It seemed strange in the 1970s that, at the height of his success as possibly the most famous actor in the world, Robert Redford decided to make rural Utah his home.
He’d discovered Utah while driving from his parents’ home in California to college in Colorado, and built a cabin here in the early 1960s, long before his career took off. With success, he went all in, buying a faltering old ski resort on the backside of Mt Timpanogos and rechristening it Sundance. You’d see him around like any neighbor, getting an ice cream shake at Granny’s in Heber City, shopping at a hardware store in Provo. My cousin once helped him change a flat tire on the side of the highway. He was at the post office one day and at the Oscars the next.
His commitment to his adopted home was real—you don’t go from starring in The Candidate to running for the Provo Canyon sewage board on a lark. At a time when environmentalist was a dirty word in the mountain West, Redford insisted that we native Utahns treat our extraordinary home as he did, with the fervent love of a convert. Some folks would insult him for it—he was a commie, a Hollywood elitist, even, worst of all, a Californian. But what he was was right, over and over again. He helped kill a coal plant in what is now a national monument. He stopped the construction of a six-lane freeway through his beloved Provo Canyon. He established his own nature preserve that will remain unspoiled in perpetuity. He wholly loved the land so many of us take for granted.
Other famous people have moved to Utah, but they came because Redford came first. As he turned a podunk local film festival into the most prominent celebration of cinema on the planet, he introduced our state to movers and shakers who also fell in love. Yet he hated the hoopla and overdevelopment that sprang up as a result—you felt that if he could have frozen Utah in 1980, he would have. It’s hard not to feel the same way sometimes.
Here at Salt Lake magazine, we wrote about Redford, our most famous living resident, many times. We interviewed him. We wrote about his movies. We talked about Redford the activist and local businessman. We covered him as someone whom we knew folks always wanted to hear about. In all that coverage, we never saw anyone but a great neighbor we were lucky to know. An oversized photo of one of our early covers hangs in the entrance hall of our offices, summing up who he was. Citizen Redford.
At the end of one of his famous roles, playing the Sundance Kid next to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, there is one of the most celebrated frames in cinema. Our two heroes are surrounded by the Bolivian army, about to be gunned down. It’s the last stand of the Old West outlaw—the rapidly advancing world no longer has a place for these kinds of men. You can’t help but wonder if we have a place for stars like Redford anymore, unproblematic men who settled into a home they loved and committed to it, using the luck life doled out to them to help others, and delighting us with their casual charm and charisma for decades.
Robert Redford went by Bob to his friends. As he aged and his face became as craggy as the Utah desert, he became part of the landscape, another visual icon in a place chock full of them. He fell in love with our mountains. Many of us who live here loved him back for it.
He became, above all, a Utahn.
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