Robert Redford
Charles Robert Redford Jr. (born August 18, 1936) is a retired American actor and filmmaker. He has received numerous accolades such as an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Honorary César in 2019. He was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014.[1][2]
Robert Redford
- Actor
- filmmaker
1958–present
-
Sibylle Szaggars(m. 2009)
Appearing onstage in the late 1950s, Redford's television career began in 1960, with appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961 and The Twilight Zone in 1962. His greatest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963). Redford made his film debut in War Hunt (1962). He gained success as a leading man in films such as Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), and The Candidate (1972). He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the crime caper The Sting (1973). He continued to star in such films as The Way We Were (1973), All the President's Men (1976), and The Electric Horseman (1979).
Redford made his directorial film debut with Ordinary People (1980), winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. During this time, he starred in films such as Brubaker (1980), The Natural (1984), and Out of Africa (1985). He released his third film as a director, A River Runs Through It, in 1992. He went on to receive Best Director and Best Picture nominations in 1995 for Quiz Show. In 1981 Redford cofounded the Sundance Resort and Film Institute. His later film roles include All Is Lost (2013), Truth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017), and The Old Man & the Gun (2018). Redford portrayed Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Early life and education[edit]
Redford was born on August 18, 1936,[3] in Santa Monica, California, to Martha Woodruff Redford (née Hart; 1914–1955) and Charles Robert Redford Sr. (1914–1991), an accountant. He has a paternal half-brother, William.[4] Redford is of English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry.[5][6][7] His patrilineal great-great-grandfather, a Protestant Englishman named Elisha Redford, married Mary Ann McCreery, of Irish Catholic descent, in Manchester. They emigrated to New York City in 1849, immediately settling in Stonington, Connecticut. They had a son named Charles, the first in line to have been given the name. Regarding Redford's maternal lineage, the Harts were Irish from Galway and the Greens were Scots-Irish who settled in the United States in the 18th century.[5] Redford's family lived in Van Nuys while his father worked in El Segundo.[4]
Robert attended Van Nuys High School, where he was classmates with baseball pitcher Don Drysdale.[4][8] He has described himself as having been a "bad" student, finding inspiration outside the classroom in art and sports.[4] He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzales at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to help Gonzales warm up for matches.
After graduating from high school in 1954,[9] he attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for a year and a half,[4][10][11] where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity.[12] While there, he worked at a restaurant/bar called The Sink, where a painting of his likeness now figures prominently among the bar's murals.[13] While at Colorado, Redford began drinking heavily and, as a result, lost his half-scholarship and was kicked out of school.[10][11] He went on to travel in Europe, living in France, Spain, and Italy.[4] He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Class of 1959) in New York City.[4][14]
Career[edit]
1959–1966: Early roles[edit]
Redford's career, like that of many major stars who emerged in the 1950s, began in New York City, where the actor found work both on stage and in television. His Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story (1959), followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in the original 1963 cast of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park.[15] Starting in 1960, Redford appeared as a guest star on numerous television drama programs, including Naked City, Maverick, The Untouchables, The Americans, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate, The Twilight Zone, The Virginian, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, among others.[16][17]
Redford made his screen debut in Tall Story (1960) in a minor role. The film's stars were Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda (her debut), and Ray Walston. After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. In 1960, Redford was cast as Danny Tilford, a mentally disturbed young man trapped in the wreckage of his family garage, in "Breakdown", one of the last episodes of the syndicated adventure series, Rescue 8, starring Jim Davis and Lang Jeffries.[18] Redford earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962). One of his last television appearances until 2019 was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.[5] In 1962 Redford got his second film role in War Hunt, and was soon after cast alongside screen legend Alec Guinness in the war comedy Situation Hopeless ... But Not Serious, in which he played a US soldier falsely imprisoned by a German civilian even after the war has ended. In Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which won him a Golden Globe for best new star, he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood, and rejoined her along with Charles Bronson for Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966) — again, as her lover, though this time in a film which achieved even greater success. The same year saw his first teaming (on equal footing) with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. This film marked the only time Redford would star with Marlon Brando.
Personal life[edit]
On August 9, 1958, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen in Las Vegas. A second reception was held at Lola's grandmother's home on September 12.[5] They had four children: Scott Anthony Redford (September 1, 1959 – November 17, 1959), Shauna Jean Redford[64] (b. November 15, 1960), David James Redford (May 5, 1962 – October 16, 2020),[65][66] and Amy Hart Redford (b. October 22, 1970).
Redford and Van Wagenen never publicly announced a separation or divorce, but in 1982, entertainment columnist Shirley Eder reported that the pair "have been very much apart for a number of years."[67] In 1991, Parade magazine stated, "it is unclear whether the divorce has been finalized."[68] Many websites say they were divorced in 1985.
Scott Redford died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 2+1⁄2 months and is buried at Provo City Cemetery in Provo, Utah. Shauna Redford is a painter and married to journalist Eric Schlosser.[64] James Redford was a writer and producer, while Amy Redford is an actress, director, and producer.[69] Redford has seven grandchildren.[70][71]
On July 11, 2009, Redford married his longtime girlfriend, Sibylle Szaggars, at the Louis C. Jacob Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. She had moved in with Redford in 1996 and shared his home in Sundance, Utah.[72]
In May 2011, Robert Redford: The Biography was published by Alfred A. Knopf, written by Michael Feeney Callan over fifteen years with Redford's input and drawn from his personal papers and diaries.