The Natural

ROBERT REDFORD is the ORIGINAL artist-activist-maverick. Fifty years ago, he started LEADING THE CHARGE on environmental causes. Thirty years ago, he GODFATHERED INDIE CINEMA into existence when he created Sundance. And at eighty-one, the two-time Oscar winner is STILL KICKING ASS in his day job: making movies. Michael Hainey sits down with THE ICON.

- Michael Hainey

IT’S tempting to see Robert Redford as the golden boy. The guy who never had to sweat for it. The guy who got what he got because it was handed to him, because of his looks. The guy who, as the writer James Salter said of Redford at age forty, after he had carved out his extraordinary success, had the aura of a charmed life: “As if glancing at a menu, he was able to choose his life.”

The reality of Redford’s life, like the reality of anyone’s, is much more complex.

The son of a milkman, he grew up in Santa Monica, California. He loved to play baseball and was offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Colorado, but at the end of his freshman year, just after his mother died, he was kicked off the team and asked to leave school. (“I lost my scholarship pretty quickly after I discovered drinking,” he once said.) Desperate to become a painter, he went to Europe to study but flamed out. He returned to New York and found his way into a theater company.

It was there, while performing in a staging of The Seagull, that he caught the eye of a Broadway agent. A few bit parts came his way before he broke big in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park—a role he would reprise onscreen in 1967 opposite a thirty-year-old Jane Fonda.

Two years later, Redford beat out Steve McQueen, among others, to costar with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Redford was thirty-three, and the film launched him on a godlike run. Over the next ten years, he starred in some of the most iconic films of the 1970s (The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, The Sting, The Great Gatsby, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, The Electric Horseman), and he came to define that decade’s vision of manhood.