Robert Redford’s 10 Best Movie Roles, Ranked

Robert Redford has become a towering institution in Hollywood. After winning a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer following his performance in the 1965 film InsideDaisy Clover, Redford has turned in one iconic movie performance after another. By 1980, Redford moved behind the camera to helm the Oscar-winning Ordinary People, beginning a new chapter as a film director.

In 1981, Redford founded the Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah as a means of assisting young independent filmmakers through the rigors of the Hollywood studio system. Despite never winning an acting Oscar, Redford was given an Honorary Academy Award in 2002 for his lasting contributions to cinema. Speaking of, here are Robert Redford’s 10 Best Movie Roles!

10 Our Man – All Is Lost (2013)

Redford remained out of the cinematic spotlight for five years, from 2007 to 2012. When he finally returned to the big screen, he took on one of the biggest challenges of his acting career by giving an arduous one-man performance in the harshest of elements.

All is Lost is the tense and terrifying tale of Our Man (Redford), a wise old sailor who must use every trick of the trade when his 40-foot yacht collides with a shipping tanker in the Indian Ocean. Without means of communication for help, Our Man must prevent the boat from sinking while navigating towards safety.

9 Denys – Out Of Africa (1985)

Redford had no greater or more frequent directorial collaborator than the late Sydney Pollack. Together, the filmmaking duo made seven features together. In their penultimate partnership, Redford gives one of his most memorable turns as Denys in the sweeping exotic romance, Out of Africa.

Of course, starring opposite the great Meryl Streep only raises one’s game. Such is the case for Redford in this film about a colonial big game hunter (Redford) and a Danish Baroness (Streep) who strike up an unlikely love affair in 20th-century Kenya.

8 Bill McKay – The Candidate (1972)

Here’s a bit of trivia for all you film buffs. Former U.S. President Barack Obama has publicly stated that Robert Redford’s 1972 film The Candidate is his favorite movie. Good enough for us!

In all candor, Redford perfectly balances the wide-eyed aspirations of a public servant with the fearful uncertainty of how to lead a nation in times of peril. In the film, Redford plays Bill McKay, a California Senator running for President of the United States. With little chance of winning, McKay opts to ignite radical systemic change instead.

7 Forrest Tucker – The Old Man & The Gun (2018)

In one of the lightest, breeziest, and overall most pleasant heist films ever made, Redford brings the real-life character of Forrest Tucker to life with a great sense of kindhearted ebullience in The Old Man & The Gun.

The unbelievable true story follows Tucker, a bank robber who escaped prison 18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully. In the film, the elderly Tucker makes a daring escape from the island prison of Alcatraz after fashioning a boat as a woodworker in jail. At 82 years young, Redford gives a masterclass in top-tier acting.

6 Jeremiah Johnson – Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

In his second time working with the late great Sydney Pollack, Redford took one of the most convincing and physically grueling performances of his career as the snowbound mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson. Redford nearly gives a silent performance!

Fed up with westward expansion, former U.S. soldier Jeremiah Johnson treks into the wilderness to build a home and live off the land unfettered. When he stumbles on a native Crow reservation in Colorado, Johnson makes friends in unlikely places, learning ancient ways of subsisting off the land in self-sufficient ways.

5 Dave Chappellet – Downhill Racer (1969)

Playing against type in Downhill Racer is Redford as Dave Chappellet, a brash and icy skiing competitor without an ounce of sympathy for a single fellow human being. It’s a great performance in an equally superb film!

Chappellet takes advantage of a fellow skier’s injury, which lands him on the U.S. Olympic Team. As he tries to win his estranged father’s approval by medaling in the Olympics, Dave constantly battles with his coach, Claire (Gene Hackman), while falling for glamorous European skier Carol (Camilla Sparv).

4 Roy Hobbs – The Natural (1984)

Until he appeared in Captain America, Roy Hobbs is likely the closest to a superhero as Redford ever approached onscreen. The baseball star has a mythic quality about him, accentuated by his superpowered baseball bat.

The classic Barry Levinson film tracks the near-impossible ascension of an unknown ballplayer whose meteoric rise in the Majors whiplashes every spectator on the planet. Roy Hobbs becomes an overnight sensation as a godlike homerun-hitter who uses a bat carved from a lightning-struck tree. And just like a superhero, he names the bat Wonderboy.

3 Bob Woodward – All The President’s Men (1976)

Extra kudos are always in order when an actor of Redford’s caliber plays a real-life character. In perhaps the greatest movie about journalism ever made, Redford nails the countenance of Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward.

All The President’s Men is required viewing for all living Americans. It charts the 1970s Watergate scandal and the unthinkable lengths to which the Post went to in order to break the story for the American public. Redford’s chemistry with Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein couldn’t be better, nor could Alan J. Pakula’s swift direction.

2 Johnny Hooker – The Sting (1973)

Believe it or not, Redford only earned a single Academy Award nomination for decades worth of grade-A acting. Said nod came following his magnetic turn as Johnny Hooker in The Sting.

Redford once again pairs with Paul Newman in what is arguably the finest screen partnership of all time. In the follow-up to Butch and Sundance, Redford plays a small-time grifter who meets his match in the wise elderly conman Henry (Newman). As the two team-up with grand designs to bilk a high-stakes poker game, a series of harrowing misadventures take place.

1 The Sundance Kid – Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

Redford has never played a cooler, confident, or more memorably iconic character than The Sundance Kid in George Roy Hill’s classic buddy-road-movie. Never!

The film about two kindred outlaws on the run to Bolivia is the stuff of cinematic legend. Redford and Newman display gangbusters chemistry as they bicker and quibble over every petty grievance under the sun. But they always have each other’s back, as evidenced in the classic final shot of the film. Moreover, Redford would go on to name his film institution after Sundance.