Robert Redford was more than a film star, though he knew that was how he would be remembered. He didn’t like fame all that much, especially when he attracted a creepy stalker: ‘Some strange, dark character was sending me gifts. They kept coming and coming. The guy was obsessed with me and Joan Baez. They had a Swat team and infrared binoculars, and they threw us out of the house. They caught the guy, and he was insane. They put him away and he died in prison.’

Though Redford acquired a reputation as a Hollywood activist, he was careful to distance himself from some of his flakier peers: ‘The way you really find out about the performer’s seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears. They go from the environment to animal rights to obesity or whatever. That I don’t have a lot of respect for.’

He also had the grace to admit that he himself was a bit of a hypocrite when it came to green issues: ‘I own a car that I shouldn’t be talking about because I’m an environmentalist, but the 1955 Porsche Spyder 550 RS is the finest sports car ever made.’

The most romantic leading man of his generation, Redford was born in 1936, the son of a Santa Monica accountant. He had polio when he was 11, was expelled from the University of Colorado after one and a half years for heavy drinking. For a time, his greatest claim to fame was hitting balls at tennis ace Pancho Gonzalez at........

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