By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — After Paul Newman died of lung cancer at the age of 83 in 2008, Robert Redford talked to ABC about their longstanding friendship.
Its inception, he explained, was their starring together in the hit 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“It was just that connection of playing those characters and the fun of it that really began the relationship,” Redford said at the time. “And then once the film started, once we went forward, we then discovered other similarities that just multiplied over time, a common ground that we both had between us, interests and so forth, and differences.”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was a hybrid western-buddy comedy that featured the actor pair as renegade outlaws involved in a train robbery gone awry. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including best original screenplay.
Much like their bonded onscreen characters in the film, what would follow in real life would be decades of love and admiration between the pair, who could have easily been rivals given their positions as Hollywood heartthrobs-turned-leading men.
Redford died Tuesday “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah–the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” according to a statement from his publicist Cindi Berger, chairman and chief executive officer of Rogers and Cowan PMK. He was 89.
The two men had plenty in common.
Like Newman, Redford began his career on the stage before transitioning to the silver screen. Each took their craft very seriously and it was Redford’s talent, he recalled, that led Newman to fight for the younger star to play the Sundance Kid opposite his Butch Cassidy.
“He said, ‘I want to work with an actor,’” Redford said. “And that was very complimentary to me, because that’s, I think, how we both saw our profession, that acting was about craft and we took it seriously.”
Redford often credited Newman with helping to make him the multi-hyphenate star that he became because he had gone to bat for him on that film.
Their buddy energy carried them into another movie also now considered a classic, 1973’s “The Sting,” which further cemented their friendship.
Both wanted to be respected for their craft more so than their considerable good looks.
They were devoted family men and at one point lived about a mile apart from each other in Connecticut. They also both leaned into philanthropy, with Redford focusing on the environment and independent filmmaking, and Newman founding the food company Newman’s Own whose profits he donated to charity.
Redford once reflected on Newman’s commitment to The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, which Newman first founded in 1988 to aid chronically ill children.
In a video supporting the camp, Redford said that even before he started working with Newman, he thought of him as “not so much a hero, but a guy who stood up for what he believed was right.”
“Playing friends, we became friends,” Redford said. “And I got to experience firsthand what that meant to Paul.”
The man who was a bigger star than he was before their first film together, and who fought for Redford to get the role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” showed Redford “what the craft of acting meant to him, what his family meant to him, which was everything,” he said in the clip.
“So I couldn’t say enough good things about Paul, except that he had a terrible sense of humor,” Redford added. “And the worst of it was that he would laugh at his bad jokes.”
The love was mutual.
During an appearance on “Film 82,” Newman shared that casting Redford was initially the idea of Newman’s wife, the actress Joanne Woodward, who he said after reading the script and declaring it “marvelous” told him that “the only guy who can play it is Bob Redford.”
“We have lot of fun together,” Newman said of Redford. “We bounce off of each other very well.”
The two men had a habit of playing “eccentric practical jokes” on each other, Newman added.
According to him, Redford once sent him a Porsche for his birthday, but one that had crashed into a tree at 130 mph without a transmission.
“It was just left in my driveway with a big bow around it,” Newman recalled. “So I had the whole thing compacted.”
But that wasn’t all. With the aid of the real estate agent who had rented Redford the house he was living in at the time, Newman got into the home and left the large compacted car inside his vestibule.
“It took five guys to carry this thing into his house,” Newman said. “And of course he finally won that one because he never admitted that anything was in his house.”