—From “What Makes Robert Redford Run?” by Wendell Davidson, from the May/June 1977 issue of The Saturday Evening Post
“There’s a piece of me in every part I play, but very few roles fit me as comfortably as some people think,” Robert Redford says. “Sundance [in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] was about the only role that did. I felt so good in it that I almost felt guilty getting paid.” Redford played the Sundance Kid with a casual violence, a happy-go-lucky rebelliousness that seems particularly American — reminiscent of Redford’s own teenage stance.
“I hated school,” he says. “My mind wandered constantly and I’d amuse myself sketching.”
“I was always good at tennis and I took great pleasure in beating the rich kids. Sometimes I’d break into those big houses in Bel Air, just to look around. I thought, ‘What had they done to deserve all that?’”
It was not that Redford was a deprived or underprivileged child. “My father was a milkman and we lived in a comfortable neighborhood in Van Nuys, California. Mother was a wonderful, positive-natured woman who found joy all around her.”
The streak of rebellion and distaste for privilege is still there. “In Beverly Hills,” Redford says, “they had a law that you couldn’t blow your horn in a residential area. It burned me up so much that I would lay on my horn every time I drove through. What was so special about Beverly Hills?”
This article is featured in the September/October 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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