Actor, director and producer Robert Redford, who was each the quintessential good-looking Hollywood main man and an influential supporter of impartial movies by his Sundance Institute, died on Tuesday on the age of 89, his publicist mentioned.
Redford handed away at his dwelling at Sundance within the mountains of Utah surrounded by his family members, Cindi Berger, CEO of the publicity agency Rogers & Cowan PMK, mentioned in an e mail to Reuters. Berger didn’t disclose the reason for loss of life.
Once dismissed as “just another California blond”, Redford’s allure and craggy attractiveness made him one of many business’s most bankable main males for half a century, and one of many world’s most recognizable and best-loved film stars.
Redford made hearts beat sooner in romantic roles similar to “Out of Africa,” received political in “The Candidate” and “All the President’s Men” and skewered his golden-boy picture in roles just like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in “The Electric Horseman” and middle-aged millionaire who affords to purchase intercourse in “Indecent Proposal.”
He used the hundreds of thousands he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival within the Seventies, selling impartial filmmaking lengthy earlier than small and quirky have been modern.
He by no means gained one of the best actor Oscar, however his first outing as a director – the 1980 household drama “Ordinary People” – gained Oscars for finest image and finest director.
Yet he remained finest identified for the 2 early films he made with Paul Newman – the 1969 western caper “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and “The Sting” (1973), each of which grew to become classics.
Despite their chemistry and lengthy private friendship, Redford was by no means to crew up once more with Newman, who died in 2008.
“Butch Cassidy” made blue-eyed Redford an in a single day star however he by no means felt snug with superstar or the male starlet picture that persevered late into his 60s.
“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he as soon as informed New York journal.
Intensely personal, he purchased land in distant Utah within the early Seventies for his household retreat and loved a stage of privateness unknown to most superstars. He was married for greater than 25 years to his first spouse, earlier than their divorce in 1985. In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist and longtime accomplice Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford used his star standing to hunt out difficult movie tasks and to quietly champion environmental causes such because the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
“Some people have analysis. I have Utah,” he as soon as remarked.
Although he by no means confirmed an curiosity in coming into politics, he usually espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, through the presidency of Donald Trump, he informed Esquire journal that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Trump ought to “quit for our benefit”.
Born within the Los Angeles seaside metropolis of Santa Monica on Aug 18, 1937, to what he described as a “lower working class family”, Redford landed a university baseball scholarship however misplaced it after spending an excessive amount of time partying.
Deciding he wished to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to check portray. He enrolled in drama faculty to strive his hand at theatrical set design (“Acting seemed ludicrous to me,” he recalled) however was persuaded to take to the stage and by 1959 he was a full-time performer on Broadway and later discovered work on tv, showing in such applications as “Perry Mason,” “The Twilight Zone” and “The Untouchables.”
He made his film debut in 1962 in a low-budget movie known as “Warhunt”, however first gained consideration in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), reverse Jane Fonda.
He turned down the position taken by Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” (“I never did look like a 21-year-old college student who’d never been laid,” he mentioned later) and held out for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The Seventies introduced “The Way We Were” and “The Great Gatsby”.
From the Nineteen Eighties he devoted extra time to producing movies and to the institution of the Sundance Institute – a year-round workshop for aspiring filmmakers – and the Sundance Festival, which has grow to be one of the influential impartial movie showcases on the planet.
In 2001, he gained an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.
Redford remained lively in movies as an actor and producer proper as much as the tip of his life. In 2017, he reunited with Fonda for the Netflix drama “Our Souls at Night,” a romance between a widow and widower.
“I live for sex scenes with him,” Fonda informed journalists when the movie premiered in Venice. “He’s a great kisser so it was fun to kiss him in my 20s and to kiss him again in my almost 80s.”
Redford mentioned on the time that it could be certainly one of his final movies as an actor and that he was planning to focus extra on directing and his past love – artwork.
© Thomson Reuters 2025.