Actress follows dad to stage
by Patricia O’Haire, New York Daily News (KRT)

    “Following my father’s footsteps wasn’t easy,” Amy Redford was saying as she sipped a cup of decaf cappuccino in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. “It’s really asking for a very particular kind of scrutiny.”

   Redford was just down MacDougal Street from the Players Theater, where she opens Tuesday in a new play, Golden Ladder. Yes, she’s Robert Redford’s daughter. Yes, she understands that she’s always going to be his daughter.

   “But people in this city are great,” she says. “They take me for myself.”

   Tall, slim, blond, with deep blue eyes, the 31-year-old actress is the youngest of the three Redford children.

   Redford lives downtown with her husband of 18 months. He’s a photographer, but she keeps his name secret.

   She has been working mostly in theater, the last time in October, in Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories. She drew raves in David Van Asselt’s suspense drama The Messenger (2000). Her first movie, Casanova Falling (1999), was named best romantic comedy at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival.

   In Donna Spector’s comic drama Golden Ladder, Redford plays a woman whose mother is Christian and whose father is Jewish. The religious conflict launches her on a three-decade spiritual odyssey, testing various religions and beliefs with often hilarious results. Appropriately, her undergraduate degree is in religious studies and humanities.

   The youngest Redford has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, London (where she studied drama) and Park City, Utah, home of her dad’s Sundance Institute and its annual film festival.

   Going into acting was her call, she said. Her father did not influence her.

   Her parents divorced in 1985, when Amy was 15. Her mother, Lola Van Wagenen, was executive producer of the well-received documentary There She Is: A History of Miss America.