Enough: An unfinished life

Robert Redford plans to retire from acting soon

Veteran Hollywood actor Robert Redford says he is planning on retiring from acting soon and will focus on directing and art, his first love, thereafter. The 80-year-old Out of Africa and The Sting star told his grandson Dylan in an online interview that he was getting tired of acting.

“I’m an impatient person so it’s hard for me to sit around and do take after take after take,” Redford said in the interview, published on Thursday for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “Going back to sketching — that’s sort of where my head is right now.”

Redford, who has never won an Oscar for acting despite a storied 50-year career, will not be departing from the big screen any time soon. He said he has two more acting projects in the works. One is a love story for older people with Jane Fonda, his co-star in the 1967 romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park and the other is a lighter movie with Casey Affleck and Sissy Spacek. Both movies are expected to be released in 2017.

“Once they’re done, I’m going to say, ‘Okay, that’s goodbye to all that,’ and then just focus on directing,” Redford claimed. He recalled that his first love was art and that he spent time in Europe as a teenager “exploring story-telling through painting.”

Movies like All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid and The Way We Were made Redford into one of the biggest movie stars of the 1970s and 1980s. He later turned to directing, winning an Oscar for the 1980 film Ordinary People.

In 1978, Redford helped start what eventually became the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to promote independent movies. The festival has since grown to be the most influential independent film gathering in the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2016.

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