Robert Redford To Receive Owens Award

Robert Redford has won many hats in his nearly 50 year career: leading man, Oscar-winning director (ORDINARY PEOPLE), social activist and founder of the Sundance Film Institute. However, it is his acting that will be honored next week at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where he will receive the Peter J. Owens Award at the Festival’s Tribute Gala. In addition, the notoriously publicity-shy Redford will appear at a public onstage tribute at the Castro Theatre in a program that will feature career retrospective film clips, audience Q&A and an onstage interview with Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle. The on-stage appearance will be followed by the world premiere screening of the restoration of one of Redford's most beloved films, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) directed by George Roy Hill.

Beginning in theater and on live television in the late 1950s, Redford made his first impression as a screen actor in the film INSIDE DAISY CLOVER in 1965, opposite Natalie Wood. Since then, he has been a major industry star and one of the world’s most recognizable actors, appearing in such classic films as THE STING, THE WAY WE WERE, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, THE CANDIDATE, OUT OF AFRICA and INDECENT PROPOSAL. In 1996, Redford received the Screen Actors Guild's prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. Previous recipients of the prestigious award include Robin Williams, Ed Harris, Joan Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage. For more information on this year’s Festival, visit: www.sffs.org

Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Online Dailies Editor