Robert Redford
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50 free Robert Redford trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Robert Redford spent more than six decades in front of the camera and behind it. He was the outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the reporter in All the President's Men and the romantic lead of Out of Africa, and he went on to make acclaimed films of his own. This quiz covers the whole story: the early television parts, the hits of the 1970s, the films he made as a film-maker, including Quiz Show, his look back at the rigged television contests of the 1950s, and the festival he built in the mountains of Utah. It is pitched for film fans of every level. Most questions give you something to reason from, a few will test anyone who knows the films well, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Robert Redford won his only competitive Oscar in which category, for the 1980 drama Ordinary People?
Best Director
Best Director went to Redford at the first attempt, because Ordinary People was the first film he had ever directed. He never won an Oscar for acting, despite decades as a leading man.
Q 02In a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone, Robert Redford's wounded policeman is revealed to be which figure?
Death
Death poses as an injured young officer to win over a frail old woman who has shut herself in a basement flat to escape him. Redford was told it became the most-watched episode of the series.
Q 03Which actor played Butch Cassidy opposite Robert Redford's Sundance Kid in the hit 1969 western?
Paul Newman
Paul Newman starred in what became the top-grossing film released in 1969. Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty had both turned down the Sundance role before Redford landed it.
Q 04Robert Redford's film Quiz Show dramatises the rigging of which real American game show of the 1950s?
Twenty-One
Twenty-One was so tightly staged that contestants were told how to dress, which questions to miss and even when to mop their brows. Its exposure nearly finished off the whole quiz genre.
Q 05Which star of The Way We Were, opposite Robert Redford, also sang its chart-topping title song?
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand took the title song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and it also won the Oscar for Best Original Song. She played a campus activist who falls for Redford's golden-boy writer.
Q 06Which Washington Post reporter did Robert Redford play in the Watergate drama All the President's Men?
Bob Woodward
Bob Woodward was a part Redford lined up for himself: he bought the screen rights to the two reporters' book in 1974 for $450,000. The film went on to earn eight Oscar nominations.
Q 07Which Utah town hosted Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival from 1981 until its move to Colorado?
Park City
Park City gave the festival a ski-resort setting and a January date, a switch meant to draw more attention from Hollywood. In 2025 organisers announced a new home in Boulder.
Q 08In Indecent Proposal, how much does Robert Redford's billionaire offer for one night with Demi Moore's character?
$1 million
$1 million is the price John Gage puts on a night with the married Diana Murphy. The premise came from a 1988 novel and made the film one of the biggest hits of 1993.
Q 09Which actress played Danish author Karen Blixen opposite Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning Out of Africa?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep won the part over the director's first choice, Audrey Hepburn. The film collected seven Oscars, yet neither of its two stars took one home.
Q 10Which rising star did Robert Redford direct in A River Runs Through It before acting beside him in Spy Game?
Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt played younger brother Paul Maclean, the part that brought him to wider prominence. Redford stayed off screen but is heard throughout as the older Norman, narrating the story.
Q 11Which English actor did Robert Redford cast as disgraced contestant Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show?
Ralph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes prepared by driving to the real Van Doren's Connecticut home and posing as a lost motorist. He later called that brief meeting crucial to getting the man's accent right.
Q 12Which actor gained 25 pounds to play defeated champion Herb Stempel in Robert Redford's Quiz Show?
John Turturro
John Turturro also changed his voice to mimic the real Stempel, who worked on the film as a technical adviser. Even Van Doren himself said he enjoyed the performance.
Q 13Which fast-talking director did Robert Redford cast as a quietly menacing sponsor in Quiz Show?
Martin Scorsese
Q 21Which playwright wrote Barefoot in the Park, the Broadway comedy that gave Robert Redford his stage breakthrough?
Neil Simon
Neil Simon saw it become his longest-running hit, with 1,530 Broadway performances. Redford repeated his role as the strait-laced newlywed husband in the 1967 film version.
Q 22Which actress starred with Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, The Electric Horseman and Our Souls at Night?
Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda first shared a film with him in 1960's Tall Story, where his part was too small to earn a credit. Their final pairing came on Netflix 57 years later.
Q 23To which South American country do Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid flee in Robert Redford's 1969 western?
Bolivia
Martin Scorsese got the part because Redford wanted a tough character played gently. He reckoned the film-maker's rapid delivery would make the executive seem extremely menacing.
Q 14In Robert Redford's Quiz Show, which Best Picture winner is Herb Stempel ordered to get wrong on air?
Marty
Marty was one of the real Stempel's favourite films, which made the dive hurt all the more. He was told to answer On the Waterfront instead.
Q 15Which brand sponsors the rigged game show in Robert Redford's Quiz Show and wants its champion replaced?
Geritol
Geritol was an iron and vitamin tonic, and in the film its makers fear that the reigning champion's ratings have levelled out. For legal reasons the script renamed the company's real boss.
Q 16In Robert Redford's Quiz Show, star contestant Charles Van Doren teaches at which Ivy League university?
Columbia
Columbia lost him as an English instructor after he admitted to Congress that he had been fed the answers. His father Mark, a Pulitzer-winning poet, taught there for nearly 40 years.
Q 17Robert Redford's Quiz Show lost the Best Picture Oscar to which Tom Hanks film?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump won six Oscars that night, while Quiz Show went home with nothing from its four nominations. Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption were beaten in the same race.
Q 18Which actor, then starring as a TV doctor, plays investigator Richard Goodwin in Robert Redford's Quiz Show?
Rob Morrow
Rob Morrow, Dr Joel Fleischman in Northern Exposure, had rejected other film offers before this one. He read four of the real Goodwin's books to prepare.
Q 19Which network airs the rigged quiz at the centre of Robert Redford's film Quiz Show?
NBC
NBC made Van Doren a well-paid Today correspondent, then dropped him once he confessed. In the film, the network's president denies knowing anything about the fix.
Q 20Which director, first lined up to make Quiz Show himself, plays host Dave Garroway in Robert Redford's film?
Barry Levinson
Barry Levinson gave up the director's chair because he was committed to Bugsy. Redford then cast him as the Today host, liking his easygoing, casual manner.
Bolivia is pictured by Butch as a robber's paradise, but the two outlaws end up cornered there by local police reinforced with army troops.
Q 24Which composer won two Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for its score and its hit song?
Burt Bacharach
Burt Bacharach won for both the score and the song Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, even though Time magazine complained that his music was anachronistic for a western.
Q 25Robert Redford's only Oscar nomination for acting came for playing grifter Johnny Hooker in which film?
The Sting
The Sting won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, on the night its young lead went home empty-handed. Redford plays a small-time con man out to bring down a crime boss.
Q 26Which ragtime composer's piece The Entertainer became a pop hit thanks to a 1973 Robert Redford con-man film?
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin wrote The Entertainer in 1902, and the film's soundtrack carried it into the pop top ten more than seventy years later. The story itself is set in 1936, decades after the rag was written.
Q 27Which director wrote Robert Redford's film The Great Gatsby after Truman Capote's script was rejected?
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola wrote the second screenplay, and later complained that the finished picture failed to follow it. Capote had been paid $300,000 for a draft judged unusable.
Q 28Which actor played reporter Carl Bernstein alongside Robert Redford in All the President's Men?
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman and Redford spent months visiting the newspaper's offices, sitting in on news conferences to research their parts as the Watergate reporters.
Q 29Which actor won an Oscar as editor Ben Bradlee in Robert Redford's Watergate film All the President's Men?
Jason Robards
Jason Robards won Best Supporting Actor for the part, then took the same award again a year later for playing Dashiell Hammett in Julia.
Q 30In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's character is paid to read books for which agency?
The CIA
The CIA employs his bookish researcher, who comes back from lunch one day to find every one of his co-workers murdered. He spends the rest of the film working out why.