Robert Redford, the Oscar-winning actor, director and godfather of independent cinema as the founder of the Sundance Film Festival, has died at the age of 89.
Redford died “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah – the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved”, publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement Tuesday.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
No cause of death was provided.
The iconic American actor and director is best known for his acclaimed performances in 1976’s All the President’s Men and 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he made his breakthrough alongside Paul Newman as an affable outlaw in a hippy Western.
The tousled-haired, freckled actor made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as Out of Africa, got political in The Candidate and All the President’s Men, and skewered his golden-boy image in roles like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in The Electric Horseman and the middle-aged millionaire who offers to buy sex in Indecent Proposal.
Redford was born in 1936 in West Los Angeles. His father was a milkman, and his mother, who he called “the strong member of the family”, was a stay-at-home mom, The Hollywood Reporter (THR) noted in 2014.
“I was always about breaking the rules,” he told THR. “I wanted to be away from Los Angeles because I felt it was going to the dogs. I didn’t want to be wherever I was. And I felt a certain suffocation. I wanted to be free.”
He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director – the 1980 family drama Ordinary People – won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
Redford also starred in 1973’s The Sting with Paul Newman, with whom he enjoyed a long, personal friendship before Newman passed away in 2008.
Their film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made blue-eyed Redford an overnight star, but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.
“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he once told New York Magazine.
His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him the most desired of leading men, but he worked hard to transcend his looks – whether through his political advocacy, his willingness to take on unglamorous roles, or his dedication to providing a platform for low-budget movies.
Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars. He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, before their divorce in 1985. The pair had four children. One son died when he was only months old. His other son died in 2020.
He is survived by two daughters and German artist Sibylle Szaggars, who he married in 2009.
He used the millions he made as an actor to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable. The festival has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.
Redford used his star status to also quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
“Some people have analysis. I have Utah,” he once remarked.
Redford’s interest in politics began after he travelled across Europe following his mother’s death in his late teens, with notable experiences in Spain, Italy and France.
“It was the first time I developed any kind of a political view,” he told THR in 2014, “because I couldn’t care less about politics when I was growing up.”
Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, during the first term of US President Donald Trump, he told Esquire magazine that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Trump should “quit for our benefit”.
He told THR in 2014 that he had developed “kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country”.
On October 5, 2018, the same day the US Senate voted to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, Redford penned an essay on the Sundance website, calling American politics “a damn mess”.
“Tonight, for the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life,” Redford wrote in 2018. “For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade.”
Multiple women accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in the 1980s during his confirmation hearings. He denied the allegations.
In 2001, Redford won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar award.