Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18 1936) is an Academy Award-winning American film director, actor, producer, businessman, model, environmentalist, and philanthropist.

Early life

Redford was born in Santa Monica, California, the son of Martha W. (née Hart) and Charles Robert Redford, Sr., a milkman-turned-accountant from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He has a half-brother, William, from his father's re-marriage. Redford is of English and Scots-Irish ancestry.

He attended Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, California (where he met Natalie Wood), graduated in 1954, and received a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, where he was a pitcher. He lost the scholarship due to excessive drinking, possibly fueled by the death of his mother, which occurred when Redford was 18. Before leaving CU, Redford joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes in theatrical set design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

Television days

Redford's career, like that of almost all major stars who emerged in the 1950s, began in New York, where an actor could find work both on television and on stage. Starting in 1959, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including The Untouchables, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate and The Twilight Zone, among others. He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962).

Work on stage

Redford's Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story (1959), followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963).

Silver screen

While still largely an unknown, Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), co-starring with John Saxon in a film set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the debuts of Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt. After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. He played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and rejoined her for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966)—again as her lover. The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. Fonda and Redford were paired again in the big screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967), and were again co-stars in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).Also was in world war 2 film "A Bridge Too Far "(1977)

Redford became concerned about his blond male starlet image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman (1969). The film made him a bankable star and cemented his screen image as an intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy, and Redford became one of the most popular stars of the 1970s.