Robert Redford has revealed his plans to retire from life in front of the camera after a movie career spanning almost 60 years.

The 80-year-old Hollywood legend said he plans to focus on his passions outside of acting, including directing and painting.

In an interview with his grandson, Dylan Redford, he said: "I'm an impatient person, so it's hard for me to sit around and do take after take after take."

Asked if he thought he might take up his paintbrush again, "Yeah, a lot, and a lot lately because I'm getting tired of acting.

"It's just me, just the way it used to be, and so going back to sketching, that's sort of where my head is right now."

The Californian has been shooting in Our Souls at Night, with Jane Fonda, and Old Man With a Gun, alongside Casey Affleck and Sissy Spacek. Both films are due to be released in 2017.

"Once they're done," he said, "then I'm going to say, 'Okay, that's goodbye to all that, and then just focus on directing."

Mr Redford received his art training in Paris after dropping out of the University of Colorado and said he was "devastated" when his tutor found his early work disappointing.

Instead he focused on acting. His first film role was as a basketball player in Joshua Logan's Tall Story in 1960.

He shot to stardom in 1969 as one of the leads in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film he said flew in the face of Hollywood fashion at the time and inspired him to set up an independent film festival.

He said: "American culture was so much red, white, and blue from the 1940s on and the studios were following that lead so that things were just very red, white, and blue - meaning commercial.

"I was very much a part of the studio system. But I felt that there were other stories to be told that were more in the grey zone, where life was more complicated, so I started Sundance."

In 1981, Redford set up the non-profit Sundance Institute, which provides financial and creative support to independent film-makers. It also hosts the renowned Sundance Film Festival.