The iconic pier and working-class childhood fueled the Academy Award-winning actor’s imagination and later activism
Robert Redford, the Academy Award-winning actor and filmmaker who died Tuesday at 89, was profoundly shaped by his Santa Monica upbringing, where the iconic pier and a working-class childhood fueled his imagination and later activism.
Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, Redford grew up in a heavily Latino neighborhood in South Los Angeles, as detailed in a Los Angeles Times obituary. His father, Charles Sr., an accountant, regularly took young Redford to the Santa Monica Public Library, where he delved into Greek mythology, sparking an early passion for storytelling. His mother, Martha, occasionally brought him to the Aero Theatre, where films offered an escape during tough economic times. “These weren’t happy times; nobody had much,” Redford told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “The library’s where I got into this mythology.”
The Santa Monica Pier was a cornerstone of Redford’s childhood. In a video posted by the Santa Monica Pier, he recalled being a 4-year-old “overwhelmed by the spectacle of the merry-go-round and the uneven enchanting music of its calliope.” He described the pier as a “magical elixir” that transported him back to those early memories. In an SFGATE article, Redford wrote of the pier in the 1940s as “the wild frontier — the escape from the city to the east,” where he would “walk the boardwalk, build castles in the sand and imagine magical things.”
Redford’s bond with the pier grew stronger in 1973 when he filmed “The Sting” there with Paul Newman. That year, the Santa Monica City Council planned to demolish the pier for a luxury resort island, prompting fierce local opposition. Redford, a native son, lent his voice to the cause, signing a petition with the film’s cast and crew to preserve the pier. “I said then that the pier should be a museum, but I was mistaken, for the pier was already a museum,” Redford said in the Santa Monica Pier video. The community’s efforts paid off, with the council reversing its decision in 1974 and the pier being designated a historic landmark in 1976.
Santa Monica also influenced Redford’s environmental activism. He told biographer Michael Feeney Callan, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, that watching Los Angeles transform into a “smog-spewing industry machine” left him disillusioned. This perspective, coupled with childhood visits to his maternal grandfather in Austin, Texas, inspired his lifelong commitment to environmentalism, Native American rights, and other causes. These values underpinned his founding of the Sundance Institute in 1981, which revolutionized independent filmmaking.
Redford’s family later moved to Van Nuys, which he found “sterile” and uninspiring. After graduating from Van Nuys High School in 1954, he briefly attended the University of Colorado before pursuing acting in New York. His career took off with roles in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “The Sting” (1973), which earned him an Oscar nomination, and as director of “Ordinary People” (1980), which won him a Best Director Oscar. His final role was in “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).
Redford died at his Utah home.
