Robert Redford, the dashing actor and Oscar-winning director who eschewed his standing as a Hollywood main man to champion causes near his coronary heart, has died, based on his publicist Cindi Berger, Chairman and CEO of Rogers and Cowan PMK.
He was 89.
“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah–the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,” Berger mentioned in an announcement to NCS. “The family requests privacy.”
Known for his starring roles in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” Redford additionally directed award-winning movies corresponding to “Ordinary People” and “A River Runs Through It.”
His ardour for the artwork of filmmaking led to his creation of the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit that helps impartial movie and theater and is understood for its annual Sundance Film Festival.
Redford was additionally a devoted environmentalist, transferring to Utah in 1961 and main efforts to protect the pure panorama of the state and the American West.
Redford acted effectively into his later years, reuniting with Jane Fonda within the 2017 Netflix movie “Our Souls at Night.” The following 12 months, he starred in “The Old Man & the Gun” at age 82, a movie he mentioned can be his final – though he mentioned he wouldn’t take into account retiring.
“To me, retirement means stopping something or quitting something,” he informed CBS Sunday Morning in 2018. “There’s this life to lead, why not live it as much as you can as long as you can?”
In October 2020, Redford voiced his concern in regards to the lack of give attention to local weather change within the midst of devastating wildfires within the western United States, in an opinion piece he wrote for NCS.
That similar month, Redford’s 58-year-old son died from most cancers.
David James Redford – the third of 4 youngsters born to Robert Redford and former spouse Lola Van Wagenen – had adopted in his father’s footsteps as an activist, filmmaker and philanthropist.
Born in Santa Monica, California, close to Los Angeles, in 1936, Redford’s father labored lengthy hours as a milkman and an accountant, later transferring the household to a bigger house in close by Van Nuys.
“I didn’t see him much,” Redford recalled of his father, on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” in 2005.
Because his household couldn’t afford a babysitter, Redford spent hours within the youngsters’s part at the native library the place he turned fascinated with books on Greek and Roman mythology.
Yet Redford was hardly a mannequin scholar.
“I had no patience … I was not inspired,” Redford recalled. “It was more interesting to me to mess around and to adventure beyond the parameters that I was growing up in.”
Drawn to arts and sports activities – and a life exterior of sprawling Los Angeles – Redford earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1955. That similar 12 months, his mom died.
“She was very young, she wasn’t even 40,” he mentioned.
Redford mentioned his mom was “always very supportive (of my career)” — extra so than his dad.
“My father came of age during the Depression and he was afraid to take chances … so he wanted the straight and narrow path for me, which I was just not meant to be on,” he mentioned. “My mom, it doesn’t matter what I did, she was all the time forgiving and supportive and felt that I might do something.
“When I left and went to Colorado and she died, I realized I never had a chance to thank her.”
Redford quickly turned to ingesting, misplaced his scholarship and finally was requested to go away the college. He labored as a “roustabout” for the Standard Oil Company and saved his earnings to proceed his artwork research in Europe.
“(I) lived hand to mouth, but that was fine,” Redford mentioned of his time in Europe. “I wanted that adventure. I wanted the experience of seeing what other cultures were like.”
When he returned to the US, Redford started finding out theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
Shy and closed off, Redford mentioned he didn’t slot in with the opposite drama college students who have been keen to point out off their appearing expertise. After a efficiency in entrance of his class with a fellow scholar that resulted in frustration and catastrophe, Redford mentioned his instructor pulled him apart and inspired him to stay with appearing.
In 1959, Redford graduated from the academy and obtained his first appearing function on an episode of “Perry Mason.” His appearing profession was “uphill from there,” he mentioned.
His large appearing break got here in 1963, when he starred in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” on Broadway – a task he would later reprise on the massive display with Jane Fonda.
Around this time, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen and began a household. His first little one, Scott, died from sudden toddler demise syndrome only a few months after his start in 1959. Shauna was born in 1960, David in 1962, and Amy in 1970.
As his appearing profession was taking off, Redford and his household moved to Utah in 1961 the place he purchased two acres of land for just $500 and constructed a cabin himself.
“I discovered how important nature was in my life, and I wanted to be where nature was extreme and where I thought it could maybe be everlasting,” he informed NCS.
Redford made a reputation for himself as a number one man in 1969 when he starred reverse Paul Newman – already a significant star – in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The Western a few pair of outlaws gained 4 Academy Awards.
Redford mentioned he “will forever be indebted” to Newman, whom he credited with serving to him get the function. The two actors had nice on-screen chemistry, turned lifelong buddies and reunited in “The Sting” in 1973, which gained the Academy Award for finest image.
Redford starred in a string of hit motion pictures all through the Seventies: “Jeremiah Johnson”; “The Way We Were,” co-starring Barbra Streisand; “The Great Gatsby”; and with Dustin Hoffman in 1976’s “All The President’s Men,” in regards to the Watergate scandal.
Teaming up with director Sydney Pollack on “Jeremiah Johnson,” Redford fought with the studio to get the movie made the best way he needed – a precursor to his profession as a director and his help for impartial filmmaking.
“It was a battle from the get-go,” Redford informed “Inside The Actor’s Studio.” “They (the studio) said … ‘You’ve got $4 million, put it in the bank in Salt Lake City, you can shoot wherever you want, but that’s it. If it goes over, it comes out of your hide.’”
With spare dialogue and gorgeous surroundings, the movie tells the story of a Mexican War veteran who has left the battlefield to outlive as a trapper within the American West.
It was launched greater than three years after it was made as a result of, based on Redford, the studio’s gross sales chief thought the movie was “so unusual” that it wouldn’t discover an viewers.
“Jeremiah Johnson” ended up grossing practically $45 million. It wasn’t the one time Redford’s ardour for the artwork of filmmaking put him at odds with the studios that funded his work.
“The sad thing you have to work against, as a filmmaker, is held opinions about what works or doesn’t work,” Redford mentioned. “Sports movies don’t work, political movies don’t work, movies about the press don’t work – so I’ve done three of them.”
Redford made his directing debut in 1980 with “Ordinary People,” a drama about an sad suburban household which earned the Academy Award for Best Picture and one other one for him as finest director. He continued starring in hit movies corresponding to “The Natural” in 1984, which tapped into his ardour for baseball, and 1993’s “An Indecent Proposal,” which paired him with a a lot youthful Demi Moore.
He later directed the 1993 movie “A River Runs Through It,” which gained three Academy Awards, 1994’s “Quiz Show” and “The Horse Whisperer” in 1998, which he additionally starred in.
Ruggedly good-looking, Redford was typically solid because the romantic main man in movies corresponding to “Out of Africa” in 1985, however he wasn’t all the time snug with the label and feared being typecast.
“I didn’t see myself the way others saw me and I was feeling kind of trapped because I couldn’t go outside the box of … good-looking leading man,” he mentioned. “It was very flattering, but it was feeling restrictive … so it took many years to break loose of that.”
Redford and Van Wagenen divorced in 1985. He married artist Sibylle Szaggars Redford in 2009.
Redford’s ardour for the atmosphere and impartial filmmaking merged when he based the Sundance Institute in 1981. The nonprofit helps “risk-taking and new voices in American film” in addition to theater, and Redford’s Sundance resort in a canyon above Provo, Utah, hosts annual workshops for playwrights and screenwriters.
Each 12 months Redford’s institute holds the Sundance Film Festival in Utah – the biggest annual showcase within the United States for impartial movie. Many younger filmmakers obtained their large breaks at Sundance, together with Steven Soderbergh with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” in 1989, Quentin Tarantino with “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992 and Ryan Coogler with 2013’s “Fruitvale Station.”
Robert Redford’s life in footage
Redford’s lifelong affect on the movie trade was acknowledged in 2002 with an honorary Oscar.
In his later years, Redford by no means misplaced his ardour for storytelling via movie and remained an outspoken champion of environmental causes. He often demurred when requested about retiring.
“I want to make the most of what I’ve been given,” Redford informed NCS’s Christiane Amanpour in 2015. “You keep pushing yourself forward, you try new things and that’s invigorating.”
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Redford is survived by his spouse, daughters Shauna Redford Schlosser and Amy Redford, together with seven grandchildren.
This story has been up to date.