My favorite Redford anecdote comes from Mike Nichols. They’d worked together in Barefoot in the Park, and Redford wanted Nichols to cast him as the lead in Nichols’s new movie, The Graduate.
Nichols told him no. “You can’t play a loser.”
Redford insisted he could.
Nichols said, “No you can’t. Look at you. How often do you strike out with a woman?”
Redford’s baffled response: “What do you mean?”
He didn’t understand the concept. It had never happened.