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Robert Redford (1936–2025): Farewell to the Sundance Kid
The Kid Who Wasn’t Supposed to Make It Before the golden hair and the grin that launched a thousand magazine covers, Charles Robert Redford Jr. was a sickly kid from Santa Monica who nearly died of polio, a self-described bad student who drank his way out of a baseball scholarship at the University of Colorado,…
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: How Robert Redford Became a Movie Star
“You’re in Your First $50 Million Picture” Picture the first day of rehearsals, early 1968. Paul Newman — already the biggest movie star on the planet — sits down at the read-through table across from a young television actor with golden hair and almost no film career to speak of. Newman leans in, grins that…
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Robert De Niro: The Quiet Man Behind the Tough Guys
Bobby Milk Before he was Travis Bickle, before he was Jake LaMotta, before the world knew his name at all, Robert De Niro was a pale, painfully shy kid in Little Italy that the neighborhood boys called “Bobby Milk.” It was not a compliment. In the New York of the 1950s, toughness was currency, and…
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Gaining Sixty Pounds for Greatness: How Robert De Niro Made Raging Bull
The Fighter Nobody Wanted to Film It is 1974, and Robert De Niro is holding a book he cannot put down. He has just won his first Academy Award for playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, he is Hollywood’s brightest rising star, and the book in his hands is a battered…
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Meryl Streep: The Life Behind the Greatest Actress of Her Generation
She has been nominated for more Academy Awards than any actor in history — twenty-one of them — and won three. She has played a Holocaust survivor, a British prime minister, a fashion empress, a singing Greek hotelier, and a witch. Presidents have hung medals around her neck. And yet the most revealing photograph of…
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How Meryl Streep Made Sophie’s Choice: The Accent, the Agony, the Oscar
Some performances you admire. A very few you survive. Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie’s Choice (1982) belongs to the second category — a performance so complete, so devastating, that audiences walked out of theaters in silence, and critics reached for words like “miraculous.” It won Streep her second Academy Award and was…
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Jane Fonda: Hanoi Jane, Fitness Queen, Survivor — A Life of Reinvention
How many lives can one woman live? Jane Fonda has been a Hollywood princess, a French sex symbol, the most hated woman in America, the most beloved fitness guru on the planet, a three-time wife of famous men, a two-time Oscar winner, and — in her eighties — a repeat arrestee on the steps of…
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How Jane Fonda Made Klute: The Role That Won Her the Oscar
There is a moment, about halfway through Klute, when Bree Daniels sits alone in her psychiatrist’s waiting room, talking into a tape recorder about the one thing she cannot buy, borrow, or fake: control over her own life. Jane Fonda plays the scene with her voice half-breaking and her famous shag haircut falling across her…
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Jack Nicholson: The Man Behind the Grin
The Grin Hides a Ghost Nobody in Hollywood history has worn rebellion quite like Jack Nicholson. The arched eyebrows, the wolfish grin, the laugh that could sound like delight or menace depending on the lighting — for five decades he was the movies’ patron saint of beautiful troublemakers, the man who played every outsider and…
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Which One of You Nuts: How Jack Nicholson Made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Little Movie That Ate Hollywood On November 19, 1975, a small, strange film opened in American theaters. It had no car chases, no happy ending, and a leading man who spends half the movie pretending to be insane inside a real mental hospital. It was made for about $4.4 million — pocket change even…