Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director whose hit movies often helped America make sense of itself and who, off screen, evangelized for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centered independent film movement, died early Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.
His death, in the mountains outside Provo, was announced in a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK. She said he had died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.
With a distaste for Hollywood’s dumb-it-down approach to moviemaking, Mr. Redford typically demanded that his films carry cultural weight, in many cases making serious topics like grief and political corruption resonate with audiences, in no small part because of his immense star power.
As an actor, his biggest films included “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), with its loving look at rogues in a dying West, and “All the President’s Men” (1976), about the journalistic pursuit of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate era. In “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) he was an introverted C.I.A. codebreaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game. “The Sting” (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Mr. Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.
Mr. Redford was one of Hollywood’s preferred leads for decades, whether in comedies, dramas or thrillers; studios often sold him as a sex symbol. His body of work as a romantic leading man owed a great deal to the commanding actresses who were paired with him — Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were” (1973), Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa” (1985).
“Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes.”
He branched into directing in his 40s and won an Academy Award for his first effort, “Ordinary People” (1980), about an upper-middle-class family’s disintegration after a son’s death. “Ordinary People” won three other Oscars, including for best picture.
His next film as a director, “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988), a comedic drama about a New Mexican farmer denied water rights by uncaring developers, was a flop. But Mr. Redford stubbornly refused to pursue less esoteric material. Instead, he directed and produced “A River Runs Through It” (1992), a spare period drama about Montana fly fishermen pondering existential questions, and “Quiz Show” (1994), about a notorious 1950s television scandal. “Quiz Show” was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and best director.
Perhaps Mr. Redford’s greatest cultural impact was as a make-it-up-as-he-went independent film impresario. In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices. He took over a struggling film festival in Utah in 1984 and renamed it after the institute a few years later.
The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, became a global showcase and freewheeling marketplace for American films made outside the Hollywood system. With heat generated by the discovery of talents like Steven Soderbergh, who unveiled his “Sex, Lies and Videotape” at the festival in 1989, Sundance became synonymous with the creative cutting edge.
The directors Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, Darren Aronofsky, Nicole Holofcener, David O. Russell, Ryan Coogler, Robert Rodriguez, Chloé Zhao and Ava DuVernay were nurtured by Sundance early in their careers. Sundance also grew into one of the world’s top showcases for documentaries, in particular those focused on progressive topics like reproductive rights, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and climate change.
Mr. Redford complained bitterly about the commercial whirlwind the festival created as it grew to more than 85,000 attendees in 2025 from a few hundred in the early 1980s.
“I want the ambush marketers — the vodka brands and the gift-bag people and the Paris Hiltons — to go away forever,” Mr. Redford told a reporter during the 2012 festival, as he trudged in snow boots to a screening, a young assistant behind him struggling to keep up. “They have nothing to do with what’s going on here!”
Preferring life on his secluded Utah ranch, Mr. Redford created the image of a reluctant star. His Hollywood career, he insisted with characteristic orneriness, was incidental to his real concerns, one of which was the environment. In many ways, he created the actor-as-environmentalist archetype that stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo would adopt.
Mr. Redford did not like to be called an activist, a label he found too severe. But an activist he was.
In 1970, he successfully campaigned against a six-lane highway that was proposed in a Utah canyon (where one year he received eight tickets for speeding, rounding the curves in a Porsche Carrera). In 1975, he was hanged in effigy over his resistance, also successful, to a proposed coal-fired power plant in southern Utah; the area later became a national monument. A sign on the hanging dummy said: “I’m a Star. I Made My Money.”
For three decades, Mr. Redford was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. From time to time, people with similar priorities encouraged him to run for office. He brushed such chatter aside, having become disillusioned with politics in the late 1970s, when he was elected commissioner of the Provo Canyon sewer district. He had sought the office
“I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.”
A California Youth
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, Calif. His parents, Charles Redford and Martha Hart, married three months later. (Early in his career, 20th Century Fox publicists officially placed Mr. Redford’s birth in 1937, a falsehood that was often repeated over the years.)
After working as a milkman, Mr. Redford’s father became an accountant and was eventually employed by Standard Oil of California. His mother died in 1955, when Mr. Redford was 18; the cause was a blood disorder associated with the birth of twin girls, who had lived only a short while, leaving Mr. Redford an only child.
Later in life, Mr. Redford, in dozens of interviews, told and retold the story of his California youth. It was an oral history in which the details sometimes shifted. He liked to cast himself in memory as a juvenile delinquent, sometimes mentioning gang fights, other times hubcap stealing and nights spent in jail. “There was great fear I was going to end up a bum,” he told TV Guide in 2002.
Little was ever mentioned of early show business connections that suggested the possibility of a screen future, although he spoke about getting laughed off the Warner Bros. lot at age 15 when asking for stunt work.
In fact, at schools in west Los Angeles, he kept company with children of the screenwriter Robert Rossen (“The Hustler”), the actor Zachary Scott (“Mildred Pierce”) and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Dore Schary. In 1959, Mr. Schary produced a Broadway play, “The Highest Tree,” in which Mr. Redford had one of his first stage roles.
He had made his Broadway debut earlier that year in “Tall Story,” in which he had a one-line part. His most successful Broadway appearance was in the Neil Simon hit comedy about newlyweds, “Barefoot in the Park,” in 1963, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Elizabeth Ashley.
After high school, Mr. Redford attended the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, but he soon dropped out, having chaffed at too much “bureaucracy,” as he put it. For more than a year he bounced around Europe, where he studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, aspired to paint, and — working through what he later described as profound depression — sold sidewalk sketches for pocket cash.
Back in Los Angeles, he did oil-field work and met several Mormon students who were sent to proselytize after their first year at Brigham Young University in Utah. He dated one of them, Lola Van Wagenen, and married her in 1958.
The couple would become rooted in Utah. “It’s not trying to pretend to be something it’s not,” he told Rocky Mountain magazine in 1978, comparing Utah with Los Angeles, which he called phony and superficial. “It doesn’t invite you in and then kick you in the shins.”
Film critics loved to kick Mr. Redford.
In 1974, his performance as Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” received near-universal disdain, with Ms. Kael writing that Mr. Redford “couldn’t transcend his immaculate self-absorption.” Robert Mazzocco, a critic for The New York Review of Books, wrote that Mr. Redford “has the emotions of a telephone recording from Con Ed.”
The response was so harsh that The New York Times weighed in with an article bearing the headline “Why Are They Being So Mean to ‘The Great Gatsby’?” The writer, Foster Hirsch, then enumerated the reasons. “Gatsby is one of the great losers in American literature,” the article said. “Does Redford, with his male model looks, answer such a description?”
Box-Office Gold
Mr. Redford enjoyed being a sex symbol, except when he didn’t. “This glamour image can be a real handicap,” he complained in a 1974 profile in The Times.
Nonetheless, it was his broad grin, tousled reddish-blond hair and all-American look (“WASP jock” in his own words) that first won the audience to his side. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was a well-reviewed picture, but it succeeded at the box office in large part because Mr. Redford was paired with another matinee idol, Paul Newman. They repeated the trick in 1973 for the same director, George Roy Hill, with “The Sting.”
Reviewing “The Sting” for The Times, Vincent Canby described the film as “Mr. Newman and Mr. Redford, dressed in best, fit-to-kill, snap-brim hat, thirties splendor, looking like a couple of guys in old Arrow shirt ads.”
His other acting successes included “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), about a legend-in-his-own-time mountain man, and “The Natural” (1984), the quintessentially American story of a man who gets a second chance at his dream baseball career. “Sneakers” (1992), a breezy caper starring Mr. Redford as a security hacker, reflected his occasional willingness to embrace popcorn cinema.
Mr. Redford’s biggest ticket seller as an actor (not counting two late-career Marvel films in which he played supporting roles) was the 1993 morality tale “Indecent Proposal,” which co-starred Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson and took in $267 million, or $590 million in today’s dollars. In her “Indecent Proposal” review for The Times, Janet Maslin called Mr. Redford “one of the screen’s great flirts.”
Mr. Redford’s marriage to Ms. Van Wagenen produced four children: Shauna, Amy, David James (known as Jamie) and Scott, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at 2½ months. The marriage ended in divorce in 1985. Mr. Redford married Sibylle Szaggars, a German artist he had met at the Sundance Institute, in 2009.
By then, Mr. Redford had seen his family through trauma that occasionally rivaled what he portrayed in “Ordinary People.” In 1983, his daughter Shauna’s boyfriend, Sidney Lee Wells, was shot dead in Colorado. The incident fed Mr. Redford’s reclusive tendencies, according to “Robert Redford: The Biography” (2011), by Michael Feeney Callan. Shauna subsequently survived a gruesome car accident that left her vehicle submerged in water, with her inside.
Just as Mr. Redford began “Quiz Show,” he saw his son Jamie through two liver transplants that overcame the effects of a chronic disease. Jamie died of cancer of the bile ducts in 2020 at 58.
Ms. Szaggars Redford survives her husband. Shauna Schlosser Redford and Amy Redford also survive their father, as do seven grandchildren.
Mr. Redford’s finances suffered with the years, partly because some business ventures were ill-timed. A planned movie theater chain, Sundance Cinemas, faltered in 2000 when a partner filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2002, Mr. Redford raised cash by selling half of his Sundance Catalog, a mail-order venture. A more bitter pill was the 2008 sale of his stake in the Sundance Channel cable network to Rainbow Media, which operated the rival Independent Film Channel.
The financial shake-up may have added to his late-life reasons for pushing his craft as an actor. In 2013, he was the sole performer in “All Is Lost,” about a sailor struggling to survive at sea. The role required Mr. Redford, then 75, to spend long days in a water tank on the movie’s Baja California set.
“All Is Lost,” which had almost no dialogue, turned into a disappointment for Mr. Redford: He was snubbed by Oscar voters. The weathered star in turn blasted the film’s distributor, Roadside Attractions.
“We had no campaign to cross over into the mainstream,” he told reporters with signature directness at a Sundance news conference. “They didn’t want to spend the money, or they were incapable.”
Mr. Redford’s final acting roles included “Our Souls at Night” (2017), a twilight-years romance co-starring Ms. Fonda, and “The Old Man and the Gun” (2018), a drama, based on a true story, about a septuagenarian bank robber. He retired from acting, in part because he was increasingly immobile; decades of riding horses and playing tennis had wreaked havoc on his 5-foot-10 frame.
Throughout his career, Mr. Redford pushed and questioned and then questioned and pushed. His tenaciousness served him well as early as 1969, when he was preparing to play the Sundance Kid. The president of 20th Century Fox, Richard D. Zanuck, told Mr. Redford to shave the bandit mustache he had grown for the role. He refused.
“It was authentic,” Mr. Redford told Mr. Callan, his biographer. “I got my way.”
Michael Cieply contributed reporting.
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
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