Robert Redford ‘almost died after being bullied and beaten by street gang’

London: Veteran actor Robert Redford while revealing about his wild youth in a new biography has said that he almost died after being bullied and beaten by a street gang.

The double Oscar winner, best known for his roles in ‘The Sting’, ‘Butch Cassidy’ and the Sundance Kid’ and ‘The Horse Whisperer’ opens his heart to Irish author Michael Feeney Callan in Robert Redford: The Biography, just published in the US. As a youth, he ran with his own street gang and was once arrested with stolen jewellery in a car. While he was in school he became a victim of a gang who regularly beat him up. To show them “how manly” he was he was almost killed when jumping off a building for a dare. “Facing down my fears hit home,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying in the book. “I realised you have two choices; you can be led by your fears or you can overcome them,” he said. Soon he was in a gang himself, playing truant, stealing beer from stores and breaking into neighbours’ homes. “We were a street gang. It became our camouflage for all kinds of petty theft,” a childhood friend of the actor revealed. ANI