Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director, 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.
His hit movies often helped the United States make sense of itself and he off screen, evangelised for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centred independent film movement.
RM Block
With a distaste for Hollywood’s dumb-it-down approach to moviemaking, 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 former US president Richard M Nixon in the Watergate era.
In Three Days of the Condor (1975) he was an introverted CIA codebreaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game. The Sting (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.
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).
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 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 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 non-profit 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, LGBTQI issues and climate change.
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,” 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, 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. – New York Times
