This week saw the 85th birthday of Robert Redford, who has become a cinema legend. He only has 83 screen credits as an actor, but 55 as producer & 10 as director. He won an Oscar + Golden Globe as Best Director for Ordinary People 1980, but an honorary Oscar 2002 as the director, producer & creator of Sundance which has done so much for creative, independent & innovative film-making. From the start of success, he used his last $500 dollars for an initial two acres to acquire property in Utah, which has since grown to 5,000 acres and he converted part of it to become the Sundance Ski Resort at the base of Mount Timpanogos, and later developed from this the Sundance Film Institute from which sprang the Sundance Film Festival, which is now in Park City, Utah. Mostly this came following The Way We Were and The Sting both 1973, when he was top of the box office for three years. He was Oscar-nominated as best actor for The Sting 1973 and best director & producer for Quiz Show 1994; nominated for an Emmy as Best Supporting Actor for Alcoa Premiere 1961 and as producer of documentary All The President’s Men Revisited 2013. Loved across the Atlantic too, he won a BAFTA as Best Actor for all three of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Downhill Racer, all released in 1969 + nominated as producer for Quiz Show. He won a Golden Globe 1965 for Most Promising Newcomer for Inside Daisy Clover & won special Henrietta Globes for 1975,77 & 78 as the world’s Favourite Film Male, and a Cecil B DeMille Award 1994 for his contribution to film, and Best Director nominations for A River Runs Through It 1992, Quiz Show & The Horse Whisperer 1998, + for Best Actor All is Lost 2013 & The Old Man & The Gun 2018. He was awarded in 2016 a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama. Born in Santa Monica, CA he grew up in the San Fernando Valley and went to Van Nuys High School, working two summers at Yosemite National Park, but lost a baseball scholarship (he was a pitcher) at the University of Colorado in Boulder (still an honorary member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity) due to drinking bouts. He studied at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, NY and travelled around Europe, and then studied at American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, NY. We believe him more than worthy of a match in his honour and hope you do too – if the number or ratings do not suit, then please make contact.
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