A gruesome unsolved murder. A childhood bout with polio. The death of an infant son. Robert Redford spent decades as a movie icon, but off-screen, his life was filled with tragic events.
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00:00A gruesome, unsolved murder. Childhood bout with polio. The death of an infant son.
00:05Robert Redford spent decades as a movie icon, but offscreen, his life was filled with tragic events.
00:11In 2011, Robert Redford collaborated with author Michael Feeney Callan on
00:15Robert Redford the Biography, an exhaustive, definitive look back on his life.
00:19It included previously unknown or little-known revelations about the
00:22personal life of the mega-famous actor. One of the most harrowing stories came
00:26from Redford's childhood. In his youth, he was diagnosed with polio, the devastating disease
00:30that, according to the Mayo Clinic, leads to severe breathing issues, paralysis, and often death.
00:36It was almost entirely eradicated in the 1950s with a vaccine,
00:39but Redford grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when polio remained rampant.
00:44Redford explained on NPR's Fresh Air that,
00:47"[It wasn't an iron lung case. It was a case of mild polio,
00:50but it was severe enough to put me in bed for two weeks. I couldn't move very well,
00:54but I was not paralyzed." He developed the disease after swimming in the ocean.
00:58He realized he had it when he awoke one morning and couldn't move his arms or open his eyes."
01:02Eluding major lasting damage from the disease, Redford would pay tribute to polio vaccine
01:07developer Jonas Salk by serving as a co-director of Cathedrals of Culture,
01:11a documentary about the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
01:14Robert Redford was raised in the Los Angeles area by parents Martha and Charles. His father
01:19supported his family throughout the Great Depression as a milkman-turned-accountant
01:23who worked for Standard Oil. According to the Mirror, Redford's father had to work such long
01:27hours that it left little time for family. Charles Redford's brother David thus filled
01:31in the void of a father figure for the future superstar. Redford, who would later pursue
01:35athletics and a number of cerebral and artistic paths, must have been influenced by the time he
01:40spent around his well-rounded uncle, a gifted football player who spoke four languages.
01:45David Redford was a member of the U.S. military,
01:47and he served as an interpreter in the General George S. Patton's Third Army. Robert Redford
01:52told NPR,
01:53"...I was very fond of him, and he would, on his furlough, he'd come down to play baseball with
01:57me and so forth."
01:58But then in the early 1940s, the elder Redford was called away to combat,
02:02and he died in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Young Robert Redford was
02:06devastated by the death of his uncle, and he didn't get a lot of grief support. He told NPR,
02:10"...the way the family dealt with it, it just wasn't talked about.
02:14It just happened, and you didn't ask a lot of questions."
02:17Not long after he recovered from his childhood bout of polio, a very young Robert Redford dealt
02:22with a tremendous family tragedy, the effects of which would be felt for years and end in even
02:27more untimely death. When Redford was 10 years old, his mother gave birth to twin girls. Her
02:32doctor advised against the pregnancy, as Robert's birth had been medically troublesome. Sadly,
02:36the twins died almost immediately after birth. During that traumatic medical episode,
02:40his mother developed a blood disorder. This remained a permanent condition until she had
02:45a hemorrhage, which would later be the primary factor leading to her death in 1955. She was 40.
02:50Her son was 18.
02:52Growing up in Southern California, Redford was bullied and pushed around by some of the other
02:56neighborhood teens. He remembered that,
02:58"...there was a kid called Felix who picked on me, probably because I went to a good school.
03:02I was good at track and popular with the girls, and he beat up on me. I toughened up fast."
03:07At one point, a group of bullies persuaded teenage Redford to join them on the rooftop
03:10of a building. In order to show how tough and macho he claimed to be, they dared him to jump
03:15off the roof. Redford accepted the challenge, and the leap nearly killed him.
03:19"...I'm not fighting anyone or anything anymore."
03:22Later, Redford experimented with hashish and marijuana, and got involved in the semi-legal
03:27drag race and subculture that ran through California in the early 1950s. On the way to
03:31one race, he crashed his car while driving 90 miles per hour. He survived the accident,
03:36but was, according to his biography, lucky to be alive.
03:39Robert Redford graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1954 with adequate grades,
03:44but a strong athletics resume. He was accepted to the University of Colorado at Boulder,
03:48which had an impressive baseball program. There was talk that he might earn a sports scholarship,
03:52but once classes began, Redford focused on studying art and dropped his baseball ambitions.
03:57Struggling to make friends, he started hanging around with a member of C.U. Boulder's chapter
04:01of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. This helped Redford come out of his self-imposed isolation,
04:06and even increased his artistic output, but it would also lead to his undoing.
04:10Within a few months, he was a regular in campus drinking circles, imbibing a lot of booze,
04:15pulling pranks, and spending more time drag racing and riding motorcycles than studying.
04:19Redford didn't finish college. Following his mother's death, he began to drink even more.
04:24This led to the loss of his baseball scholarship. Without it,
04:27he could no longer afford tuition, and he was asked to leave the university.
04:30"...What do we do now?"
04:32Slightly more than a decade after the death of his newborn sisters, Robert Redford once
04:36again dealt with the tragic loss of an infant. This time, it was his own son.
04:40In 1958, Redford married historian Lola Van Wagenen. The couple eloped, then moved to New
04:46York, where Redford studied at the Pratt Institute before being cast in a play.
04:50By 1959, the Redfords had started a family. But at just 10 weeks old, their firstborn,
04:54a son named Scott, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a mysterious and still poorly
04:59understood condition also called SIDS or crib death. Redford told People,
05:03"...that was a tough hit. It was our first child. We were in New York and we were broke.
05:08It was really tough."
05:09Reluctant to speak about the loss over the years,
05:11Redford instead quietly raised funds for research into the causes of SIDS.
05:16Following the loss of baby Scott, Redford and Van Wagenen had three more children,
05:20Jamie, Shauna, and Amy Redford. Like his late brother,
05:23Jamie would also suffer health problems throughout his life. Doctors diagnosed
05:27him with a severe, life-threatening case of Highland Membrane Disease,
05:30which was an infant respiratory condition. He was given a 40 percent chance of survival.
05:35The child recovered, but ran the gamut of medical woes, as father told People.
05:38Jamie developed colitis, a chronic digestive condition that leads to inflammation of the
05:43colon, infections, and blood flow problems. The colitis led to liver issues, and Jamie
05:48was diagnosed with cirrhosis. He received a liver transplant in 1993 at age 31.
05:53Unfortunately, the new organ didn't alleviate Redford's health issues,
05:56and he eventually underwent a second transplant. Every weekend, while filming Quiz Show in New
06:01York, Redford would fly to Omaha to be with his son at the hospital. Jamie slowly recovered,
06:05but experienced serious complications. However, he would ultimately survive and pursue a meaningful
06:10career as a filmmaker and producer. Jamie Redford died in 2020 at age 58 of bile duct cancer.
06:17Van Nuys High School in the 1950s was the academic home of two screen legends,
06:21Robert Redford and Natalie Wood. They didn't know each other at the time. Redford was an athlete,
06:26and Wood was already a big name, having been a child star in Miracle on 34th Street and soon
06:30to land an Oscar nomination for Rebel Without a Cause. Redford told TCM that he and Wood became
06:35close friends and collaborators in the 1960s, co-starring in Inside Daisy Clover and This
06:40Property is Condemned. She made a cameo appearance in his movie The Candidate,
06:44and he was the best man at one of her weddings. In 1981, Wood, who had an admitted fear of water,
06:50drowned near California's Catalina Island after leaving a yacht where she'd been partying and
06:54fighting with her husband, Robert Wagner. According to The Hollywood Reporter,
06:58the circumstances of her death remained murky more than 40 years later. Natalie Wood was 43
07:03years old when she died. After her untimely passing, Redford said,
07:07"...I only wish our paths could have crossed again."
07:10Robert Redford's daughter Shawna was born in 1961 and grew up to become an artist.
07:14She made headlines in the early 1980s for her association with a tragic story.
07:19Shawna Redford's college sweetheart at the University of Colorado was a journalism student
07:23named Sid Wells. In January 1983, Wells rented a room in his apartment to Thane Smica. Less than
07:29eight months later, Sid was found dead, killed by a gunshot wound to the head. Smica was arrested
07:33but released due to a lack of evidence, and so he moved to California, where his car was found
07:38abandoned in Beverly Hills in 1986. After that, he was never heard from again. In 2010, new evidence
07:44emerged that pointed to Smica's guilt. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he was never located.
07:48And the murder remains officially unsolved.
07:51For many years, Robert Redford was one-half of one of the longest-lasting marriages among
07:56Hollywood elite, a group notorious for short-lived wedded bliss.
08:00"'One woman, I'll be his.'"
08:03He married Lola Van Wagenen well before he found fame and fortune. The relationship lasted,
08:08despite a less-than-rock-solid foundation. Redford married her in part to prove to his
08:12family that he could pull it off. He told The Telegraph,
08:14They feared that I was going to go off the deep end, or that I would never amount to anything,
08:18or die at an early age. I wanted to prove them wrong."
08:21Redford noted that he and Wagenen had $300 between them at the time of their wedding.
08:25After raising three kids to adulthood across nearly three decades,
08:29Redford and Van Wagenen divorced in 1985. A post-marriage life, Redford said,
08:33"'I got lost for a time.'"
08:35Following flings with actors Sonia Braga and others, Redford met Sibylle Chigars,
08:40an artist about 20 years his junior. They met in 1996 and married in 2009.