Do we like Robert Redford?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of backing the environment, Native storytellers, women's voices and LGBTQ+ equality, with no harmful words or acts found; the record on how he treated people day to day is thinner.
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica in 1936 and started out on stage and television in New York. He turned down The Graduate to make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, which made him a proper star. Then came The Sting, The Way We Were and All the President's Men.
The twist is that the golden boy became a director and, more importantly, a builder. He won the Best Director Oscar for Ordinary People and founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, which grew into the festival that launched a generation of indie films. He also picked up an honorary Oscar in 2002.
On the harm check, we came up clean. In 2018 he said of #MeToo that the role for men is to listen, and that there is no place in the world for discrimination. LGBTQ+ outlets remember him as an ally who backed marriage equality in 2013, though that Advocate piece is an opinion column, so weigh it that way.
The planet was his big thing. AP reports he got into environmental campaigning in the mid-1970s, lobbied for the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and sat on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council until he died. He also co-founded a New Mexico wildlife foundation to fight horse slaughter.
He was also a friend to Native storytellers. He executive-produced the Navajo drama The Dark Wind and the AMC series Dark Winds, which AP says was his final work and features largely Native actors and writers. Its showrunner said the series wouldn't exist without him.
On politics he was open, and he copped plenty for it. In a 2019 NBC News op-ed he called Donald Trump's presidency a “monarchy in disguise” and urged voters to turn him out. Say what you like about that, it was a public argument, not a smear on a group of people.