Appreciation: Never just the Sundance kid, Robert Redford chased complexity at every turn

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Robert Redford looked like he walked out of the sea to become a Hollywood god.He was physically flawless.

Pacific blue eyes, salt-bleached hair, a friendly surfer-boy squint.Born in Santa Monica to a milkman and a housewife, his first memory was of sliding off his mother’s lap at the Aero Theatre as a toddler and running toward the light, causing such a ruckus that the projectionist had to stop the film.He definitely grew up to grab the movies’ attention.

He wasn’t just telegenic but talented, although that wasn’t a requirement for stardom when he emerged in the late ’50s when the industry was scooping up hunks like him by the bucket for television and B-movies.All a male ingenue needed to do was smile and kiss the girl.

It would have been so easy to do that a couple times and wind up doing it forever.You can understand why so many forgotten actors made that deal, without realizing that forever can lead to a fast retirement.But if Redford had sensed at 2 years old that he was meant to be onscreen, by his 20s, he insisted he’d only do it on his own terms.

At 27, with nearly zero name recognition, he horrified his then-agent by turning down a $10,000-a-week TV gig as a strait-laced psychiatrist to do a Mike Nichols theater production for just $110.His rejection of the easy money was an unusual choice, particularly for a cash-strapped father of two.To appreciate Redford fully, we have to applaud not only the work he did but the simple, feel-good roles he rejected.

He could have become a celebrity without breaking a sweat as the war hero, the jock, the husband, the cowboy, the American ideal made incarnate.Yet, he had the rare ability to sidestep what audiences thought we wanted from him to instead give us something we didn’t know we needed: selfish victors (“Downhill Racer”), self-destructive veterans (“The Great Waldo Pepper”) and tragic men who did every...