With his all-American good looks, Robert Redford, who died on Tuesday aged 89 was the eternal "Sundance Kid", a US screen legend both in front of and behind the camera.

The tousled-haired heartthrob made his breakthrough alongside Paul Newman as the affable outlaw in the Western "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in 1969.

After 20 years as one of Hollywood's hottest actors, he moved behind the camera becoming an Oscar-winning director and co-founded the Sundance Film Festival, which became a springboard for a new generation of independent filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino.

"Few careers have had such an impact on the history of cinema," said French producer Alain Terzian before awarding him the French equivalent of an Oscar in 2019.

But the athletic young Redford's beginnings were far from a smooth ascent to the top. The son of an accountant from Santa Monica, California, his mother died in 1955, a year after he finished high school.

He won a scholarship to the University of Colorado thanks to his baseball skills, but lost it a year later because of his heavy drinking.

Redford spent the next months travelling........

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