Robert Redford Dies at 89

Robert Redford, the all-American actor whose discontent at being considered just a movie star stirred him to become an Oscar-winning director, environmental activist, and savior of thoughtful cinema with his Sundance Film Festival, died on Tuesday. He was 89. His death was announced by Cindi Berger, chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK; Berger said that Redford had died in his sleep, but did not give a more specifid cause.

One of the most iconic actors of 20th-century American cinema, Redford’s résumé reads like a film-school syllabus, filled with titles like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson, The Sting, The Way We Were, All the President’s Men, Ordinary People, and Out of Africa.

Even decades after making those classics, Redford proved his dramatic endurance and all-encompassing commitment to acting in J.C. Chandor’s gripping, one-man 2013 survival epic All Is Lost. Redford took on the project, the most physically demanding role of his career, while in his mid-70s, and insisted on doing his own stunts—a decision which led to him losing partial hearing. The performance was heralded by many critics as being the best of his career, though he was ultimately snubbed for a best-actor nomination at the Oscars—perhaps because Redford himself was reluctant to campaign for the award.

His final starring role was in David Lowery’s acclaimed 2018 crime drama The Old Man and the Gun, which earned Redford his 10th Golden Globe nomination—11th if you count his 1994 Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. As an actor, he told Vanity Fair at the time, “I think I’ve done it long enough… You don’t want to overstay your time. The last film I’d done [Our Souls at Night] was a pretty heavy lift. It was a very dramatic love story. It was pretty sad. So the idea of this probably being the last thing I’m acting in just felt very right, because I could have fun, enjoy myself.”

Ironically, while most actors move west to hit it big, Redford—who was born and raised in Los Angeles—found himself moving east, eventually using the money he made with his movie career to buy land in Utah (where his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, was born and raised). The estate would be christened Sundance and become the home of his annual film festival, which celebrates its 47th anniversary in 2025.

“I always distrusted California quite a bit because I grew up there,” Redford told Rolling Stone in 1994. “It was not a place you went to, because I was there already. It had no magic for me. I was born at the end of the rainbow, so I didn’t see the rainbow.”

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr., Redford was the son and namesake of a milkman-turned-accountant. A self-described “bad student,” Redford suffered from a mild case of polio as a child after what he told Fresh Air was “extreme exertion in the ocean.” Though Redford’s mother Martha had been advised not to have more children after Redford’s difficult birth, she “wanted a family so badly she got pregnant again,” Redford told AARP in 2011, to twin girls—both of whom died at birth. A decade later, when Redford was 18, his mother suffered a hemorrhage related to complications from the twins’ birth, and died. “It seemed so unfair,” Redford told the magazine. “But, in an odd way, it freed me to go off on my own, which I’d wanted to do for a long time.”

Redford enrolled at the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship. His attempt at serious academia was short-lived, as he preferred booze to books. But having witnessed the overdevelopment of his home town, Redford’s college year was significant for another reason.

“I went into the mountains and to the Sierras, worked at Yosemite National Park and fell in love with nature that way, and I realized that nature was going to be a big part of my life,” Redford told NPR in 2013. “So I sought land elsewhere that I thought would be kept free of development.”

Post-college, Redford spent a year and a half in Paris in the 1950s—sketching, maturing, and engaging for the first time in politics. “They challenged me about my politics, which didn’t exist,” Redford said of his time in Europe. “It broadened my view of country. When I went back, I questioned things, which led me into a certain amount of activism.”

Redford returned to Los Angeles long enough to meet his first wife— Lola Van Wagenen, a college student at the time—before moving to New York City, enrolling in art school, and, at the behest of a teacher, transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

“Something clicked,” Redford has said of those early days acting. “It was the beginning of everything coming into focus with me.”

The actor started booking television parts (Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, The Twilight Zone) and stage roles, before breaking out on Broadway in a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. Redford starred opposite Jane Fonda in the 1967 screen adaptation. Before the end of the decade, Redford was cast at co-star Paul Newman’s behest in Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid—the iconic film which launched his star internationally.

“That was a gesture that I never forgot and I felt that I really owed him after that,” Redford told NPR in 2016, about Newman’s decision to stand up to the studio to get Redford, then an unknown, cast. “And then he and I, in the course of that film, became really, really good friends. . . I’ve never had so much on a film as I have that one.”

Though he attained Hollywood leading-man status, Redford said he never identified as being handsome and had a difficult time with the label and the limitations that came with it.

“I didn’t grow up being told I was good-looking,” Redford told Rolling Stone in 1994. “I was a freckle-faced, kind of redheaded kid that people made fun of because my hair had so many cowlicks. . .Suddenly, you’re referred to as a glamorous figure, and it’s flattering. Then shortly after that, you begin to realize that what’s also coming with that is reduction. . .Then another kind of struggle begins.”

To distinguish himself as more than the Hollywood hunk, Redford took on darker, more textured characters, like in 1969’s Downhill Racer, 1972’s The Candidate, and 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson. The actor also took on producing, launching a battle that lasted over three years to get All the President’s Men made. And in 1980, Redford added another title to his expanding résumé by directing his first film, Ordinary People—which won four Oscars, including the best director statue for him, and best picture. He directed eight more films, including A River Runs Through It , Quiz Show, and The Horse Whisperer, throughout his career.

“That movie was a turning point in my life,” Redford told Rolling Stone, referring to Ordinary People. “I was about to turn 40, so there was that decade coming to a close as well as a full decade of work as an actor and producer. . .I was beginning to get frustrated with having to put so much body English on the films I was doing. I thought, ‘I wish I could have total control of this situation. Why not just do it?’”

Another major turning point came two years after the release of All the President’s Men, when Redford founded the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute to showcase the kind of sophisticated, nuanced, American-made films Hollywood had become less and less interested in making.

“The business changed and suddenly Hollywood became more centralized,” Redford told NPR. “It was following the youth market. Technology was creating more chances for special effects, which would be more of a draw for the youth. And so Hollywood, which basically Hollywood follows the money—that’s what it does—and so it was going that direction.”

“That led to the idea of, well, to keep this thing alive,” Redford continued, explaining the inception of Sundance. “Because this is where new voices are going to be developing or new films can be coming that are independent, that are more exciting and more humanistic and stuff like that.”

By 2016, the film festival had expanded to include over 110 feature-length films from over 30 countries. The same year, by attracting over 45,000 attendees, the festival also generated over $143 million in economic activity for the state of Utah.

“People say I’ve gone against Hollywood,” Redford told The Telegraph in 2013, explaining his non-traditional trajectory. “But I’ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person. Once my career got going and I was able to act, I tried to take parts that were offbeat.”

In 2016, Barack Obama presented Redford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Heralding the filmmaker’s uncanny ability to forecast a major shift in Hollywood’s moviemaking landscape, Obama referred back to Redford’s 1972 film The Candidate.

“[Redford’s character] famously asks his campaign manager the reflective and revealing question, ‘What do we do now?’” Obama said during the ceremony. “And like the man he played in that movie, Robert Redford has figured it out, and applied his talent and charm to achieve success. We admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next.”

Throughout his career, Redford relied more and more on a turn of phrase he used to explain his offbeat interests in film, environment, politics, and the merging of the three—explaining how he is is not interested in “the red, white, or blue” swaths of the country he grew up in, but that “gray area” of complex individual and issue underneath.

In an interview with Variety in 2013, Redford reiterated that: “As I grew up and went about my life, I think I just got more and more interested in that gray area where things are not so easily quantified.”

Now, thanks to the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Lab he founded, Redford has ensured that generations of filmmakers, actors, and audiences will continue on the exploration of the complicated and complex that he began—sharing the stories that, like his, don’t fit neatly into any particular Hollywood stereotype.

Redford is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars; children Scott, Shauna, and Jamie; and grandchildren.