Robert Redford Hollywood icon dies at 89
A Hollywood legend 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 the founder of the organization behind the Sundance Film Festival, died Tuesday morning age 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 has helped launch many careers.
In a career that stretched 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.
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.
Redford reached a career turning point in 1969 with director 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
