Robert Redford, iconic actor and director, has died at age 89. According to a statement from his publicist, he died in his sleep on Tuesday at his home “at Sundance in the mountains of Utah – the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved.”
As an actor, his biggest films included “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” from 1969, “All the President’s Men” from 1976, “Three Days of the Condor” from 1975, while his role in “The Sting” from 1973 earned him his only Oscar nomination as an actor.
As a romantic leading man, he acted with Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park,” with Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” and Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa.”
As a director, his first effort with “Ordinary People” earned him his first Academy Award.
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.
Sundance was synonymous with “creative cutting edge,” discovering directors like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Robert Rodriguez, and others.
Sundance showcased top documentaries focused on progressive topics such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues and climate change. He vocally opposed the Keystone XL pipeline.
“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.”
Redford called out Trump’s administration as dictator-like in 2019, describing it as chaotic, exhausting, and un-American.
Read that op-ed here.
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.
Redford was married twice: to historian Lola Van Wagenen between 1958 and 1985, with whom he had four children, and artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009.