13 Stars You Never Noticed Retired From Acting (3 of 4)

Robert Redford

With an acting career spanning for over 60 years, it makes sense for Robert Redford to retire soon enough. In fact, after starring in The Old Man & the Gun in 2018, he stated in an Entertainment Weekly interview that that was his final role.

“Never say never, but I pretty well concluded that this would be it for me in terms of acting, and [I’ll] move towards retirement after this ’cause I’ve been doing it since I was 21. I thought, ‘Well, that’s enough.’ And why not go out with something that’s very upbeat and positive?”

Despite his retirement though, he is still involved in the acting community to some extent. He has lent his voice to a couple of projects including his grandson Dylan Redford’s movie Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia. At this point, we can expect him to be working at this capacity or not at all.

Meg Ryan

Meg Ryan was commonly known for her roles in the ‘80s and ‘90s rom-com shows. She starred in When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, to list a few of them. Her most recent showing though was in 2018 in Picture Paris and it was the first time she appeared since her Ithaca days, which was done in 2015.

In terms of her continuing the acting career, this one is more up in the air than the others on this list. It’s hard to predict the future of one’s career of course. Still, though, we think Ryan is gone for good, since she mentioned in a 2019 interview in The New York Times that she was taking a break.

The reasoning was that acting made her feel burnt out.

“I felt in a crazy way that, as an actor, I was burning through life experiences. Somehow I was a helicopter pilot or a journalist or an alcoholic. I was living these express-lane lives. I didn’t feel like I knew enough anymore about myself or the world to reflect it as an actor. I felt isolated.”

Gene Hackman

The last film we saw of Gene Hackman was in 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport. And with him being now 91 years old, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be making a comeback. This is further driven by his health reasonings in a 2020 Empire interview:

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was actually a stress test that I took in New York. The doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress.”

Hackman is still putting in work in his own way. He has since published three novels during the time of his retirement.