EXCLUSIVE: Young Robert Redford's Darkest Secrets Revealed — Including How He Drowned Himself in Booze as Struggling Art Student to Numb Feelings of Failure
Robert Redford's youth included a loss soul drinking his life away.
Sept. 17 2025, Published 6:00 p.m. ET
Robert Redford was one of Hollywood's brightest stars for decades before his death at 89 – but RadarOnline.com can reveal behind the golden boy image was a troubled youth who numbed himself with drink while trying to survive as a penniless art student in Europe.
Redford, the Oscar-winning actor and director whose career spanned more than six decades with films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and All the President’s Men, left the United States in 1956 after barely scraping through his first year of college.
Redford Found Himself Spiraling
Redford struggled to find his place, as he moved about.
He arrived in Paris to study painting, convinced that art was his one true calling, but soon found himself broke, lonely, and spiraling into self-doubt.
Author Minty Clinch, who chronicled Redford's early life, said: "He tried to live as a painter, but his days in Paris were as much about playing at being European as they were about art. He wore a stolen beret, sketched tourists in Montmartre, and looked, by his own admission, generally like a fool."
According to Clinch, Redford became a kind of soldier of fortune, drifting between bars and surviving on charm. He haunted Harry's Bar, a watering hole popular with Americans.
"If you hung around long enough, someone would buy you a meal," he said.
A Chance Encounter With A Hollywood Legend Ends In Booze
Redford tried to make it as a painter but struggled while in Paris.
When the Paris winter closed in, Redford hitchhiked through Germany, ending up in Greece, before reaching Rome by New Year's Eve. There, nursing a drink in the American Bar, he watched in awe as screen siren Ava Gardner entered with her entourage.
"All the courage went out of me like steam from a valve," the actor remembered about the sighting. "I could hardly walk. I got all the way to her table and lost everything – nerve, courage, memory, vocabulary. I just stood there like a dope in front of her."
But Gardner took pity on the future star – and leaned forward and kissed him. "Happy New Year, soldier," she told him. From Rome, he went to Florence to attend art school, but teachers criticized his work and crushed his confidence. He retreated to his room, where he drank so heavily that without food to soften the effect of the booze, he ended up hallucinating.
Redford Catches The Acting Bug
The actor would be convinced to move ti Los Angeles after meeting the love of his life.
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"So much was happening to me mentally that I couldn't handle it. At first, it was exciting, but then it got frightening," he later said. Redford eventually gave up painting, sold off canvases to fund his return to California, and soon met Lola von Wagenen, then 19, a Mormon from Provo, Utah, who was staying in his Los Angeles building.
She remembered: "Bob was my biggest rebellion. He was No.1 on the list of forbidden items my parents gave me when I left home. I thought he was the greatest thing I'd ever seen."
He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Von Wagenen persuaded him to steady his course. He enrolled at the Pratt Institute in New York to study theater design. A friend suggested he try acting to better understand the stage, leading him to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. There, he discovered a passion that would change his life and eventually make him one of cinema’s most bankable names.
