A Toast to Those We Lost

The impact that the legendary actor, director, and Sundance Film Festival founder had on Hollywood is immeasurable.

View in Browser  Wednesday, December 31, 2025 I was bereft when David Lynch died, back in January. I wasn't a superfan; I haven't even seen all of his movies. It's just that the man was an original. There were truths only he could tell us, and now those yet to be revealed will remain hidden away forever. When an artist passes, we of course mourn the loss of another human being. But the reason we feel the loss so deeply, even as we know the person only at a remove, is that their work helps us see ourselves in ways we cannot achieve on our own. In losing them, we lose a bit of us. This year, we asked incredible writers—artists themselves—to help us understand the truths these luminaries uncovered. To honor those we lost in 2025, we're sharing many of those stories below.    —Kevin Dupzyk, contributing editor Plus: 17 champagne cocktails for celebrating, well, anything The lost art of buying a round at the bar When Trump's term is finally up, we must burn his legacy to the ground What Robert Redford Never Lost Sight Of The impact that the legendary actor, director, and Sundance Film Festival founder had on Hollywood is immeasurable. It's hard to know where to start with Robert Redford now that his life has ended. He was so many things, to so many different people, for so very long that the void he leaves in the culture after dying at the age of 89 is nearly immeasurable.   He was The Natural. He was The Candidate. He was All the President's Men. He was in The Way We Were. He was the only actor who could stand alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting and still arguably be the handsome and charismatic one. Behind the scenes, he was the founder of the game-changing Sundance Film Festival, which advanced the careers of countless independent filmmakers and gave audiences a new perspective on what was possible.   Redford's approach to life was unwaveringly earnest. Whether it was acting, filmmaking, business, or his various environmental causes, he believed in authenticity.  READ THE STORY Before Dune was a Hollywood franchise, it was just one movie helmed by an indie iconoclast. Toby Thompson details David Lynch's process making his 1984 film Dune in this feature from January 1985. >> In 2005, Esquire traveled to New Mexico to meet the one and only Val Kilmer. Read Chuck Klosterman's July 2005 profile of Kilmer, involving buffalo and his Christian Science beliefs. >> There Will Never Be Another Giorgio Armani A remarkable outpouring of emotion across the globe followed the news of the passing of Giorgio Armani, a fashion titan whose brand has been a powerhouse of the industry and, one might say, of modern Italian taste since he founded it in 1975. Maestro was the word most used. In Armani's case it was apt. First and foremost, Giorgio Armani was a designer in the purest sense. In a statement, the brand called him "the creator, the founder, and the tireless driving force" of his brands.   If Armani is a household name literally everywhere—his name is a regular solution in the New York Times crossword—it's because of his unswerving devotion to a very particular notion of Italian style, one that showed a new and distinctly modern yet elegant way of dressing. By Nick Sullivan We Could Use a Comforting Story About Rob Reiner Right Now "As you wish." In 1987, Rob Reiner's film The Princess Bride immortalized those words as a stand-in for the phrase "I love you." Every time you hear that phrase in the movie, it really means this powerful other thing. It's a code between two people who care deeply for each other—told through the tale of the swashbuckling Wesley and the princess Buttercup—but it's also a secret way of expressing love in the everyday framing device that bookends the story.   Reiner thought this was the true point of the movie when he set out to adapt William Goldman's 1973 novel of the same name. "When people say, 'What is the film The Princess Bride about?' I say, 'It's about how a sick boy, who doesn't want to see his grandfather, is brought closer to his grandfather over the sharing of a book,' " Reiner told me in 2003. For the director, stories were a way of uniting people. Film was his way to say, "As you wish," like a covert language for delivering comfort and reassurance. The Princess Bride hilariously featured six-fingered enemies, medieval poison testers, and characters with names like Prince Humperdinck. But at the heart of every one of his films, Reiner sought to expose starker and harder truths that beg us to be kinder and more merciful to each other. By Anthony Breznican Follow Us Unsubscribe | Manage Preferences | Privacy Notice | CA Notice at Collection Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines. ©2025 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This email was sent by Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019-3779