6 Actors Quietly Enjoying A Career Renaissance While Everybody's Been Watching McConaughey
2. Robert Redford
Having been one of the iconic film stars of the 1970s and now well past his glory years, there are probably few people that really thought the career of the former Sundance Kid was due a shot in the arm. Many of his contemporaries, most obviously Paul Newman, are no longer with us and Redford himself seemed in semi-retirement. Even his work as a director has been gradually declining since he won the 1980 directing Oscar, with his last well regarded directing jobs being Quiz Show and The Horse Whisperer back in the 90s. For most of the last decade, Redford's only significant work as director or actor was on 2007's Lions for Lambs and 2012's The Company You Keep, bland political films with none of the style or quality of the engaging political dramas of Redford's golden age, films like All the President's Men. It seemed like he just was not likely to make movies that good any more. And then came a film that was just Redford on his own on screen for virtually all its 105 minutes: All is Lost. Were it not for Gravity and its similar theme of a lone individual trapped in an isolated place, All is Lost may well have got greater Oscar attention. As it was, Redford's performance as a man lost at sea in and after a tropical storm was nominated for the majority of critics' Best Actor awards. Alone and using hardly any dialogue, Redford still managed to hold the audience on the edge of their seats throughout. Straight off the back of the one man show of All is Lost, Redford's career rebirth is now giving us his biggest film in years. Captain America: The Winter Soldier draws heavily on the sort of paranoid conspiracy thrillers like Redford's Three Days of the Condor that were very popular when the veteran actor was an A-lister, so his appearance as suspicious Alexander Pierce is highly appropriate. The movie has just opened to impressively positive reviews, much stronger than the first Captain America or the recent Thor sequel. Could this be the start of a new phase in the 77 year old's career?
