Remembering Robert Redford Through the Years

I was in New York in 2014, having just flown in from Los Angeles, for my first and only interview with the actor and Sundance founder. I was nervous. In Robert Redford biography, a veteran journalist, but young enough to still get butterflies, I was about to meet a Hollywood legend whose movies — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Natural, The Sting, All the President’s Men — had been my introduction to film. But it was Redford’s reputation that I was dreading. He was famously late, if he showed up at all.

A colleague once told me of flying to Utah for an appointment that never materialized. A friend spent a week at a location holding for him and was reduced to twiddling his thumbs until the tenth day, when, suddenly, Robert Redford legacy turned up.

His Robert Redford career highlights the same to me. And just like that, the maddening was mercifully made flesh: right there, and somehow bigger than life — that shock of hair, that most recognizable face in Robert Redford movies— was Robert Redford, the Sundance Kid himself. In a black sweatshirt and a casual overcoat. Sitting down. For the next two and a half hours we talked. We really talked.

“I was always a rule breaker,” he said. Of his childhood in Santa Monica in the 1940s and ’50s, growing up in a working-class neighborhood of immigrants, his own father a weary milkman with aching hands. He could just as easily have been talking about Robert Redford Hollywood journey.

Acting wasn't his first love, however. That was my dream when I was young." Circumstances intervened, though. After quitting college at the University of Colorado, he "kind of fell into acting. I never looked back. I did very well right away. I got my first TV role in an old Twilight Zone, "Nothing in the Dark."