Home \ Signature Roles \ The Way We Were (1973) — Robert Redford
ROBERT REDFORD · 1973 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Hubbell Gardiner is everything a 1940s campus wants in a man: handsome, talented, easy, a writer with a golden future.
Hubbell Gardiner is everything a 1940s campus wants in a man: handsome, talented, easy, a writer with a golden future. Katie Morosky, played by Barbra Streisand, is everything it does not: loud, political, Jewish, and unwilling to be quiet about any of it. Robert Redford plays Hubbell as a man who loves Katie and cannot live with her intensity — and who knows, even as he leaves her, that he is choosing comfort over courage.
The film’s romance is also a political history, from college radicalism through McCarthyism to Hollywood blacklisting, and its famous theme song became a standard. But the film endures because of Redford’s restraint: Hubbell is not a villain, he is a man who could not rise to the moment, and Redford lets the audience feel both his charm and his failure in the same glance.
