e steps from his dusty silver Acura and chuckles
sheepishly, explaining how he got lost en route to our
interview in Santa Fe, where he has owned a home off and
on since the ’80s. He wears a gray T-shirt, jeans, and brown-and-beige lace-up Merrells. His full head of strawberry-blond hair is tousled, his smile luminescent. His features
have softened with age—his skin has weathered—but
Robert Redford’s magnetism still electrifies.
Redford will turn
75 this year. “Thanks
for that reminder!”
he sarcastically re-
sponds when I mention the milestone. No, he’s not planning a
party. “When Jane Fonda, whom I’m very close to—I’ve done
three films with her—turned 40, she sent me a note: ‘Please
come to my 40th birthday celebration.’ I wrote her back and
said, ‘ When I turned 40, I went into hiding!’ We’re very dif-
ferent in how we celebrate ourselves.” Which isn’t to say that
Redford isn’t thriving. “ When you get older, you learn certain
life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say,
‘Hey, I’ve got a new lease on this thing. So let’s go.’ ”
In a wide-ranging, candid interview, Redford lets us in on
a secret: If he was once in hiding, he’s at last ready to open a
window onto the experiences that have shaped him—and
that frame the current chapter of his life.
We sit at a small round table in a classroom at Santa Fe
University of Art and Design. Redford, known to friends as
Bob, has requested Chinese chicken salad, water, and coffee
for lunch. “Mind if I steal an egg from your salad?” he asks,
as if we’re old pals. He smiles at my surprise, then settles in:
“What can I tell you?” he begins.
Pop-culture buffs might trace the shedding of the über-
private Redford persona to his appearance last year on The
Oprah Winfrey Show to surprise his fellow guest, Barbra
Streisand. Since costarring in The Way We Were in 1973, the
two had never been interviewed together. “When I got into
the business, I had this naive idea that I’d let my work speak
for me. I just was never interested in talking about myself,”
Redford says. “However, we’re in such a different time, and
celebrity is so much in the mainstream. I thought, ‘I might as
well enter this zone, but go a toe at a time.’ ”
In February Redford received a Lifetime Achievement
Award from AARP THE MAGAZINE at its annual Movies for
Grownups® Awards gala in Beverly Hills. That he accepted
the honor further confirms that he’s more comfortable talk-
ing about his life—though he cringes when he’s called a living
legend. “That really bothers me,” he says. “Does that mean
I’m bronzed? Whoa! It’s not over yet, folks!”
To the contrary, Redford’s latest directorial project is
soon to be released in theaters. The Conspirator tells the
story of Mary Surratt (played by Robin Wright), whose
boardinghouse was a meeting place for John Wilkes Booth
and fellow plotters of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Charged with conspiring in the president’s murder, Surratt
is reluctantly represented at trial by a young Union war
hero (James McAvoy). The political climate of post–Civil
War Washington—when individual rights sometimes took
a backseat to national security—mirrors post-9/11 America,
Redford admits: “We don’t seem to learn from our own his-
tory. But whatever parallels exist are up to the audience to
find; it won’t be a needle in a haystack. My focus is on the
emotional arc of the characters. What I loved about this story
was the two characters who start off at opposite sides and
move together and across each other.”
Charles Robert Redford Jr., of English, Scottish, and
Irish ancestry, grew up as an only child in a mostly Hispanic
neighborhood in Santa Monica, where his father, Charles Sr.,
worked as a milkman. One of his earliest memories is from
third grade, at the end of World War II. “This dark current
started running through our school about Jews,” Redford
recalls. “I didn’t know what a Jew was. But suddenly people
