[continued from previous message]   
      
   himself on horseback on the scenic Kaiparowits plateau, where construction   
   was to begin. His efforts sparked a backlash — he was called a liberal   
   carpetbagger — and residents of one Utah town burned him in effigy.   
      
   From time to time, people with similar political priorities encouraged him   
   to run for office. He brushed such chatter aside, having become   
   disillusioned with government in the late 1970s, when he was elected   
   commissioner of the Provo Canyon sewer district. (He had sought the office   
   in an effort to protect the Provo Canyon area near his home from   
   development and pollution. But he quickly encountered bureaucracy, which   
   reinforced his belief that independent activism and storytelling through   
   film were more effective tools for change.)   
      
   “I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014.   
   “The   
   way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be   
   better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own   
   country.”   
      
   A California Youth   
   Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica,   
   Calif. His parents, Charles Redford and Martha Hart, married three months   
   later. (Early in his career, 20th Century Fox publicists officially placed   
   Mr. Redford’s birth in 1937, a falsehood that was often repeated over the   
   years.)   
      
   After working as a milkman, Mr. Redford’s mercurial father became an   
   accountant and was eventually employed by Standard Oil of California. His   
   mother died in 1955, when Mr. Redford was in his late teens; the cause was   
   a blood disorder associated with the birth of twin girls, who had lived   
   only a short while, leaving Mr. Redford an only child. Her death left him   
   angry and disillusioned.   
      
   “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he later told a   
   biographer, Michael Feeney Callan. “But after Mom died, I felt betrayed by   
   God.”   
      
   Later in life, Mr. Redford, in dozens of interviews, told and retold the   
   story of his California youth. It was an oral history in which the details   
   sometimes shifted. He liked to cast himself in memory as a juvenile   
   delinquent, sometimes mentioning gang fights, other times hubcap stealing   
   and nights spent in jail. “There was great fear I was going to end up a   
   bum,” he told TV Guide in 2002. He found Van Nuys, the Los Angeles   
   neighborhood where the family lived, to be unbearably conformist and dull   
   — revealing a rebellious nature that never left him.   
      
   Little was ever mentioned of early show business connections that   
   suggested the possibility of a screen future, although he spoke about   
   getting laughed off the Warner Bros. lot at age 15 when asking for stunt   
   work.   
      
   In fact, at schools in west Los Angeles, he kept company with children of   
   the screenwriter Robert Rossen (“The Hustler”), the actor Zachary Scott   
   (“Mildred Pierce”) and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Dore Schary. In   
   1959, Mr. Schary produced a Broadway play, “The Highest Tree,” in which   
   Mr. Redford had one of his first stage roles.   
      
   He had made his Broadway debut earlier that year in “Tall Story,” in which   
   he had a one-line part. His most successful Broadway appearance was as an   
   uptight lawyer in the Neil Simon comedy about newlyweds, “Barefoot in the   
   Park,” in 1963, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Elizabeth Ashley   
   as a free-spirited wife.   
      
   After high school, Mr. Redford attended the University of Colorado on a   
   baseball scholarship, but he soon dropped out, having chafed at too much   
   “bureaucracy,” as he put it. He had also developed a fondness for all-   
   night beer parties.   
      
   For more than a year he bounced around Europe, where he studied art at the   
   École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, aspired to paint, and — working through   
   what he later described as profound depression — sold sidewalk sketches   
   for pocket cash. (He had been a talented illustrator since high school.)   
      
   Back in Los Angeles, he did oil-field work and met several Mormon students   
   who were sent to proselytize after their first year at Brigham Young   
   University in Utah. He dated one of them, Lola Van Wagenen, and married   
   her in 1958.   
      
   The couple would become rooted in Utah. “It’s not trying to pretend to be   
   something it’s not,” he told Rocky Mountain magazine in 1978, comparing   
   Utah with Los Angeles, which he called phony and superficial. “It doesn’t   
   invite you in and then kick you in the shins.”   
      
   Film critics loved to kick Mr. Redford.   
      
   In 1974, his performance as Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” received   
   near-universal disdain, with Ms. Kael writing that Mr. Redford “couldn’t   
   transcend his immaculate self-absorption.” Robert Mazzocco, a critic for   
   The New York Review of Books, wrote that Mr. Redford “has the emotions of   
   a telephone recording from Con Ed.”   
      
   While the movie was a box-office hit, the response was so harsh that The   
   New York Times weighed in with an article bearing the headline “Why Are   
   They Being So Mean to ‘The Great Gatsby’?” The writer, Foster Hirsch,   
   then   
   enumerated the reasons. “Gatsby is one of the great losers in American   
   literature,” the article said. “Does Redford, with his male model looks,   
   answer such a description?”   
      
   Box-Office Gold   
   Mr. Redford enjoyed being a sex symbol, except when he didn’t. “This   
   glamour image can be a real handicap,” he complained in a 1974 profile in   
   The Times.   
      
   Nonetheless, it was his broad grin, tousled reddish-blond hair and all-   
   American look (“WASP jock” in his own words) that first won the audience   
   to his side. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was a well-reviewed   
   picture, but it succeeded at the box office in large part because Mr.   
   Redford — with deft comedic timing honed from Neil Simon and years of TV   
   work — was paired with another matinee idol, Paul Newman. They recaptured   
   their chemistry in 1973 for the same director, George Roy Hill, with “The   
   Sting.”   
      
   Reviewing “The Sting” for The Times, Vincent Canby described the film as   
   “Mr. Newman and Mr. Redford, dressed in best, fit-to-kill, snap-brim hat,   
   thirties splendor, looking like a couple of guys in old Arrow shirt ads.”   
      
   His other acting successes included “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), about a   
   legend-in-his-own-time mountain man, and “The Natural” (1984), the   
   quintessentially American story of a man who gets a second chance at his   
   dream baseball career. “Sneakers” (1992), a breezy caper starring Mr.   
   Redford as a security hacker, reflected his occasional willingness to   
   embrace popcorn cinema.   
      
   His riskier films — pictures that got made based on his star power but   
   defied expectation — included the ski drama “Downhill Racer” (1969), in   
   which he played an arrogant athlete, and “The Candidate” (1972), a coldly   
   comic commentary on the bewildering state of American politics. He managed   
   to turn “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), about disillusionment in America   
   after World War I, and “The Electric Horseman” (1979), a comedic romance   
   about a washed-up rodeo star, into box-office hits.   
      
   Mr. Redford’s biggest ticket seller as an actor (not counting two late-   
   career Marvel films in which he played supporting roles) was the 1993   
   morality tale “Indecent Proposal,” which co-starred Demi Moore and Woody   
   Harrelson and took in $267 million, or $590 million in today’s dollars. In   
   her “Indecent Proposal” review for The Times, Janet Maslin called Mr.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)