ON a cool November evening in 1959 Robert Redford kissed goodnight to his 10-week-old son Scott and lay him down in his cot. The rising young star had just moved into a large apartment on West 93rd Street in Manhattan and days earlier had opened on Broadway in new drama The Highest Tree. With his bride of barely a year Lola and still heady from their elopement to marry in Las Vegas, Redford seemed on top of the world. But by the next morning Scott was dead, the victim of cot death, a syndrome that back then did not even have a name. It was the heartbreak of Robert Redford’s life, a tragedy that forever altered his psyche, plunging him into a depression that he only escaped by immersing himself in acting.

Yet you would hardly know the agonies that he endured from the new authorised biography that the screen legend has helped craft. “I was not into shared soul searching,” the superstar confesses. “In that regard I was and remain a loner. I like to face the issues alone.” The book, simply titled Robert Redford, offers a fascinating insight into the actor’s mind, as much for what it does not reveal as  for what it does. It represents the way Redford, 73, hopes to be seen by the world, disclosing as much – or as little – as he could bring himself to expose.