After grieving, the young pair had a daughter, Shauna, the following year. Their second son, James, was then born premature in 1962 with respiratory distress syndrome, a breathing disorder that affects newborns.
“The hardest thing in the world is when your children have problems,” the Oscar winner said at one time. “There have been so many hits on our family that no one knows about, and I don’t want them to, for my family’s sake.”
James would later be diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a disease that affects the liver and bile ducts, as an adult. While he received two liver transplants in 1993, he died in 2020.
“The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child,” Redford’s rep said at the time. “Jamie was a loving son, husband, and father. His legacy lives on through his children, art, filmmaking, and devoted passion to conservation and the environment.”
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