Redford's daughter makes it on stage

Amy Redford, daughter of film legend Robert, is emerging on the New York stage as a star in her own right - after years of hiding her surname to prove she could make it on her own terms.

The 32-year-old actress shares her father's piercing blue eyes - and is at last embracing his name for her first stage lead in Golden Ladder: a play, appropriately, about confused identities.

Redford took her grandmother's surname, Hart, after dropping out of the University of Colorado. Her decision followed a period of youth rebellion during which, at the age of 14, she shaved half her head.

At the time she was living in New York with her father, star of classic films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and mother, documentary film-maker Lola Van Wagenen. The couple divorced in 1985.

"Some people go inside themselves. I wasn't someone who liked to hide so I gave them something to look at," said Ms Redford. "I just wanted room to become the person I was meant to be, not what was prescribed for me."

Concealing her identity, she enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, her father, knowing the pressures of an acting career, at first hesitant about the move. But it has so far earned her credits on Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and some small film roles.

In Golden Ladder, her first big stage role, she plays Catherine, a woman who discovers her parents have hidden from her the truth that they are Jewish.

On her own reconciliation with her past Ms Redford, who lives in New York with photographer husband Mark Mann, said: "You get beyond blaming your parents. You're able to recognise they were trying to do the right thing."