Redford @ 70. Or more likely, 71.

It's as if the 70s are turning 70 rather than 30. Ten days ago, it was Dustin Hoffman. Today, another 70th birthday of another Hollywood-ish star goes unmentioned in the English-language press (probably because, according to the IMDb, he's actually turning 71) but gets extensive nods in the German-language papers.

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in a piece laced with lots of pix, Verena Leuken considers Robert Redford: "What allies him more with Cary Grant than with Tom Cruise is his aura of unreachability, the awe of the effect he has on other people, a public image almost entirely decoupled from his personality and a concurrent physical impossibility, even in his best films, as a director or as an actor, to be someone other than Robert Redford. Dustin Hoffman can play autistic, can play women, historical figures, students, angry husbands, mathematicians with violent tendencies and hundred-year-old men. Robert Redford always plays Robert Redford."

Also, Susan Vahabzadeh in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jens Mühling in Der Tagesspiegel, Claudia Lensson in Die Welt and Anke Westphal in the Berliner Zeitung.

In English, besides the Wikipedia entry (which backs the claim that Redford's 71 today), you might turn to an only somewhat related yet also somehow appropriate recollection from Helen Brown in the Telegraph:

This month Seven Hundred Penguins, a collection of paperback covers from the publisher's birth in 1935 up to the millennium, is published. It's a sort of Heat magazine for bibliophiles, an opportunity to gawp at what our favourite books were wearing in 1945, 1987 or 1992, as well as a chance to look at some oddities, some fleeting one-hit wonders, some "do you remember whens?"

I hit my biggest emotional experience on page 95, where I found the 1974 cover I can never separate from my reading of The Great Gatsby. As a student, I had been delighted to discover a copy of the book in a charity shop. Set in a Mills & Boon-ish border of primrose yellow, it features a still from the film starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

I recall with blushes the day I took it to a seminar only to have the tutor sniff at it. As the other students pulled plain hardbacks or Penguin Classics from their bags, I realised the Gatsby of my imagination had been infected by Redford. And then, walking home, I reflected on how oddly appropriate that was. Gatsby was a kind of actor and never became part of the class he so wanted to infiltrate. My copy of the book about him didn't either. The Redford-Farrow cover was bang on.

Posted by dwhudson at August 18, 2007 3:24 AM