How Robert Redford’s life was shaped by polio and devastating grief

As an actor, Robert Redford found himself at the heart of many adventures, love stories and battles—but the most emotionally wrenching scenes played out away from the cameras. 

The 89-year-old Oscar-winner died in his sleep on Tuesday at his home in Utah, outside of Provo, The New York Times reported.

Redford was one of the top Hollywood leading men for decades, appearing in blockbusters such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men.

His first big break came in 1963, when he starred on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, and in 2018, he announced the film, The Old Man and The Gun would be his final onscreen role. 

With his performances on screen forever immortalised, the Daily Mail revisits the early health battle which ignited his love of the outdoors—and the heartbreaking losses he was forced to navigate as an adult.  

Childhood polio changed his life forever

Redford was just 11 when he contracted polio, a paralysis-causing viral infection which used to be common all over the world. 

The disease can quickly escalate, and around one in 50 patients develop severe muscle pain and stiffness in the neck and back.

Less than one per cent of polio cases result in paralysis and one in 10 of those result in death.   

When polio weakened the muscles used in breathing, patients used to be treated using an ‘iron lung’—and Redford admitted that as a child, being trapped in one was his biggest fear. 

He said: ‘Before the Salk vaccine was discovered, what hung over your childhood was always the fear of polio because all you saw were people in iron lungs.’

Despite his wariness of the centuries-old virus, Redford ended up contracting polio from swimming in the ocean, and although he wasn’t left in an iron lung, he was bedridden for weeks. 

He said: ‘I couldn’t move very well, but I was not paralysed.

‘It wasn’t an iron lung case. It was a case of mild polio, but it was severe enough to put me in bed for two weeks.’

In 2014, he directed one of six short films in a series called Cathedrals of Culture, choosing the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in Los Angeles as his subject. 

He said: ‘From a personal standpoint I knew something about the building because I grew up in Los Angeles not far from that area… so I was around when that building was being built.

 ‘Also, I was around when the polio epidemic was still a threat. You could get it.

‘I had a mild case of it myself when I was 11 years old, and fortunately it was mild enough not to cause me any real damage. 

‘Polio was part of the picture, so when Jonas Salk invented the vaccine, it was just earth-shattering news.’ 

Another way that polio shaped Redford’s future came during his recovery. 

After he regained his strength, his mother took him to visit Yosemite National Park. 

The youngster was so blown away by the scenery that he ended up working two of his teenage summers there.  

‘It gave me a chance to really be there every day—to hike up to Vernal Falls or Nevada Falls. It just took me really deep into it. Yosemite claimed me,’ he told Smithsonian.com. 

In 2016 he narrated a documentary about the famous US nature reserve, and to mark Earth Day in 2020, he mused about his post-polio trip.

‘I distinctly remember the moment I stood in awe of the natural world,’ he said. 

‘I was eleven years old. My mother had taken me on a road trip as a reward for being treated for a mild case of polio.

‘We drove from our home in LA to Yosemite and, as we came through a forest of trees and a mile long tunnel, we stopped by the side of the road to admire the view. 

‘I felt so small, while at the same time, realising that the world was so big. I still recall distinctly what I thought—”I don’t want to look at this, I want to be in this.”‘

Pressured to jump from the top of a building  

As a teen, Redford was faced a huge life lesson—don’t be cowed by your fears. 

Writing in his 2011 memoir, Robert Redford: The Biography, the actor recalls that he found himself being forced to jump from a relatively high building to show his bullies he wasn’t a chicken. 

He said: ‘Facing down fears hit home early…You have two choices, it seemed to me. You can be led by your fears, or you can overcome them.’ 

Elaborating on the dangerous stunt in his book, he admits that he could have died. 

Drinks, drugs and fast cars 

Thanks to his good grades and impressive athletics ability, Redford was awarded a baseball scholarship at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

He got stuck into student life, became a regular at on-campus ‘drinking circles’, experimented with marijuana, and immersed himself in the drag racing and motorbike racing scenes. 

In his autobiography, he recalls being involved in a serious car crash on his way to a drag race in Santa Barbara, California in the early 1950s. 

Redford crashed while driving at 90 miles per hour, adding that he was ‘lucky to be alive’ after the horror smash.

But he faced a huge reality check when he was just 18. 

The college student was left devastated by the death of his mother, Martha, who died at age 40. 

It was reported that she developed a blood disorder after she miscarried twins, which subsequently caused devastating haemorrhaging years later. 

Her passing plunged him into grief and he began to drink more, eventually losing his scholarship which forced him to leave the education system altogether. 

The notoriously private star later said of her: ‘The one person who stood behind me was my mother. She believed that all things considered, she just had faith that I had something in me that was going to turn out OK.’ 

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome 

Redford and his first wife Lola Van Wagenen shared four children together: Scott, Shauna, James and Amy. 

Tragically Scott died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) when he was just 10-weeks-old, and Redford blamed himself for not checking on the baby sooner. 

He said: ‘It was really hard. We were very young. I had my first theatre job, which didn’t pay much. 

‘We didn’t know anything about sudden infant death syndrome so as a parent you blame yourself. It creates a scar that never completely heals.’ 

He lost another son to cancer 

Tragically, Redford’s second son, James, also passed away. He died from bile duct cancer—a rare complication of liver cancer—in 2020 at the age of 58. 

The transplant activist and filmmaker’s life had been plagued with sickness after he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when he was 15, and a decade later, Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) a condition that causes bile ducts to become blocked.

The condition caused him to go into liver failure, and he underwent two liver transplants during the 1990s. 

He was survived by his wife and two children.

In a statement, the Redford family said: ‘The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child. Jamie was a loving son, husband and father. His legacy lives on through his children, art, filmmaking and devoted passion to conservation and the environment.’