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Robert Redford was born August 18, 1937 in Santa Monica, California. He has a career that could fill three normal lives. He is an actor praised early on for his work on the stage and in television and then for four decades' worth of fine performances in films. He is a director and producer of acclaimed motion pictures. He is also an intensely committed champion of independent film. Through his founding and unflagging support of the Sundance Institute, the Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Channel, and a nationwide chain of Sundance movie theaters, Robert Redford has fostered a generation of independent American filmmakers. A screen actor at the top of his career in 1980, Robert Redford felt it was time to give something back to the film business. Therefore, he founded the Sundance Institute, a multi-disciplinary arts organization dedicated to the development of artists of independent vision and to the exhibition of their new work. His goal was to create a film community where directors, writers, actors and composers could realize their talent in an atmosphere of collaboration, where two basic freedoms were guaranteed: the freedom to have a singular vision and the freedom to experiment in putting that vision on film. "Sundance created an opportunity of education through work that didn't exist before," says Redford. Since its inception, the Institute has supported nearly 1,000 artists through its training programs and thousands more through the annual Sundance Film Festival. Some of the most compelling films of recent years have been developed and premiered at Sundance: "Hoop Dreams," "Smoke Signals," "Central Station," "Three Seasons," "Boys Don't Cry" and "Love & Basketball." The movie that launched the whole modern independent film movement--"Sex, Lies & Videotape"--was first seen at the Sundance Festival. Still, Redford is first and foremost known the world over as one of the great movie stars. Because of his golden screen image and his well-known love of the great outdoors, it is not a surprise to learn he was born in Santa Monica, California, the sun-kissed land of sand and surf, where for a kid with stars in his eyes, Hollywood is just a joyride away. What is surprising though is that he was the son of a milkman, raised in a grim neighborhood where life during the depression and World War II was bleak. The young Redford spent what little free time he had not at the beach or going to the movies, but at the library. His favorite reading material: comic strips. There he learned about storytelling through words and pictures. |
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 His first artistic ambition was to be an artist in Europe and for a while he led a painter's life in Paris. He was also an oil worker, and attended school on a baseball scholarship. Finally deciding he wanted to act, he moved to New York. Any serious young actor trying to make it in New York in the late '50s did TV drama, and Redford appeared in his fair share of televised plays. They were, in fact, his acting school and simultaneously he made his Broadway debut in 1959 in the comedy "Tall Story." More romantic comedies followed leading up to his 1963 appearance in a classic of the genre--Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park," a huge success that made Hollywood take notice. He had already made his film debut a year earlier in "War Hunt," but now the offers came steadily. By the mid-sixties he was working constantly--"Inside Daisy Clover" and "This Property Is Condemned" with Natalie Wood, "The Chase" with Marlon Brandon and Jane Fonda--none were safe choices. But then, reuniting with Fonda, he made the screen version of his great stage success, "Barefoot in the Park. PAGE: 1 | 2 |
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