Hollywood actor and Oscar-winning director Robert Redford, best known for films including Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and The Sting, has died at the age of 89. Redford, who was also one of the founders of the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the US, died on Tuesday morning. In a statement, his representative said he was at home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah – “the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,” she added.
The leading man has endured a shocking amount of hardship, misfortune, death, dysfunction, calamity, and tragedy throughout the years. Express.co.uk takes an inside look into the most harrowing moments in the long life and career of Robert Redford.
In 2011, the actor collaborated with author Michael Feeney Callan on Robert Redford: The Biography.
One of the most tragic stories came from Redford’s childhood when he was diagnosed with polio. The devastating disease can lead to severe breathing issues, paralysis, and often death.
“It wasn’t an iron lung case. It was a case of mild polio, but it was severe enough to put me in bed for two weeks,” Redford told NPR’s Fresh Air.
The Hollywood star explained that he developed the disease after swimming in the ocean, saying, “I couldn’t move very well, but I was not paralysed.”
The actor would later pay tribute to Jonas Salk — the scientist who discovered the polio vaccine in the 1950s — as part of a 2014 short film series.
“I was around when the polio epidemic was still a threat,” Redford remarked in the documentary (via Express). “So when Jonas Salk invented the vaccine, it was just earth-shattering news.”
Redford would also reveal that during his teenage years was challenged to jump off a relatively high building by the gang in order to prove his manliness to his childhood bullies – but he almost died.
In his 2011 memoir, “Robert Redford: The Biography,” he reflected on the life-threatening moment.
“I toughened up fast if only for survival,” he said. At one point, some of those bullying forces persuaded teenage Redford to join them on the rooftop of a building,
He accepted the deadly change and the leap nearly killed him.
The actor has also faced heartbreaking tragedies over the years starting with his mother, who sadly died when he was just 18-years-old.
Having secured good grades and an impressive athletics resume it earned him a place at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Within a few months, Redford was a regular in campus “drinking circles,” and began drinking booze, pulling pranks, and spending more time drag racing and riding motorcycles than studying, according to NPR.
But the tragic loss of his beloved mother led him to drink more , where it led to the loss of his baseball scholarship. Without that, he could no longer attend college, and he was asked to leave the University of Colorado.
In the early 1950s, Redford had admittedly experimented with marijuana and got immersed in drag racing that ran through Santa Barbara, California.
On the way to one such race, Redford crashed his car while driving at 90 miles per hour and according to his biography, survived the incident but was “lucky to be alive”.
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