There are so many different directions that the career of our Star of the Month Robert Redford could have singularly gone--but didn't. With his Golden Boy good looks, million dollar face and experience working in early television and on Broadway, he might have, for example, made a fortune making nothing but featherweight Hollywood movie comedies without ever breaking a sweat. Or he could have instead stayed in television, starring in his own series; heaven knows Redford spent a major part of the early '60s appearing in the TV outings headlined by others, including Richard Chamberlain's Dr. Kildare series, Robert Stack's The Untouchables, James Garner's long run as Maverick and Henry Fonda's short run as The Deputy. Despite the fierce competition facing young actors in the TV world in the 1960s, Redford stood out--enough so that at age 26 he received an Emmy® nomination for his supporting performance in Alcoa Premiere's "The Voice of Charlie Pont" (1962), which had Bradford Dillman in the title role.

Redford might also have done very well remaining solely on Broadway, where he had a rather swift and notable rise starring in the original companies of Sunday in New York (1961) and Barefoot in the Park (1963), among others. What he ultimately did instead of choosing one arena in which to work was to work everywhere. He made his first movie appearance, a brief one, in a 1960 film adaptation of the play Tall Story, in which he'd appeared on Broadway; it was two years later that he landed his first meaty film role in 1962's War Hunt, with actors that included fellow unknowns and future directors Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola. Redford's impact in movies wasn't immediate.

It took, in fact, seven years of moviemaking before Redford became a bona fide movie star with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, then it was four more years until the double whammy of 1973's The Way We Were and The Sting made him an icon. By that point he was also showing that his focus and wide interests were taking him in a myriad of directions: as a political activist and environmentalist, as a film director (he won the Oscar® on his first try, 1980's Ordinary People), as a film producer, dedicated humanitarian, the hands-on founder and sparkplug of the Sundance Film Institute and the Sundance Film Festival (that Sundance name coming from the character he played in Butch Cassidy), and the list of his accomplishments goes on from there.

Something else about Redford: he now owns a good chunk of Utah. He bought two acres of land there in 1960 for $500; that parcel has since grown to more than 5,000 acres, all the more room for his Sundance activities to continue to grow.

Every Tuesday this month on TCM we're celebrating this multi-layered, much-hyphenated, quite extraordinary fellow for whom working in just one area of today's world was never enough. We'll have 15 of his best, most beloved films for you to enjoy, including the only one that Redford himself says he can bear to watch. That one will kick off our Redford month on January 6 at 8 p.m. ET. (Sorry, you have to look elsewhere for the title.) Do enjoy a lively January with us and with RR.

by Robert Osborne