Robert Redford, magnetic Hollywood icon and Sundance founder, dies at 89
Robert Redford, the actor and director who sailed to Hollywood stardom with turns in classics such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and invigorated American independent cinema as one of the founders of the Sundance Film Festival, died Tuesday morning.
He was 89.
Cindi Berger, his publicist, said he died at his home “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
Redford was best known as a go-to leading man of the late 1960s and 1970s, instantly recognizable for his windswept hair and widely beloved for his easy charisma. But he was also an accomplished filmmaker, committed political activist, and culture-shaping entrepreneur.
He won the best director Oscar for the family melodrama “Ordinary People” (1980), the first of his nine stints behind the camera.
Redford’s expansive spirit will live on through the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1981 that sponsors the Sundance Film Festival. The festival, held annually in snowy Park City, Utah, showcases offbeat projects and helps launch the careers of new artists.
“I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance,’” Redford recalled in a 2018 interview. “As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
In a career that stretched across more than six decades, Redford won two Academy Awards, including an honorary prize in 2002 and three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award lifetime achievement honor in 1994.
President Barack Obama awarded Redford the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, saying in remarks at the White House that Americans “admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next.”
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born Aug. 18, 1936, in the beachside community of Santa Monica, California, to Martha Hart and Charles Robert Redford Sr., a milkman turned oil company accountant.
The younger Redford described himself as a poor student who was more interested in the arts and athletics. He graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1954 and briefly attended the University of Colorado Boulder. He later ambled around Europe, soaking up the culture in France, Spain and Italy.
He eventually moved to New York City, enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his Broadway debut in the play “Tall Story” (1959) and went on to appear in several popular television shows of the early 1960s, including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.”
Redford’s most high-profile theatrical performance from the period was opposite Elizabeth Ashley in the original Broadway run of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” (1963), playing the uptight newlywed Paul.
“Barefoot in the Park” catapulted Redford to supporting roles in movies, including the off-kilter Alec Guinness comedy “Situation Hopeless … But Not Serious” (1965) and the show business tale “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965), starring Natalie Wood.
“Inside Daisy Clover” handed Redford his first Golden Globe (for best new star), and the actor earned wider attention co-starring with Jane Fonda in both the prison break yarn “The Chase” (1966) and the 1967 big-screen version of “Barefoot in the Park.”
Redford reached a career turning point in 1969 with George Roy Hill’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He was the sharp-shooting Sundance Kid to Paul Newman’s quick-witted Butch Cassidy, two charming Wild West outlaws trying to make their way to Bolivia.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” anchored by one of the most electric star pairings in Hollywood history, conquered the box office and won over critics. Redford was suddenly a bankable leading man with his pick of projects — and legions of admirers across the country.
The same year, Redford starred as a relentless skier in “Downhill Racer” and a lawman in “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.” He followed those parts with turns as a motorcyclist in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy” (1970) and a jewel thief in “The Hot Rock” (1972), but both movies fizzled at the box office.
“The Candidate,” a political satire starring Redford as a callow U.S. Senate aspirant, performed respectably and collected largely positive reviews. Obama, in his remarks at the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2016, called it “the best movie about what politics is actually like, ever.”
Redford’s next several projects were among his most commercially successful, lighting up multiplex ticket booths and cementing his status as one of the key A-list performers of the era.
He captivated audiences as a rugged mountain man in Sydney Pollack’s “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972) and Barbra Streisand’s romantic partner in “The Way We Were” (1973). He teamed again with Paul Newman and director George Roy Hill for the light-hearted caper “The Sting” (1973).
“The Sting,” starring Redford and Newman as too-cool-for-school grifters in the 1930s, dominated the box office, scooped up the Oscar for best picture, and delivered Redford his first and only nomination for best actor at the 1974 ceremony. (He lost to Jack Lemmon for “Save the Tiger.”)
Redford scored more hits in the middle of the decade, playing the title character in a 1974 retelling of “The Great Gatsby,” a cocky aviator in “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), and a CIA analyst swept into a high-stakes conspiracy in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975).
He next co-starred in one of the most celebrated movies of the 1970s: “All the President’s Men” (1976), an adaptation of a bestselling memoir of the same name by The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who doggedly investigated the Watergate scandal.
“All the President’s Men,” a commercial and critical triumph, represented one of the peaks of Redford’s influence in the film industry. He orchestrated the project, including purchasing the film rights to the book and hiring “Butch Cassidy” scribe William Goldman to write the screenplay.
The film, a tense and fast-paced account of how Woodward (Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) unraveled the conspiracy that brought down President Richard Nixon, also reflected Redford’s political consciousness and sense of civic responsibility.
“Accuracy was the big, big objective in making the film,” Redford recalled in a 2006 interview. “We had to be accurate, otherwise we would fall under that perception that Hollywood was messing around with a very vital event.”
Redford closed out the 1970s with a relatively small part in the war epic “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and the role of a shambolic rodeo star in “The Electric Horseman” (1979), co-starring frequent collaborator Jane Fonda.
The dawn of the 1980s marked the start of a crucial career chapter. He appeared in the 1980 prison flick “Brubaker,” but Redford’s more significant project that year was his wrenching directorial debut, “Ordinary People.”
“Ordinary People” chronicles an upper-middle-class Midwestern family wracked by grief and dysfunction. The film, starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, examines the emotional fault lines underneath America’s clean-cut suburban ideal.
Oscar voters lavished the acclaimed drama with four awards, including best picture and a director trophy for Redford. (“Raging Bull” fans are still smarting from the knockout punch.)
Redford acted in only three more films in the 1980s — the baseball picture “The Natural” (1984), the best picture winner “Out of Africa” (1985) and the courtroom comedy “Legal Eagles” (1986) — and directed the largely forgotten dramedy “The Milagro Beanfield War,” released in 1987.
But in that same period, Redford helped form one of the signature institutions of modern film culture. He founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 with the goal of discovering talent from outside the Hollywood system, highlighting independent productions and supporting new artists.
The Sundance Film Festival, named for one of the actor’s most iconic characters, grew into a cornerstone of the film industry and eventually one of the most glitzy extravaganzas on the Hollywood social calendar, known as much for screenings as for executive deal-making and VIP parties.
The festival was a launching pad for some of the most well-known auteurs of the last quarter-century — Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Gina Prince-Bythewood — and continues to be an incubator for promising young writers, directors and other creative personalities.
It has likewise focused national attention on seminal independent films such as Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1989) and Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) as well as “Clerks” (1994), “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “Donnie Darko” (2001) and “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006).
In the 1990s and early 2000s, as Sundance helped turn independent film into a lucrative business, Redford continued to act steadily.
In those years, Redford starred in the heist comedy “Sneakers” (1992), the erotic potboiler “Indecent Proposal” (1993), and the back-to-back 2001 thrillers “The Last Castle” and “Spy Game.”
He was also an active director during that period, helming “A River Runs Through It” (1992), “Quiz Show” (1994), “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), and “Lions for Lambs” (2007), and more recently “The Conspirator” (2010) and “The Company You Keep” (2012).
“A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show” drew praise, and the latter received Oscar nominations for best picture and best director. Redford’s subsequent directorial outings received mixed reviews, however, although “Lions” and “Company” allowed him to explore political themes.
In his later years, Redford took on a challenging role in “All Is Lost,” a 2013 survival story that featured virtually no other characters and barely any dialogue. The actor received a standing ovation after the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
He portrayed former CBS newsman Dan Rather in “Truth” (2015) and introduced himself to a new generation of moviegoers as the villainous government operative Alexander Pierce in the Marvel franchise entries “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).
Redford’s leading role as a gentlemanly bank robber in David Lowery’s character study “The Old Man & the Gun” (2018) was his last, adding a gentle grace note to an illustrious Hollywood career.
“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21. I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family,” Redford told the Associated Press in 2018.
He is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars, and two children from a previous marriage to Lola Van Wagenen: Shauna Jean Redford and Amy Hart Redford. Redford and his first wife lost two sons: Scott Anthony Redford, born in 1959, died of sudden infant death syndrome; David James Redford died of cancer in 2020.
