David Lowery’s ‘The Old Man & The Gun’ will be Robert Redford’s last
acting credit.
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).
