Redford circa 1970, during the filming of Three Days of the Condor. Art Zelin/Getty Images In 2014, I traveled from Los Angeles to New York to meet Robert Redford for the first and only time. Even as an experienced and somewhat jaded journalist, I was nervous. Not because of Redford's iconic stature, which was beyond doubt; and not because I'd grown up deeply affected by such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men. The reason was that Redford, a brilliant actor and extraordinary director, had a reputation for showing up chronically late - if he showed up at all. Hulton Archive/Getty Images A friend of mine had told me a reporter's nightmare about flying to Utah to meet with Redford, only for the star never to appear. Another friend had once spent more than a week twiddling his thumbs at a faraway location, waiting and waiting for an interview. At least he got lucky: Redford eventually arrived. On day 10. Related Stories Movies Peter Biskind on Robert Redford's Legacy TV 'Dark Winds' Executive Producers Pay Tribute to Robert Redford and His Last Onscreen Role: "His Rebellious Spirit and Leadership Has Opened Doors" Now here I was, ensconced in a fancy Upper East Side restaurant, wondering how I was going to write an article about a man who never appeared. And then suddenly, mercifully, there he was, instantly recognizable, one of the most iconic faces in an industry built on them. His hair tousled, clad in a black sweatshirt and casual overcoat, he settled into a table with me for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation that weaved through one of the most legendary careers in recent Hollywood history. He was focused, intelligent, astonishingly direct, admittedly more complicated than I'd expected - and punctual. *** Redford with his Oscar for directing Ordinary People in 1981. ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images "I was always about breaking the rules," he said. He was talking about his childhood, growing up in the 1940s and '50s in a heavily immigrant part of Santa Monica, where his dad worked "brutal hours" as a milkman, but he might as well have been describing his career. As an impatient teen, "I was just getting more anxious about wanting out. I didn't want to be wherever I was. And I felt a certain suffocation. I felt things were closing in around me, and it made me anxious. I wanted to be free." He dreamed of following in the footsteps of the great artists who had made Paris their hub; he didn't consider a career as an actor until later, after dropping out of the University of Colorado, but was instantly successful, landing small parts on television, including a celebrated episode of The Twilight Zone ("Nothing in the Dark") and playing a bisexual actor in 1965's Inside Daisy Clover. Then came his co-starring role in Neil Simon's Broadway comedy Barefoot in the Park, which he followed with its movie version opposite his frequent collaborator, Jane Fonda. But, of course, it was 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman, that made him a star. "The studio didn't want me," he recalled. "It all depended on Paul, and I met him, and he was very generous and said, 'Let's go for this.' He knew I was serious about the craft. That's what brought us together." Redford on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Katharine Ross and Paul Newman. Douglas Kirkland/Corbis/Getty Images The celebrated critic Pauline Kael made what may have been her worst judgment when she dismissed Butch Cassidy as "a facetious Western" in which everybody "talks comical." Her review provoked a furious response from its director, George Roy Hill, who fired off a letter that began, "Listen, you miserable bitch." But Kael sensed in her less dyspeptic moments that there was something special about Redford. "The great movie actors know when to cool it and how to relax on camera and just be," she wrote. "Robert Redford has become a star without ever having had a really good role, because he's an intuitive master of movie technique, of non-actorish readings and minimal gestures; he seems extraordinarily sensitive to the medium, and naturally wary about any inflation of feeling." When we talk of Hollywood's second golden age, the 1970s, it's in part because of films like Butch Cassidy and a swirl of other Redford vehicles that followed it, like The Sting and The Candidate. The actor may have looked like an old-school studio star, perfect for lush romances like 1973's The Way We Were; he may not have appeared in other, grittier '70s masterpieces like The Godfather or Taxi Driver. But the era is unimaginable without him. Redford with co-star Barbra Streisand in 1973's The Way We Were. Courtesy Everett Collection Around the same time he was making these films, he was also becoming a force behind the camera. It was Redford who latched on to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate reporting and realized it could make a remarkable film. It was he who spent mont