Charles Robert Redford, Jr. (born August 18, 1936) is an Academy Award-winning American film director, actor, producer, businessman, model, environmentalist, and philanthropist.
Redford was born in Santa Monica, California to Charles Robert Redford, Sr., a milkman turned accountant, and Texas-born Martha W. Hart. He has a half-brother, William, from his father's re-marriage. Redford graduated from Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, California in 1954 and received a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, where he was a pitcher on the baseball team, and a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. He lost the scholarship due to adolescent drinking, fueled in part by the death of his mother, when Redford was eighteen.
Redford was later a painting student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and took classes in theatrical set design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Robert Redford is politically liberal, and has supported environmentalism and Native American rights. Redford married Lola Van Wagenen on September 12, 1958; the couple, who had four children - Scott (born 1959 and died shortly after Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), Shauna (born November 15, 1960), David James (born May 15, 1962), and Amy (born October 22, 1970) - divorced in 1985. His companions since have included actress Sonia Braga (during 1988), Kathy O'Rear (from the late 1980s to 1995) and German painter Sibylle Szaggars (1996-current). Redford has four grandchildren.