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