Cinema: When He's 64

Yes, Robert Redford is wrinkled. He's weathered and wizened by good days on the Utah slopes and long years on movie sets. He's 64 and looks it, and he's O.K. with that. "A person's road map is there to be seen and shared," he says. "The only time I think about aging is when it's put in front of me. It started about 10 years ago. 'I notice you're more wrinkled. How does it feel?' I thought, Yeah, that's what happens, doesn't it?"

We might as well make peace with it too, because these days we're seeing a lot more of Redford. His Sundance Institute--the laboratory he started for independent filmmakers in Sundance, Utah--is celebrating its 20th anniversary. And he is starring in two movies: the prison drama The Last Castle, which opened last month, and the Tony Scott espionage thriller, Spy Game, which opens Nov. 21.

Audiences have shied away from Last Castle, and most critics have declared it a stinker, except for one thing: Redford's performance as a court-martialed three-star general leading a prison revolt. He says he was intrigued by the role because he hadn't played a military character before. Still, it's the kind of part he specializes in: the canny outsider itching to outsmart the system. He has higher hopes for Spy Game, in which he co-stars with Brad Pitt, whom he directed in the 1992 drama A River Runs Through It. With Pitt as his former protege, Redford plays a renegade CIA agent, a twist on the government-targeted fugitive he played in 1975 in Three Days of the Condor. "Condor was a critical look at the CIA, and Spy Game is an inside look at it from a historical perspective," he says. "It's intriguing to play a character that's the flip side of one you played before."

Here's an irony that is not lost on Redford: while celebrating Sundance, which is dedicated to scrappy, low-budget endeavors, its founder and protector is starring in big-budget studio movies, commanding $8 million to $10 million a pop. "Talk about contradiction," he says, laughing. "There you have it. There's a line by Kris Kristofferson: 'I'm just a walking contradiction.' Well, it sure seems that way."

Redford has always offered a study in contrasts. He is the California all-American kid who was born (in 1937) into a section of Santa Monica where most of his neighbors spoke Spanish. He had the looks of a matinee idol and the brains of a subversive mogul. Like his Sundance Film Festival--where each January in Park City, Utah, makers of low-budget films mix with cell phone-addicted agents and studio executives--Redford is a fiercely independent entity with an inescapable aura of Hollywood glamour.

In the 1970s, when his stardom was at its most luminous--with The Sting, The Way We Were, Condor and All the President's Men--he preferred the Utah mountains to Beverly Hills, taking three- and four-year breaks from acting. Except for a romance with actress Sonia Braga, whom he directed in The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), his private life has seldom drawn the spotlight. He has had only one marriage, to Lola Van Wagenen, which ended after 27 years, in 1985. And none of his three grown kids appears to have a Daddy Dearest story to tell.