When an artist dies whose work I admire, I try to celebrate them in some small way. With Robert Redford, whose golden face lit up my teenage years, who embodied everything epic, vital and sexy about an America I hadn’t yet visited, I spent much of the autumn rewatching his old films.
These days Meta or X is quick to detect your grief. So when I chose Downhill Racer (much underrated), The Candidate (so prescient) and Indecent Proposal (who’d need to be paid?) the algorithms served me a side order of Redford interview clips. Here he was at 35 or 55 or 75, ever laconic, modest and denim-clad, always aware fame is absurd and takes more than it gives, and that life’s real joys aren’t premieres or parties but people-watching, the outdoors, hanging with your children. How can the Sundance Kid, who brought only delight to the world, be gone?
But 2025 stole many delightful people. Some years are like that: 2016 swept away David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince and Victoria Wood — whose unexpected death was greeted even by hardened hacks in the Times newsroom with a wail of “oh no!” — ending with the gut-punch of George Michael on Christmas Day.
And 2025 left alone the dictators, the Epstein buddies, the bastards and bullies, the lurid fame-whores, the petty-minded cancellers, the bringers of chaos, division and despair. Instead it took Prunella Scales, Patricia Routledge, Jane Goodall, Jilly Cooper, Tom Lehrer, David Lynch, Brian Wilson, Tom Stoppard and, cruellest of all, Rob Reiner.
Robert Redford stars as Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1984)
ALAMY
The deaths came in such quick succession that my Redford season was barely finished before Diane Keaton — who gave 1970s women such a liberating new aesthetic — was gone, and I was deep in Something’s Gotta Give and Annie Hall.
Am I maudlin and self-indulgent? Maybe. But I feel a need to pause and pay respects. Not with garment-rending or candle-lighting. (Tears are presumptuous for people you never knew.) But quietly celebrating what they gave me: an escape from the horrors of the world or my own stupid problems, into something beautiful, funny or sublime.
With age you see that a human life is such a thin sliver of time and that it’s vanishingly impossible to achieve anything at all. Then the last of a generation who could feasibly have been your parents falls away. The Reaper’s scythe swishes closer. There’s no one else older and wiser left to consult. You’re the grown-ups now.
So obits become miraculous stories of when stars did align, odds were overcome, plans actually worked out. Redford, who survived childhood polio, lost his mother as a teenager, then turned to drink and got expelled from school, ended up with an Oscar and as the godfather of independent cinema. Rewatch the Tom Stoppard BBC Imagine, and wonder at how this skinny Czech refugee boy became the greatest English playwright of our age.
You understand too that tragedy is cheap: there are a billion sad stories, pain is an infinite resource any sententious fool can mine. How much harder it is to amuse and delight. Playful wit like Stoppard’s is the highest form of intelligence. His plays required such a mastery of Shakespeare or thermodynamics, he could toss these ideas into the air and juggle them for fun. It took Tom Lehrer’s alchemy to turn the deathly dull periodic table into a hilarious song, but he saw it as little more than a party trick and quickly returned to teaching maths at Harvard. Brian Wilson deployed his limitless musicality and ruined his mental peace to create songs like California Girls or Good Vibrations, which sound effortlessly happy and light.
Jilly Cooper, Sophie Kinsella and Joanna Trollope, all gone this year, were treated as literary lightweights. Bonkbuster, chick lit, Aga saga. So many words to diminish books written by women to amuse (mainly) other women, to recount their lives, give them heroines to cheer on, heroes to desire. Their novels filled millions of boring afternoons, provided respite from divorce or loneliness with sex and shopping and secrets, while all three women were noted for their humour, friendship, charm and kindness.
Comedy is harder than tragedy, as Steve Coogan notes in his autobiography, because “an audience either makes that noise [laughter] or it doesn’t”. Bad sad art can still be a succès d’estime. But a mirthless comedy is a straight-up turkey. Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron turned their friendship into When Harry Met Sally, the perfect rom-com, sweet yet not cloying, cynical but with heart. It is woven from the minutiae of life — food, shopping, gossip, bad dates — but will be enjoyed long after films full of bangs and car chases are forgotten.
This is a season of joy but also of ghosts. And the ghosts, I find, don’t diminish the joy. When the iPhone algorithm throws up “memories” they are often of that most photographed time, Christmas. I look at the assembled parties of 20 years ago, my sons small, my parents healthy and laughing in paper hats. Scroll forward and my father is gone but my father-in-law is still carving the turkey. A few Christmases more and he’s absent too. Then my mother is trimming the sprouts for what none of us knew would be the last time. The family cast shrinks then grows again with new partners, the next generation.
This is a time to remember all those who brought delight. Whether they are film-makers who moved us, actresses who made us laugh at ourselves or the people who passed through our own lives. Here’s to all those absent friends.