redford once sent him a Porsche for his birthday, but one that had crashed into a tree at 210 km/h and had no transmission.
“They just left him in my driveway with a big loop around,” Newman recalled. So I had the whole car compartmented.
But that wasn’t all. With the help of the real estate agent who had rented the house to Redford at the time, Newman entered the house and left the large car compacted inside the lobby.
It took five people to get that thing into their house,’ Newman said. And, of course, he finally won that because he never admitted there was anything in his house.
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