Robert Redford has died

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.