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he played a slick psychopath opposite Carey. The problem was that Sidney Lumet, in the midst of casting his television production of The Iceman Cometh for the National Network, a precursor of PBS, could not abide the notion of Parritt, a neurotic and thin character in the play, as a surf dude. Lumet liked what he’d seen of Redford in Playhouse 90 but disliked the tan. Lumet’s casting director, Marion Dougherty, met with Redford nonetheless. “I can do it,” Redford said to her. “I will bring myself to the requirement.” She was won over: “I knew the text, and The Iceman Cometh is all about subsurface,” says Dougherty. “Appreciating Bob’s looks was easy. But listening to what was underneath is what convinced me. He had a lot to say for himself. He was sensitive and probing and intelligent. I called Sidney and asked him to rethink. He finally said okay.”

An O’Neill role was, for Redford, a walk into Tiger’s past. Once, in a casual conversation, Tiger had told him that Doc Gainey’s, O’Neill’s favorite pub, was also one of his. “Did you know him?” Redford asked. Tiger chewed his cigar, scratched his head and said, “His brother was a bum.” Redford’s frequent visits with Tiger in the cramped, dark rooms of New London would now serve the young actor well.

Sidney Lumet, Redford well knew, was the ultimate actors’ director, having started in the Yiddish Art Theatre at the age of four and having appeared on Broadway often since the 1930s. In 1947 he’d set up a rival acting group with disaffected members of the Actors Studio (among them Eli Wallach and Yul Brynner) and had ten years’ experience directing more than 150 episodes of crime series for CBS television. The regard in which he was held was evidenced by Henry Fonda’s insistence that Lumet direct Twelve Angry Men, which became Lumet’s movie debut in 1957 and garnered three Oscar nominations. “I was more anxious to please him than any director I’d encountered,” said Redford.

The four-hour, four-act production of Iceman was to be an exact re-creation of the 1956 Circle in the Square stage production, directed by José Quintero, which was regarded as the definitive version and consecrated Jason Robards as O’Neill’s signature actor. Robards was back in the lead role of Hickey, the bar bum philosopher, as were several members of the 1956 cast. The play was to be taped over several days in October, for transmission in November.

Set in 1912, Iceman deals with salesman Hickey’s arrival at his regular haunt to harangue his old drinking friends about their habitual despair. His apparent conversion throws the gathering into turmoil, but his posturing covers up the fact that he is traumatized because he cannot come to terms with the fact that he has murdered his wife. Essentially a work that posits a dark confusion in the center of the American psyche, The Iceman Cometh is often described as O’Neill’s most autobiographical work. O’Neill himself insisted to his friend, the writer Dudley Nichols, that it was not pessimistic. “[O’Neill] did not feel that the fact that we live by illusion is sad,” said Nichols. “The important thing, he felt, is to [recognize] that we do.”

Redford’s Parritt urges Hickey to abandon delusion by choosing suicide. Redford understood the centrality of the role and wrestled for weeks with text and subtext. “My Parritt came from a place of intuition, accessed from my own contradictions. What was marvelous about Sidney was that he allowed intuition. He had a Method reputation, but he didn’t do the Stanislavski thing. There was no heavy analysis. Instead, it was organic development. Drawing on the actor’s instinct made absolute sense to me.”

Jason Robards coached Redford more than Lumet did. “We got on right off the bat,” Redford would write in his eulogy for Time after Robards’s death in January 2001. “He was extremely generous to me. In the play, when his character meets mine, he says, ‘We’re members of the same lodge in some way.’ Because of our personal connection he invested that moment pretty heavily, and I’ll never forget that line.” Redford was aware of Robards