Robert Redford, the Hollywood golden boy who became an Oscar-winning director, liberal activist and godfather for independent cinema under the name of one of his best-loved characters, died Tuesday at 89.
Redford died “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement. He died in his sleep, but no cause was provided.
After rising to stardom in the 1960s, Redford was one of the biggest stars of the ’70s with such films as “The Candidate,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Way We Were,” capping that decade with the best director Oscar for 1980’s “Ordinary People,” which also won best picture in 1980. His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him the most desired of leading men, but he worked hard to transcend his looks — whether through his political advocacy, his willingness to take on unglamorous roles or his dedication to providing a platform for low-budget movies.
His roles ranged from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward to a mountain man in “Jeremiah Johnson” to a double agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. But his most famous screen partner was his old friend and fellow activist and practical joker Paul Newman, their films a variation of their warm, teasing relationship off screen. Redford played the wily outlaw opposite Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and festival got its name. He also teamed with Newman on 1973’s best picture Oscar winner, “The Sting,” which earned Redford a best-actor nomination as a young con artist in 1930s Chicago.
Film roles after the ’70s became more sporadic as Redford concentrated on directing and producing, and his new role as patriarch of the independent-film movement in the 1980s and ’90s through his Sundance Institute. But he starred in 1985’s best picture champion “Out of Africa” and in 2013 received some of the best reviews of his career as a shipwrecked sailor in “All is Lost,” in which he was the film’s only performer. In 2018, he was praised again in what he called his farewell movie, “The Old Man and the Gun.”
“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,” he told The Associated Press shortly before the film came out. “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.”
Sundance is born
Redford had watched Hollywood grow more cautious and controlling during the 1970s and wanted to recapture the creative spirit of the early part of the decade. Sundance was created to nurture new talent away from the pressures of Hollywood, the institute providing a training ground and the festival, based in Park City, Utah, where Redford had purchased land with the initial hope of opening a ski resort. Instead, Park City became a place of discovery for such previously unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.
“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford told the AP in 2018. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard.
“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But 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.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
Sundance was even criticized as buyers swarmed in looking for potential hits and celebrities overran the town each winter.
“We have never, ever changed our policies for how we program our festival. It’s always been built on diversity,” Redford told the AP in 2004. “The fact is that the diversity has become commercial. Because independent films have achieved their own success, Hollywood, being just a business, is going to grab them. So when Hollywood grabs your films, they go, ‘Oh, it’s gone Hollywood.’”
By 2025, the festival had become so prominent that organizers decided they had outgrown Park City and approved relocating to Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027. Redford, who had attended the University of Colorado Boulder, issued a statement saying that “change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival.”
Redford’s affinity for the outdoors was well captured in “A River Runs Through It” and other films and through his decades of advocacy for the environment, inspired in part by witnessing the transformation of Los Angeles into a city of smog and freeways. His activities ranged from lobbying for such legislation as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to pushing for land conservation in Utah to serving on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Redford was married twice, most recently to Sibylle Szaggars. He had four children, two of whom have died — Scott Anthony, who died in infancy, in 1959; and James Redford, an activist and filmmaker who died in 2020.
Redford’s early life
Robert Redford was born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, a California boy whose blond good looks eased his way over an apprenticeship in television and live theater that eventually led to the big screen.
Redford attended college on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s “The Natural,” the adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel. He had an early interest in drawing and painting, then went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on Broadway in the late 1950s and moving into television on such shows as “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Untouchables.”
After scoring a Broadway lead in “Sunday in New York,” Redford was cast by director Mike Nichols in a production of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” later starring with Fonda in the film version. Redford did miss out on one of Nichols’ greatest successes, “The Graduate,” released in 1967. Nichols had considered casting Redford in the part eventually played by Dustin Hoffman, but Redford seemed unable to relate to the socially awkward young man who ends up having an affair with one of his parents’ friends.
“I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols said during a 2003 screening of the film in New York. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
Indie champion, mainstream star
Even as Redford championed low-budget independent filmmaking, he continued to star in mainstream Hollywood productions himself, scoring the occasional hit such as 2001’s “Spy Game,” which co-starred Brad Pitt, an heir apparent to Redford’s handsome legacy whom he had directed in “A River Runs Through It.”
Ironically, “The Blair Witch Project,” “Garden State,” “Napoleon Dynamite” and other scrappy films that came out of Sundance sometimes made bigger waves — and more money — than some Redford-starring box-office duds like “Havana,” “The Last Castle” and “An Unfinished Life.”
Redford also appeared in several political narratives. He satirized campaigning as an idealist running for U.S. senator in 1972’s “The Candidate” and uttered one of the more memorable closing lines, “What do we do now?” after his character manages to win. He starred as Woodward to Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein in 1976’s “All the President’s Men,” the story of the Washington Post reporters whose Watergate investigation helped bring down President Richard Nixon.
With 2007’s “Lions for Lambs,” Redford returned to directing in a saga of a congressman (Tom Cruise), a journalist (Meryl Streep) and an academic (Redford) whose lives intersect over the war on terrorism in Afghanistan.
His biggest filmmaking triumph came with his directing debut on “Ordinary People,” which beat Martin Scorsese’s classic “Raging Bull” at the Oscars. The film starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as the repressed parents of a troubled young man, played by Timothy Hutton, in his big screen debut. Redford was praised for casting Moore in an unexpectedly serious role and for his even-handed treatment of the characters, a quality that Roger Ebert believed set “the film apart from the sophisticated suburban soap opera it could easily have become.”
Redford’s other directing efforts included “The Horse Whisperer,” “The Milagro Beanfield War” and 1994’s “Quiz Show,” the last of which also earned best picture and director Oscar nominations. In 2002, Redford received an honorary Oscar, with academy organizers citing him as “actor, director, producer, creator of Sundance, inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”
“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” Redford said in 2018. “From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside.”
___
11 of Robert Redford’s most memorable performances and where to watch them
When you’re a larger-than-life, generation-spanning star like Robert Redford, the hard truth is that every movie is notable in some way. He was iconic in his own time, whether in front of the camera, or behind it. And in his lifetime, so many of his films transcended their original reviews to find passionate fanbases: Just ask older millennials about the 1992 hacker movie “Sneakers” or the “Sex and the City” generation about “The Way We Were.”
Redford died Tuesday at 89, leaving behind an arsenal of great roles that he owned, whether he was playing a quiet CIA agent, a con man, a baseball player, a grizzled mariner, an ambitious journalist, or a charming WASP in love. You could make a feast out of his Sydney Pollack collaborations alone, staring with “Jeremiah Johnson” (streaming on Tubi ), a classic that also took on a surprising afterlife as a meme that became so popular, younger generations didn’t even realize it was Redford behind that beard. His very last role came this year, a cameo in “Dark Winds,” the AMC show about Navajo police officers he produced.
This is a list of some of Redford’s most memorable performances, but don’t forget about the films he directed, too: among them are the all-timers “Ordinary People” ( streaming on MGM+ ), which won him the best director Oscar, and “Quiz Show” (rent on Apple TV+ ), which got him another nod.
“Barefoot in the Park” (1967)
Redford and Jane Fonda play a passionate but mismatched newlywed couple whose relationship is tested by their walk-up New York apartment in this Neil Simon comedy. Reprising the role he’d played on Broadway, Redford is the uptight, conservative foil to her more free-spirited character and they’re both stunningly beautiful and fun to watch. Fonda told The Guardian in 2015 that she was “always in love with Robert Redford.” He later responded that he wasn’t aware. The two also appeared together in “The Chase” (1966), “The Electric Horseman” (1979) and “Our Souls at Night” (2017).
WHERE TO WATCH: Stream on Kanopy; rent on several services, including Prime Video
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969)
Redford met Paul Newman on “Butch Cassidy,” George Roy Hill and William Goldman’s Western buddy film about outlaws on the run. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, but it almost didn’t happen, since the studio wanted a star like Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando instead of Redford.
“I was not a name equal to Paul’s. I was just sort of moving up at that time,” he told the AP in 2015. “There was a big argument that went on for months and months. They said it had to be a star. (Newman) said, ‘Well, I want to work with an actor,’ because Paul respected acting. Had it not been for Paul, I would not have gotten that break.”
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on several services, including Prime Video
“Downhill Racer” (1969)
A film that’s as stylish as it is compelling, Redford plays an ambitious and smug downhill skier out for Olympic gold in this Michael Ritchie film. Roger Ebert, in his review, wrote that it is “a portrait of a man that is so complete, and so tragic, that ‘Downhill Racer’ becomes the best movie ever made about sports — without really being about sports at all.”
This was one of Redford’s passion projects, his first independent feature that taught him some hard lessons about Hollywood. “That was when I learned about how the film industry really works,” Redford told the Harvard Business Review in 2002. “The studio simply tossed ‘Downhill Racer’ away without a second thought. I broke my heart trying to get that film promoted and distributed.”
WHERE TO WATCH: Stream on Kanopy or FuboTV; rent on Prime Video
“The Sting” (1973)
After the success of “Butch Cassidy,” “The Sting,” another Hill film, fell into place more easily. Redford and Newman play grifters in 1936 Chicago who fleece Robert Shaw’s rich mobster in this memorable caper that went on to win best picture.
“What was interesting was the switcheroo,” Redford told the AP. “Paul had played these iconic, quiet, still characters in the past, and that’s not what Paul is. He was a chatty, nervous guy who was always biting his fingernails. … He loved to have fun and play games.”
WHERE TO WATCH: Stream on Spectrum; rent on several services, including Apple TV+
“The Way We Were” (1973)
Ah Hubbell, that beautiful, carefree WASP who falls in love with Barbra Streisand’s fiercely opinionated Katie. The making of the Pollack film, from a script standpoint, was fraught and the original writer Arthur Laurents was never quite happy with how it turned out. But this romantic drama with that memorable song has endured over the generations (it was even a reference in a pivotal “Sex and the City” episode).
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on various services including Fandango
“Three Days of the Condor” (1975)
Redford teamed with Pollack again for this paranoid thriller about a quiet CIA codebreaker who returns from lunch only to discover his co-workers have all been murdered. The film sends him on the run from the bosses involved in this vast conspiracy, and a hit man played by Max von Sydow.
WHERE TO WATCH: Stream on MGM+
“All the President’s Men” (1976)
To Redford, the history of this film was more interesting than the project itself. He started obsessing over the Watergate saga during a whistle-stop tour for “The Candidate,” also a great and prophetic Redford film, when he overheard some journalists gossiping about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and became fascinated by the journalists covering the story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
“I wanted to know who these guys were, who created all this disturbance,” Redford told the AP. “I thought, ‘Wow, one guy was a Jew, one guy was a WASP. One guy was a Republican, the other guy was a liberal. One guy was a good writer, the other wasn’t very good. They didn’t like each other, but they had to work together. Now that’s an interesting dynamic I’d love to know about.’”
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on several services, including Prime Video
“The Natural” (1984)
This is one of those films that might not be many critics’ favorite, but its cultural impact almost negates that. Redford played baseball player Roy Hobbs in Barry Levinson’s adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s novel about an up-and-coming talent whose career is derailed after getting shot, but who gets another chance at greatness 16 years later.
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on several services, including Prime Video
“Out of Africa” (1985)
This breathtakingly beautiful historical romance (also directed by Pollack) finds Meryl Streep, as the Danish expat Karen Blixen, unable to resist the charms of Redford’s big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, an English man with no accent (Pollack thought it would be distracting for audiences). The film didn’t get the best reviews, but it did go on to win the best picture Oscar.
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on several services, including Prime Video
“All Is Lost” (2013)
J.C. Chandor directed Redford in this harrowing survival story, in which a veteran sailor on a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean tries to survive after his yacht is stuck by a floating cargo container. Made for only $9 million, it’s stripped-down and thrilling. “It’s a pure cinematic experience,” Redford told The Hollywood Reporter. “And that was very appealing to me at this point in my life — to be able to go back to my roots as an actor, to be interesting enough to have the audience ride along with you and almost be a part of what you are feeling and thinking.” It’s likely a quirk of modern film review aggregation, but it is also his highest Rotten Tomatoes score.
WHERE TO WATCH: Stream on Tubi, The Roku Channel, Kanopy
“The Old Man & The Gun” (2018)
This indie gem from filmmaker David Lowery, about a 70-year-old San Quentin escapee who embarks on a series of bank heists, was a bit of a swan song for Redford, who was 82 when it was released. His character, Forrest Tucker, is the kind of thief who left his victims disarmed, with one bank teller explaining to the police, “He was a gentleman.” It’s one of those films that’s almost comforting to watch, a reassuring testament to his enduring appeal. Charisma doesn’t need to dwindle with age, and Redford was proof.
WHERE TO WATCH: Rent on several services, including Apple TV+