Robert Redford has confirmed his retirement from acting, Entertainment Weekly reported. The 81-year-old actor, director and founder of the Sundance Film Festival told the publication that David Lowery’s The Old Man & The Gun will be his last acting assignment.
“Never say never, but I pretty well concluded that this would be it for me in terms of acting, and [I’ll] move towards retirement after this ’cause I’ve been doing it since I was 21,” Redford said. “I thought, well, that’s enough. And why not go out with something that’s very upbeat and positive?”
Redford began his career in 1960 with Joshua Logan’s Tall Story. His filmography includes The Voice of Charlie Pont (1962), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1975), Out of Africa (1985), Havana (1990) and An Unfinished Life (2005).
Ordinary People (1980) was the first of many films Redford directed, including A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994) and Lions for Lambs (2007).
Redford had announced that he would stop acting in 2016. In 2017, he appeared in Ritesh Batra’s Netflix film Our Souls at Night with frequent co-star Jane Fonda. Batra’s romantic drama features Redford as a widower who gets involved with his neighbour.
In The Old Man & The Gun, Redford plays a hearing aid-spouting robber who gains a reputation for being very polite during stick-ups. The movie is based on a real-life character. “To me, that was a wonderful character to play at this point in my life,” Redford said. “The thing that really got me about him – which I hope the film shows – is he robbed 17 banks and he got 17 times and went to prison 17 times.”
The Old Man & The Gun, which also stars Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover and Casey Affleck, will be released on September 28 after screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 6 to 16).