Robert Redford, the leading man with the golden-boy looks who won an Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” and later became a godfather for independent film as founder of the Sundance Film Institute, died Tuesday in Utah. He was 89.
Cindi Berger, chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, confirmed the news to Variety.
“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,” Berger said in a statement. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
The actor-turned-director — who had a stellar run in such films as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Way We Were,” “The Sting,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men” — had worked less frequently both in front of and behind the camera in recent years.
His last on-screen acting job was in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” in which he reprised his role as Secretary Alexander Pierce and joined several other Marvel vets such as Michael Douglas and Tilda Swinton.
Redford had starring roles in “A Walk in the Woods,” which became a breakout indie hit, while 2018’s “The Old Man & the Gun” drew positive reviews. He also served as executive producer on numerous television projects, most recently for AMC thriller “Dark Winds,” in which he had a cameo appearance in the most reason season.
In his ’70s heyday, few actors possessed Redford’s star wattage, aided considerably by his tousled blond locks, granite jaw and million-dollar smile. With his environmental activism, anti-establishment approach to filmmaking and pioneering efforts in providing a platform for indie filmmakers, Redford was able to use his celebrity to subvert the status quo while advancing his own creative agenda.
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Like Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck and Steve McQueen, Robert Redford was never about having a particularly wide range as an actor, but as a movie star in his prime, few could touch him.
“He’s a very instinctive, impulsive actor,” the late Sydney Pollack told Variety in 2002. “I don’t think there’s anything studied or premeditated about the work. He’s the opposite of the actor who wants to rehearse and pin things down.”
Starting in 1959, Redford traded his time between television, appearing in such shows as “Perry Mason,” “Playhouse 90,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone,” and acting on the New York stage, in such productions as “Tall Story,” his theatrical debut, and Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” (1963), reprising the latter role in the 1967 Hollywood version opposite Jane Fonda.
He made his feature film debut in 1962’s “War Hunt,” in which he appeared with another young actor, Pollack, who would eventually direct Redford in seven movies, also including “Out of Africa” and “The Electric Horseman.’
After co-starring in two films with Natalie Wood — “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965), a lurid tale of the Hollywood starmaking machinery, and “This Property Is Condemned” (1966), his first collaboration with director Pollack — Redford’s breakthrough role was as the Sundance Kid to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy in what would become the top-grossing film of 1969.
In 1972, “The Hot Rock” and “The Candidate” both provided solid roles before a string of films that made him a superstar.
Starting with successful Western “Jeremiah Johnson,” he then reunited with Newman, and earned an Oscar nomination, for “The Sting,” the Motion Picture Academy’s pick for best picture of 1973, and would become the No. 1 box office star for the next three years. Also in 1973, he cemented his role as a romantic lead opposite Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were.” Despite lukewarm reviews, it made $50 million dollars and bolstered his smoldering reputation.
Subsequent starring roles included “The Great Gatsby,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men,” which Redford exec produced, starred in and shepherded from the early manuscript stage of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s bestselling book. The film racked up eight Oscar nominations, losing the top award to “Rocky.”
In the 1980s and ’90, he transitioned into more mature roles, from the middle-aged baseball player of “The Natural” to the free-spirited big game hunter in “Out of Africa” and the callous rich gambler in “Indecent Proposal.”
Redford’s rise to the top was all the more remarkable given his penchant for characters who were aloof, sardonic, even thorny. In films like “This Property Is Condemned,” “Downhill Racer” and “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” he played unrepentant heels, and yet his charisma was undeniable.
“He’s a very brave actor when you get down to it in that sense,” Pollack said. “A big part of what made Bob popular is what he withheld.”
In addition to Redford’s status as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men through much of the ’70s and ’80s, the Sundance Film Institute and the festival that bears its name may be considered an equally significant legacy.
Redford belied expectations when he founded the organization in the mountains of Utah in 1981, still flush from winning the Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” (1980). The effort effectively put his own career on hold for at least three years.
What started out as a modest filmmakers lab became synonymous with the independent film revolution, while its namesake festival would morph into the most important film event in the U.S. for both burgeoning filmmakers and acquisition execs.
“I think he’s constantly trying to figure out different directions for himself because he’s someone who’s always taking on new challenges,” Geoff Gilmore, the longtime co-director of the festival, said in 2002, when Redford was given an honorary Oscar.
“Sundance is only one of his truly remarkable achievements,” said Frank Pierson, the writer-director-producer who was the Academy’s president at the time. “When you look at the sum total of everything he has done as a producer, director and actor, there are not many people who have dedicated themselves so completely to their ideals as Bob Redford.”
“Downhill Racer” (1969) marked a shift for Redford: He began more active involvement in the films in which he starred when he formed Wildwood Enterprises that same year. “Racer,” about a ruthless Olympic skier, and the subsequent “The Candidate,” centering on a senatorial candidate who makes a Faustian bargain with unscrupulous campaign strategists, were the first two films in a planned trilogy about the American Dream and what he described as “the Pyrrhic victory of winning.”
“I wanted to tell these stories about America, the America that I knew,” Redford said in 2009. “I remembered these slogans you were given as a kid, like ‘It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but how you play the game,’ and it was a lie. I wanted to make a film about that lie.”
Although the third part of the trilogy was never made, Redford toyed with the idea of revisiting his Bill McKay character from “The Candidate” 25 years later.
“I got excited about that,” he said, “(but) what stopped that, and probably has stopped it for good, was George Bush. I mean, you can’t beat that charade. He’s taken it away from me; there’s nothing I can say about politics that isn’t going to be known.”
If Redford came of age when male leads were prized for their rugged looks, his work as a director displayed remarkable sensitivity. Either consciously or subconsciously, his image as golden boy was projected into such directorial efforts as “A River Runs Through It,” “Quiz Show” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance” — all movies with fair-haired heroes filled with early promise who fall from grace and seek redemption.
Later, Redford displayed his politics on the stump, speaking out mostly on environmental issues. One of his causes was protecting Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge from oil interests.
Two of his last three helming efforts — “Lions for Lambs” (2007), about Americans’ complicity in Afghanistan, and “The Conspirator” (2010), which examined the kangaroo-court justice exercised in the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination — continued Redford’s proclivity for politically driven drama but were dismissed by many critics as glorified civics lessons. In the subsequent “The Company You Keep,” Redford directed himself as a former Weather Underground militant whose anonymity is exposed 30 years later.
He delivered a remarkably primal, almost entirely silent performance in J.C. Chandor’s 2013 film “All Is Lost,” about a man stranded alone at sea — though an Oscar nomination somehow eluded him; and in 2014 comicbook sequel “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which was styled not as an adventure so much as a paranoid thriller, he played the kind of villain that his characters in “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men” were attempting to expose. In 2015 he portrayed CBS newsman Dan Rather in “Truth,” which chronicled the disaster that followed the “60 Minutes” story claiming that George W. Bush had not been truthful about his service in the National Guard.
“I believe there is a role for activist filmmaking,” Redford told Variety in 2002, “and there should be. I think it is wholly appropriate to focus on social cultural issues of our time — particularly documentaries, as the truth seems harder to find in the traditional avenues of media and journalism.”
Redford was born in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1936. “It was one of the happier times of my memory because everybody was united by the war effort,” Redford said of his early childhood in 2009.
After the war, in his early teens, Redford turned his focus to sports and the arts. A distrust of the establishment emerged early on, when he received a sports medal during a national holiday called Boys Week at age 13 from then Senator Richard Nixon.
“He shook my hand and gave me the award,” Redford recounted, “and the vibe that went through me was so extreme, I said, ‘What in the hell, who is this guy? What a creep, what an absolutely dark character. What a false, artificial person this is.’ And it hit me, I think that stuck…Of course I associated that with politics.”
Redford got into more than his share of trouble at Van Nuys High, and he was kicked out of the University of Colorado Boulder, which he attended on a baseball scholarship, after a year for poor grades and a mischievous streak.
He earned enough money from various odd jobs to tour around Europe for a year with the idea of becoming a painter. But instead of returning to Los Angeles, which he regarded as “suffocating and bland,” he went to New York and ended up studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and beginning his career.
Speculating on Redford’s legacy, Pollack told Variety in 2008: “There’ll be those who remember him for offbeat movies like ‘The Candidate’ or ‘Downhill Racer.’ There will be those who’ll remember him as a great romantic leading man in movies like ‘The Way We Were.’ There will be those who will consider him a great force in the emergence of independent filmmaking. There will be those that will remember ‘Ordinary People’ as an impressive directorial debut. The one thing he has always been is difficult to anticipate. I think he enjoys, in a perverse way, not doing what you expect him to do.”
He is survived by his wife Sibylle Szaggars, daughters Shauna Schlosser Redford and Amy Redford and seven grandchildren.
From Variety US