Robert Redford Comes Out of Shell as He Stares at 75

Sundance Kid opens up to AARP magazine.

Robert Redford is still a coverboy, it's just that the publication happens to be AARP magazine.

Redford, who will turn 75 this year, told the grey set's favorite mag that he keeps young by riding horses and hanging out with his German-born wife of two years, Sibylle Szaggars.

"She's a very special person," Redford, 74, says of his artist wife of two years, Sibylle Szaggars, in the March/April issue of AARP The Magazine. "She's younger than I am [in her early 50s], and European, which I like, so that's a whole new life."

The Sundance Kid said he doesn't think too much about getting old, and keeps active in his New Mexico community where he has lived for the last three decades.

"I ride horses, ski, play pretty hard tennis," Redford said. "I still have energy. When that starts to shut down, I might start to think about age."

Redford also opened up to the mag about heartache in his life, including the death of an infant son in 1959 from SIDS and his mother passing away in 1955, just after he graduated high school.

"It was really hard," Redford says dealing with Scott's death with his first wife, Lola. "We were very young ... We didn't know anything about SIDS, so the only thing you think is that you've done something wrong. As a parent, you tend to blame yourself. That creates a scar that probably never completely heals."

Of his mother's death, Redford says: "It seemed so unfair. But, in an odd way, it freed me to go off on my own, which I'd wanted to do for a long time."

Redford has always been private, but said he's ready to change, at least a little bit.

"When I got into the business, I had this naive idea that I'd let my work speak for me," he said. "I just was never interested in talking about myself," Redford says. "However, we're in such a different time, and celebrity is so much in the mainstream. I thought, 'I might as well enter this zone, but go a toe at a time.' "

Selected Reading: People, AARP magazine, IMDb.

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