Robert Redford

Zusatztext 77560963 Informationen zum Autor Michael Feeney Callan won the Hennessy Literary Award for his short fiction and has published poetry and novels, as well as biographies of Anthony Hopkins, Richard Harris, Julie Christie, and Sean Connery. He has worked for the BBC, Ireland's Ardmore Studios, and PBS as a writer, producer, and director of television dramas and documentaries. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. Klappentext Robert Redford is among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, renowned for his iconic roles as the Sundance Kid, Bob Woodward and Jay Gatsby, and celebrated for his fierce commitment to environmental causes, independent filmmaking, and his Sundance Film Festival. Yet only now, in this revelatory biography written in close collaboration with the extraordinary actor and director himself, do we see the complex man beneath the Hollywood façade. Leseprobe Robert Redford's early life was dominated by women. They were not the women of New England, but women of the West. His mother, Martha Hart Redford, was, he says, the center of his universe. She taught him to drive when he was eight, taught him to draw, to role-play in games. She connected him with the past, introducing him to Native Americans on Navajo reservations in Arizona and to Yosemite. These conjunctions came naturally to her, because she was the stuff of the West, descended from Texans who were, in spirit, the polar opposite of the Redfords. A century before, the Harts and Greens of the maternal family line lived a frontier life along the Mississippi Valley, religiously random, indulgent, drifting. The Harts were Galway-Irish, the Greens Scots-Irish, and both families came to America through the southern colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. The Harts followed the frontier to Missouri; the Greens followed the money to Boston. While the Harts drifted, the Greens built one of the first large-scale printing presses in Boston in 1790. When a similarly ambitious undertaking in Arkansas failed, George Green set out with his family by wagon train in 1853 to settle lands near Austin, Texas. Along with three partners, he founded a new town called San Marcos. In no time George, a slave owner, had established mining interests and a loan company. His son, Edwin Jeremiah, known to all as Ed, was twelve when they set up in Texas. By the age of twenty he had expanded the family's businesses into every variety of service provision for miners across the region. He also built Green's Anglican Church next door to the family bank. During his service in the Confederate army, young Ed's wife died and he married her sister, Eliza Jane, who bore him six children, including Eugene, Robert Redford's maternal great-grandfather. As San Marcos's fortunes grew during Reconstruction, Ed became a legendary figure, a titan of the local business world. Among his social circle was another celebrated exConfederate officer, Zachariah P. Bugg, the sheriff of a Tennessee township. Zach's daughter Mattie married Eugene in 1891. Out of this union came Sallie Pate Green, Robert Redford's grandmother. Sallie Pate's childhood was one of privilege and tragedy. Eugene Green followed his father into mining and banking, but died suddenly at twenty, when his daughter was just months old. Shortly after, his teenage widow, Mattie, died of typhoid. Ed became de facto father to Sallie and rechristened her Mattie, in memory of her mother. She was the apple of his eye. In 1896, when Sallie was three, Ed's wife passed away. Shortly afterward he married Alice Young Bohan, a recently widowed sister of his former wives. Alice was affectionate but not maternal, and Ed was sixty-five; it was Sallie's good fortune that the black wet nurse, Nicey, a Green household fixture since her own childhood, became an affectionate substitute mother. In 1909, as Sallie turned sixteen, America's fascination with the new autom...

“As incisive a biography of Redford as there is ever likely to be.” —The New York Times

“One of the 10 Best Movie Books of the Year.” –*Entertainment Weekly
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“Revealing. . . . An unusually well-written movie-star biography. . . . Robert Redford is as fascinating…as its subject.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Meticulous. . . . Tells Redford’s story through Redford’s eyes and through the eyes of his family, friends and allied associates.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“First-rate. . . . A layered portrait of one of the most famous—and elusive—faces in pop culture.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
 
“Deeply researched. . . . Callan’s book begins and ends exactly where it should: with that quadrant of Utah soil christened by its owner ‘Sundance.’” —The Washington Post

“Meticulous. . . . Covers in detail Redford’s four-decade acting career, his emergence as a director and his dedication to environmental causes.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Genuinely insightful . . . Michael Feeney Callan remains keenly aware of his subject’s larger-than-lifeness, even as he tries to chip away to reveal the person underneath.”  —Entertainment Weekly
 
"Callan's book is one of the most thoroughly researched, analytic examinations ever conducted into the life of a popular entertainer." —The Sunday Times (London)
 
“A precise, weighty analysis of Redford's life and impact, meticulously constructed and delivered with pace and style. . . . Set to become the definitive account, not only of Redford, but also of that era of movie-making that was his hey-day, the era of All The President's Men and The Candidate.” —Irish Independent
 
“A deft narrative about the business of making mainstream movies from the 1960s to the present, loaded with insider interviews and compelling mini-histories of how Redford movies like ‘The Candidate,’ ‘Out of Africa,’ and ‘A River Runs Through It’ came to be made.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
"This is superior fare, a meticulously researched account of one of Hollywood's iconic heart-throbs, drawn from Redford's journals and correspondence and supplemented by copious taped interviews given over a number of years. . . . Compelling."  —The Mail on Sunday (UK)
 
“Carefully crafted. . . . Callan is clearly on his game when it comes to dissecting Redford’s film career.” —Newsday
 
“An elegant, perceptive book, admiring, friendly, but neither hagiographic nor obsequious.” —The Guardian (UK)
 
“Prodigiously researched. . . . Offers much to admire. . . . Interviews from primary sources flesh out almost every aspect of his life.” —Kansas City Star
 
“Bracing. . . . A fascinating study…of fame and our uneasy relationship with it.” —The New York Post
 
“A highly descriptive history. . . . Tells a compelling story with dozens of enigmatic, intriguing characters. . . . An analysis of the way that history, personal or national, shapes us and we, in turn, shape it. . . . An entertaining, enriching reading experience.” —PopMatters
 
“Exhaustive. . . . An open, honest appraisal of a true motion picture star. . . . A well-documented, well-written…portrait of a public figure known best from a collection of iconic films and from public endeavors.” —*The Anniston Star

• “Michael Feeney Callan spent 14 years researching, interviewing and traipsing in the 74-year-old star’s footsteps and has provided great insights into a man who shied from public scrutiny throughout a lumino…