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His gift as an actor was his sense of reserve, the feeling that something was always being held back, something churning behind that handsome face.

Several of his leading ladies commented on it.

Kim Basinger from “The Natural” said that when she was in character, this removed quality of Redford’s as he played baseball phenom Roy Hobbs drove her crazy. Her character wanted, no, needed, something from his character—and his character wouldn’t or couldn’t give it to her.

In perhaps his most romantic film, the glorious weeper “The Way We Were” with Barbra Streisand, his character Hubbell Gardner writes:

“In a way, he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him, but at least he knew it. About once a month he worried that he was a fraud.”

One reason Redford could play that film’s damaged male lead—a man who cannot commit fully to anything, including his wife or even his own talent—so devastatingly effectively was that some part of him feared he was that guy.

Things did seem to come easily to him.

Relatively early in his career, when he was lobbying director Mike Nichols for the lead in “The Graduate” that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman, Nichols said he didn’t want to cast Redford because he didn’t think audiences would believe he struggled to get a girl.

“When was the last time you struck out?” Nichols famously asked.

“What do you mean?” Redford responded, puzzled by the question.

Because Redford never had to work hard to woo audiences or anyone else, he was perhaps the least convincing actor ever to play the title character in the 1974 film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

Not only could audiences not accept that Mia Farrow’s Daisy ever would cast him aside for Bruce Dern’s Tom, but Redford could not convey the desperate longing that drove Gatsby to his tragic end. He was not a man who would allow himself to show that much yearning for anything or anyone.

It was this elusiveness that made his presence on the screen so powerful. The more he held back, the more the women in his films and the audiences in the theaters leaned forward.

When we did, we saw the scars beneath the smiling face and the golden hair.

That was his gift as an actor. By withholding, he made moviegoers scour below the surface.

He did the same as a director.

His first film in the director’s chair—1980’s “Ordinary People”—dove deep to reveal the sorrows, disappointments and resentments roiling within a family that seemed to outside observers an exemplar of the American Dream.

In that movie, he elicited an amazing performance from Mary Tyler Moore, a turn that managed to be both measured and raw at the same time. Under Redford’s direction, Moore—who had been known primarily as a light comedienne up until then—etched a portrait of a woman so consumed by grief and anger that she seemed to ache through the screen.

He directed other fine films—“A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show” are the best—that explored similar themes.

In “A River Runs Through It,” Brad Pitt’s golden-boy good looks conceal the self-destructive streak driving a talented young man to his doom. In “Quiz Show,” the superficial glamor and elegance of the 1950s television world corrupt another golden boy, Ralph Fiennes’ Charles Van Doren.

If Redford’s art had a lesson to impart, it was this: A winning visage can hide an awful lot, including a soul at war with itself.

There were sorrows in his life, the death of his mother when he was a teenager and the loss of two children. He rarely spoke of his grief publicly.

His reticence to speak of his emotional life embodied a kind of American male code, one that said what mattered most about a man was that which he chose to share with only a few.

And only if those few looked behind the curtain and paid close attention.

Robert Redford died the other day. He was 89.

He left behind a legacy of superb performances and films, ones that remind us that the truth is always something more than what meets the eye.

May he rest in peace.