Robert Redford
Charles Robert Redford, Jr. better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, model, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. Robert was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of Martha W. and Charles Robert Redford, Sr., a milkman-turned-accountant from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He has a half-brother, William, from his father's re-marriage. Robert is of English and Scots-Irish ancestry.
Robert attended Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, California, where he was classmates with baseball player Don Drysdale. He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzales at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to warm him up. After high school, he attended the University of Colorado, where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. While there, he worked at the famous restaurant/bar The Sink. He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes in theatrical set design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
Robert's career — like that of almost all major stars who emerged in the 1950s — began in New York, where an actor could find work both in television and on stage. Starting in 1959, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including The Untouchables, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate and The Twilight Zone, among others. He 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 was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.
Robert's Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story, followed by parts in The Highest Tree and Sunday in New York. His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park.
While still largely an unknown, he had his screen debut in War Hunt, co-starring with John Saxon, a film set during the last days of the Korean War. He continued on to other movies, including Inside Daisy Clover he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood, and rejoined her for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned. The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. Fonda and Redford were paired again in the big screen version of Barefoot in the Park and were again co-stars in Pollack's The Electric Horseman.Robert became concerned about his blond male stereotype image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman. The film was a huge success and made him a bankable star and cemented his screen image as an intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy.
He has continued to act into this decade with many films to his credit.
On August 9, 1958, in Las Vegas, Nevada, Robert married Lola Van Wagenen, who dropped out of college to marry him. They had four children: David James "Jamie", Shauna, Amy Redford, and Scott Anthony Redford. Scott — their first child — was born September 1, 1959, and died of sudden infant death syndrome on November 17, 1959, at age 2½ months. His remains have been buried at Provo City Cemetery in Provo, Utah.
Robert had long harbored ambitions to work on both sides of the lens. As early as 1969, he had served as the executive producer for Downhill Racer. His first outing as director was in 1980's Ordinary People, a drama about the slow disintegration of an upper-middle class family, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. He was credited with obtaining a powerful dramatic performance from Mary Tyler Moore, as well as superb work from Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, who also won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. His directing and producting credits continue to date.
With the financial proceeds of his acting success, Robert bought an entire ski area on the east side of Mount Timpanogos northeast of Provo, Utah called "Timp Haven," which was renamed "Sundance". Robert's wife, Lola, was from Utah and they had built a home in the area in 1963. Portions of the movie Jeremiah Johnson, a film which is both one of Robert's favorites and one that has heavily influenced him, were shot near the ski area. He founded the Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute, Sundance Cinemas, Sundance Catalog, and the Sundance Channel, all in and around Park City, Utah, 30 miles (48 km) north of the Sundance ski area. The Sundance Film Festival caters to independent filmmakers in the United States and has received recognition from the industry as a place to open films. In 2008, Sundance exhibited 125 feature-length films from 34 countries, with more than 50,000 attendees. The name Sundance comes from his character, the Sundance Kid.
Lola and Robert divorced in 1985. He has five grandchildren: Dylan and Lena Redford (of son Jamie), Mica and Conor Schlosser (of daughter Shauna) and Eden August (of daughter Amy).
In July 2009, Robert married his longtime partner, Sibylle Szaggars, at the luxurious Louis C. Jacob Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. She had moved in with him in the 1990s and shares his Sundance, Utah, home.
I could find no religious affiliation for Robert. So I encourage everyone, this week, to pray that God will draw him into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ!
--Heidi