Robert Redford, certainly one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors and administrators, has died right now on the age of 89. Known worldwide for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, his life story incorporates an enchanting chapter that is still wrapped in uncertainty: his youthful keep in Florence.
Born in Santa Monica in 1936, Redford misplaced his mom in 1955. The tragedy prompted him, then simply 19 years previous, to interrupt his research and embark on a journey via Europe, drawn to France and Italy. Perhaps it was a bohemian impulse for artwork, maybe the cultural local weather of postwar existentialism. Whatever the explanation, the younger American ended up in Florence.
Here the narrative turns into elusive. Some recall him in a small room close to the station “learning structure.” Others place him in a brief course for foreigners on the Istituto d’Arte in Porta Romana. Still others recommend he entered the Accademia di Belle Arti close to San Marco, and even the Libera Scuola del Nudo, a workshop open to unconventional skills the place no earlier diplomas have been required.
What is for certain is that by 1957 Redford was again in Los Angeles, extra mature and artistically enriched. Decades later, when he obtained the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice, he acknowledged how decisive these European years had been for his cultural formation.
Thus Florence stays a ghostly presence in his biography, an uncharted however actual a part of his youth. Before conquering Hollywood, Redford had already encountered the Renaissance metropolis, a spot that will have formed his sensibility even when its traces are actually blurred. The enigma itself has change into a part of the legend.
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