The death of Robert Redford has brought forth a tidal wave of praise beyond even the usual gushing torrents that attend the deaths of celebrities. Because of the extraordinary longevity of his stardom over many decades and the multifaceted nature of his pursuits, there’s a different Robert Redford for everyone.

You can consider his vast contribution to independent film with the Sundance Film Festival he founded, as well as his commitment to developing upcoming cinematic talent with the Sundance Institute. You can appreciate his wide-ranging filmography. He was a thoughtful producer, and as an accomplished director, he started with Ordinary People (1980), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and got him a Best Director Oscar as well, right out of the gate.

You can pick a favorite phase from his storied acting career. Young and irresistible (The Chase, Barefoot in the Park, The Hot Rock, The Sting)? Political thriller (Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men)? Romance (The Way We Were, Out of Africa, Up Close and Personal)? Neo-Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, The Electric Horseman, The Horse Whisperer)? Sports drama (Downhill Racer, The Natural)? Mature but still sexy, stealing focus from younger male stars (Indecent Proposal, Spy Game)? Venerable sage of filmdom (A Walk in the Woods, The Old Man and the Gun)?

You can get a look at the very youthful Redford in his early 1960s acting career on television too. And if you want to appreciate his warm all-American voice, he narrated a ton of films as well, mostly environmental documentaries.

Politically he covered the waterfront. Leftists can love him for his serious, long-term commitments to the environment and Native American rights and his savvy political films of the late 1960s and ’70s. Centrist liberals can love him for his long-standing commitments to the Democratic Party and working through the existing system. And right-wing conservatives can embrace his romanticizing love of the American West that inspired Redford’s rugged mountain man role in Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and his tribute to the Old West, his 1978 book, The Outlaw Trail: A Journey Through Time.

And everyone can appreciate his hotness, in terms of looks and long-lasting star sizzle. That includes Donald Trump, who paid tribute to Redford in a characteristic statement, “There was a period of time when he was the hottest. I thought he was great.”

Redford’s “golden boy” godliness was so extreme, he had to find smart ways to manage it lest it become confining and, frankly, a bit sickening. Early on, he had no intention of becoming a Hollywood glamor boy in a way that limited his career. That’s why he turned down two of the biggest roles of the 1960s, both designed for “golden boys” — Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), subsequently played by George Segal, and Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967), the role that made Dustin Hoffman an unlikely film star.

Both films were directed by Mike Nichols, who had helped make Robert Redford a star of the stage by guiding him through the long-running hit comedy Barefoot in the Park, written by Neil Simon. In the Mark Harris biography Mike Nichols: A Life (2021), Nichols describes the hard-working, painstaking intelligence Redford brought to bear on that part, the way he found the comic core of his uptight, newly married lawyer character — a thousand detailed tics and grimaces and jaw-clenches and bleak stares and lines bitten off with bared teeth. You can see Redford recreate it in the 1967 film version costarring Jane Fonda. It’s still very funny.

And keep in mind that Redford was only thirty years old when he was turning down Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which would’ve featured him opposite Hollywood royalty Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. That bold act of professional calculation was an excellent indication of his sheer confidence that he was making steady, inevitable progress toward major film stardom. From the beginning, he was canny. I’d argue that canniness was his leading characteristic as a star, but he was so gleaming in his handsomeness, you might miss it. Those slight darting eye movements, that disingenuous smile, the hard glint of intelligence peeking through.

Is it odd to admire canniness in a star? It’s a quality I find to be in such short supply in contemporary American society. How he built and sustained his career in order to have the power to move from the mainstream to the edge and back again is a model of how to take on a ruthless system like the entertainment industry and win. His selective use of his own good looks and charisma on-screen in order to keep his career flourishing in commercial terms was balanced by his own complication and subversion of those qualities in darker, stranger, more challenging films. Before doing the surefire crowd-pleasing movie version of Barefoot in the Park, for example, he played an enigmatic, troubled bisexual Hollywood actor leading a double life in Inside Daisy Clover (1965).

And after solidifying his film stardom with the one-two punch of Barefoot in the Park and the colossal hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (both 1967), he followed it up with the hard-hitting neo-Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). It’s based on the true story of a young Paiute man, played by Robert Blake, on the run from the law in the Southern California desert of 1909 after killing the abusive father of his girlfriend (Katherine Ross) in self-defense. Redford plays the deputy sheriff heading up the posse — supposedly the last use of an Old Western posse on record — that’s tracking Willie down. He comes to admire the man he knows is going to be destroyed. The film was written and directed by famously blacklisted filmmaker Abraham Polonsky, who hadn’t directed a movie since the harrowing film noir Force of Evil in 1948.

For me, the least appealing period of Redford’s career is the 1980s when he reinforces his mainstream stardom with three films built around his heartthrob attractions: The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Legal Eagles (1986). He’s pushing fifty when he’s making these films, and once again, it was smart of him to make a last stand as a romantic lead while he still looked really sensational. The Natural represents him as a god living among mere mortals, emitting a hazy golden aura courtesy of the lighting department, the kind of icky filmmaking technique that was very popular in that god-awful decade. But that last push no doubt kept Redford’s stardom current and bankrolled his many other commitments for many years afterwards.

And he made those films after his great decade of the 1970s, when his left-wing political stances could find their most forceful expression. Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972), for example, is still an extraordinarily mordant take on the American political process, with Redford in the title role as an impassioned environmentalist who gets drafted as the shiny new Democratic candidate for a California senate race. The steadily corrupting influence of politicking is examined in acid detail. And as he so often did, Redford makes smart use of his startling physical beauty in complex ways. It helps represent his glowing idealism in the beginning of the process, and it makes the insidious ways his swelling ego and increasingly cynical maneuverings that ruin the impression of beauty both darkly comical and disheartening.

Redford’s perfectly flat delivery of the film’s last line after his severely diminished character wins the election makes it forever memorable: “What do we do now?”

Redford ended the decade with Brubaker (1980), directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke). It’s an underseen prison drama in which he plays a new warden determined to enact wholesale prison reform in a dire Southern facility. His doomed attempts to grapple with the violence and corruption endemic to the penal system end in the appointment of a new warden who’s a brutal disciplinarian likely to make the plight of the prisoners even worse than it was before. Brubaker seems to represent a grim farewell to the New Hollywood era of briefly liberating political struggle as the Reaganite backlash began.

Redford’s wily determination to survive and thrive as a movie star over the decades meant he was able to make, with flinty practicality, a win-some, lose-some calculation as far as his own political commitments and how to express them in film. The Way We Were is an excellent example of a film that got politically gutted in the process of making it, to the point that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s happening in the later sequences that involved the climatic breakup of a marriage between a Jewish political activist named Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, and her WASP writer husband Hubbell Gardiner, played by Redford.

That’s because those scenes make clear Hubbell is essentially a sellout concerned to save his own screenwriting career in Hollywood during the blacklist, and his wife’s socialist politics are threatening to drag him down, so she sacrifices her great love for him and divorces him. In Streisand’s recent autobiography, My Name is Barbra, she goes into granular detail about the pressure from Columbia Studios on director Sydney Pollack to cut crucial scenes in ways that would obscure the gist of the plot.

It’s probable that these cuts made the film an even bigger hit, because the soap opera qualities of the love story come to the fore unimpeded by distractingly hardcore American politics. And though Streisand, Pollack, and Redford were all equally unhappy with the final film that was released, it seems Redford never put up much of a fight to preserve the film’s political core.

After all, it’s a great “golden boy” role for Redford regardless. Once more he complicates and subverts his own most essential yet distracting trait as a movie star. Hubbell’s handsomeness is revered by Katie, but he’s aware early on that beauty and privilege makes “everything come too easy” to him in ways that pose a danger to himself as a writer and a human being. As he’s increasingly hollowed out by fast success and slick careerism, he’s revealed as ever more mannequin-like, ending up with a Barbie-esque blonde as a replacement for Katie. Together they look like actors in a glossy magazine ad.

This week, a Guardian headline called him “a dolphin among sharks,” furthering the notion that he was too fine a being to live among the crass meat-eaters of Hollywood.  This makes sense only if you consider that dolphins are also formidable animals who can kill sharks if they band together, not at all the New Age symbols of peace. Intelligence is their leading characteristic, and Redford’s wiliness — even if it was a sellout wiliness when necessary to make long-term gains  — was a defining trait that ought to be reckoned with.