There was a moment, back in 2012, when Diane Keaton and Robert Redford nearly shared the screen. Each were reported to be “eyeing” the leads in a holiday-themed ensemble comedy titled The Most Wonderful Time, pitched as a Love Actually-style pastiche involving multiple interwoven tales of family and romance, all set against a backdrop of Christmas lights and yuletide meltdowns.
Alas, that movie never got made — at the very least not in that form — and Keaton and Redford never again got here so near working together. But in their very own ways, these two very different actors — she, the eccentric spirit of Latest Hollywood comedy; he, the golden-boy stoic of the American pastoral — were certain by something much more powerful than onscreen chemistry: generational gravity. They belonged to the identical loose orbit of Nineteen Seventies-era performers who upended the principles of stardom and helped reshape what American movies may very well be.
Keaton died Oct. 11 at age 79 after an incredibly quick battle with pneumonia. Redford died in his sleep, at 89, a bit lower than a month earlier, on Sept. 16. Some from their cohort had gone before — Paul Newman in 2008, Shelley Duvall in 2024, Gene Hackman in February — while others have simply drifted from view. Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway — all now of their 80s — have largely stepped away from the highlight.
In fact, that is nothing recent. All stars, even the brightest, eventually flicker out as recent generations take their place. But there’s something different — something more poignant — about watching this particular circle begin to fade.
The celebs who got here before them had been shaped by the studio system — groomed, styled and slotted into types. They signed long-term contracts, wore what the wardrobe department handed them and gave interviews ghostwritten by studio publicists. Even the greats — Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Davis — were often playing variations of a persona the system had helped construct. Their power got here from polish, execution and consistency. Stardom was a product, and it was rigorously managed.
By the point Redford, Keaton, Beatty and the others were coming of age as actors, the old studio scaffolding was already coming apart, with the contract system unraveling and the good moguls who once ruled the town with an iron fist fading from the scene. There was not a press-office puppeteer telling actors tips on how to dress or what to say, no studio image to guard. They were free to define themselves — onscreen and off — and to let those two identities blur. Their personas may very well be withholding, eccentric, neurotic, ambiguous, strange. They may play characters the previous generation never got near: complicated individuals with unresolved feelings and messy inner lives.
On the massive screen, Robert Redford transitioned from a clean-cut leading man into someone more introspective and morally uncertain.
Illustration by Layer Ø; Courtesy Everett Collection
At the identical time, a brand new type of director had taken over the asylum — such mavericks as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese — filmmakers who weren’t all for preserving the system. They desired to blow it up. Their movies — Carnal Knowledge, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Klute, Taxi Driver — didn’t just break the principles, they rewrote the language of cinema itself. And that reinvention gave this young, liberated generation of actors a canvas as unbound and unconventional as they were — a type of free-spirited platform that hadn’t existed before and hasn’t really existed since.
Few actors made higher use of that freedom than Redford and Keaton. In such movies as The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Way We Were, Redford turned the clean-cut leading man into something more introspective and morally uncertain — a figure torn between idealism and self-interest. Keaton took the identical open, idiosyncratic presence that made Annie Hall so engaging and revealed its darker shades in The Godfather and Searching for Mr. Goodbar, proving she may very well be fearless, complex, even unsettling. Each found truth in contradiction. They made uncertainty look thrilling.
But by the early Eighties, because the counterculture spirit of the previous decade gave option to something more box office-driven and fewer tolerant of creative chaos, a unique model of movie star began taking on. Actors weren’t looking for to challenge the system anymore; they were the system, powering tentpoles, sequels and high-concept hits that would sell in every corner of the world. This was the era of the Event Movie, when opening-weekend grosses became the brand new measure of stardom. The actors who began appearing on marquees — Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Gibson, Cruise — weren’t celebrated for subtlety or transformation or their onscreen bravery, but for his or her box office clout.
Diane Keaton turned her engaging presence in Annie Hall into something darker in The Godfather and Searching for Mr. Goodbar.
Illustration by Layer Ø; Courtesy Everett Collection
Sure, by the Nineteen Nineties, there was a parallel indie movement where a few of these stars could unfurl their dramatic range, ’70s-style — Cruise in Magnolia, Stallone in Cop Land — but for all of the critical acclaim and Oscar attention those roles might attract, what defined success in Eighties and ’90s Hollywood were the ticket sales for such tentpoles as Top Gun, Die Hard, the Rambo movies and The Terminator. Actors had turn into commodities of scale, defined largely by their ability to summon $100 million grosses.
When the brand new millennium arrived, that equation shifted yet again, even when the deal with money hadn’t. Hollywood’s center of gravity moved from stars to franchises. The IP became the actual draw — superheroes, wizards, Jedi and other branded worlds. The costume, often spandex, mattered greater than the actor inside it (even Redford got in on the act, playing a Marvel villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Stardom not was the engine of the movie business; it was just one other interchangeable a part of the business.
Then, within the 2010s and ’20s, stardom began moving from the massive screen to a much smaller stage — the phone. Hollywood was still turning out superhero sagas, prestige dramas and comfortable seasonal fare (like that Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time, eventually rewritten and released in 2015 because the forgettable Love the Coopers, with Keaton still starring and Redford’s role taken by, of all people, John Goodman). But the actual competition for attention was moving elsewhere — to feeds and timelines, where fame was measured not by box office totals but by followers.
From left: Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,
a horror film reinventened for the Nineteen Seventies.
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis/Getty Images
Stars used to fade between movies. Today, they’re required to remain perpetually present — posting skincare routines, political endorsements, personal podcasts. The rigorously curated distance that after made icons feel larger-than-life has been replaced by the algorithmic closeness of TikTok confessionals. Even the indie-minded actors who might’ve inherited the Keaton/Redford mantle — your Ethan Hawkes, Michelle Williamses, Adam Drivers — have had to barter this attention economy. They’re still serious actors, but they exist in a culture that prizes access over aura. The art of elusiveness — that quality of unknowable magnetism — has almost vanished.
Now and again, you catch a glimmer of that older magic — the awkward honesty and unvarnished humanity that defined the Nineteen Seventies generation. Movies like The Holdovers, Licorice Pizza, even Once Upon a Time in Hollywood evoke that mood again, though now it plays like nostalgia for the era when stars like Keaton and Redford ruled the screen. What was once rise up now reads as retro — authenticity repackaged for an audience craving for the very messiness that after made those earlier actors feel so real.
The irony, after all, is that this recent generation has more tools than ever to manage their image, yet less actual control over how they’re perceived. Every red carpet misstep, every viral sound bite, is immediately flattened into content. Stardom, once about transcendence, has turn into a type of relentless participation.
Gritty Nineteen Seventies’ realism was on display in William Friedkin’s The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman because the hard-nosed Latest York City narc Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle.
twentieth Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
As for the subsequent generation of stars — if there’s even to be one — it’s hard to assume it resembling the actors who got here before, least of all of the unruly brood who took over the screen through the Nineteen Seventies. The conditions that after created icons have splintered. Theaters are shrinking, audiences scattered, and the machinery that after turned actors into household names has gone digital. Stardom used to depend upon scarcity; the longer term will run on replication.
When a Dutch creator recently introduced Tilly Norwood, a totally AI-generated “actress,” it wasn’t her performance that felt uncanny — it was the concept behind it. A star with no past, no flesh-and-blood body, no human connection in any respect. Only a simulation of emotion, programmed to deliver the illusion of depth. Mockingly, it’s the precise inverse of what defined the Nineteen Seventies generation: actors whose power got here from being recognizably, sometimes painfully, real.
Stars like Keaton and Redford were messy, mercurial, alive — and that was the purpose. They and the opposite ’70s actors reminded audiences that being human was the story. Tilly, and the technologies that may follow her, promise something cleaner, faster, cheaper and more controllable — but infinitely less relatable. Perhaps that’s progress. Or perhaps it’s the ultimate act in an extended strategy of polishing the humanity out of movie stars altogether.
This story appeared within the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.