Robert Redford, the quintessentially handsome leading man who starred in acclaimed movies, won an Academy Award as a director and was hailed as the “godfather of indie films” for founding the Sundance Film Festival, has died. He was 89.
The New York Times reported his death, citing a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK. She said he died in his sleep in Utah.
Redford’s portrayals of heroic or romantic characters drove hit movies through six decades starting in the 1960s. They included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) — in which he shared the screen with his longtime friend Paul Newman — plus All the President’s Men (1976) and The Natural (1984).
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Butch Cassidy and All the President’s Men — in which Redford and Dustin Hoffman played Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — both made the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies of all time.
Though studious and serious about his profession and about the environmental causes he championed, Redford was undeniably helped by his megawatt smile, blue eyes and mop of strawberry-blonde hair. His on-screen romantic partners included Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer.
“No matter how any of us may feel about Redford’s skill as an actor — he was sometimes terrific, sometimes terrifically bland — he was one of the great fantasy figures of American movies in the ’70s: he seemed to glow gold,” film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote in 2011.
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In mid-career, Redford turned to directing. He won an Academy Award in his first try with Ordinary People. (1980). He later directed A River Runs Through It (1992) and Quiz Show (1994) and directed and starred in The Horse Whisperer (1998).
Acting Oscar
He never won an Oscar for acting, though he was nominated once, for his role as a professional grifter in The Sting. He won an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2002 for his impact on independent films through his Sundance Film Festival, held each January in Park City, Utah.
Photo: Bozeman Daily Chronicle via AP
His connection with Utah started with a $500 purchase of two acres of land in 1961. That holding grew to 5,000 acres including the Sundance Mountain Resort, a ski facility near Provo managed according to environmentally friendly policies that reflected Redford’s interest in conservation.
“Some people have analysis,” he once said. “I have Utah.”
Revenue from the resort, which Redford sold in 2020, helped finance a modest laboratory for filmmakers that grew, in 1981, into the Sundance Institute. In 1985 it began sponsoring the Sundance Film Festival, which became the largest independent movie festival in the US. (After 40 years in Utah, the festival is moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027.)
In 2014, Time magazine listed Redford as one of the 100 “Most Influential People in the World,” declaring him the “Godfather of Indie Film.”
Redford launched cable television’s Sundance Channel in February 1996 to further expose moviegoers to indie films. It expanded into original programming by the early 2000s. In 2008, the Rainbow Media subsidiary of Cablevision purchased Sundance Channel for $496 million. Rainbow Media was spun off as AMC Networks, and the channel was renamed SundanceTV in 2014.
‘Getting in Trouble’
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. His parents, who didn’t marry until shortly after his birth, were Charles Redford, a milkman who later became an accountant for Standard Oil, and the former Martha Hart.
In the early 1950s, the family moved to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. In interviews for a 1998 profile in the New Yorker, Redford recalled the valley of the time as “a big oven with nothing in it” and said he “spent my time wanting to leave. So it was sports and getting into trouble. And cruising and getting into trouble.”
One of his classmates at Van Nuys High School was child star Natalie Wood, with whom he would appear in Inside Daisy Clover (1965).
Using the skills he displayed decades later in The Natural, Redford won a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado. He lasted there just a year. He then worked for a while in the California oil fields before using his savings to travel to Europe, where he engaged his love of painting by studying art in Paris and Florence.
He returned to the US to enroll at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where he discovered his passion for acting.?
He appeared in regional theater in the late 1950s before cracking Broadway in productions including Sunday in New York and Barefoot in the Park. The latter was made into a 1967 film, which helped launch Redford’s movie career.
Four Children
In 1958, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen, with whom he would have four children. One of them, a baby boy named Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959. Another son, James, a filmmaker, died in 2020. Their other children are Shauna, a painter, and Amy, an actor.
The couple divorced in 1985. In 2009, Redford married his longtime companion, Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford’s fruitful seven-film collaboration with director Sydney Pollack, beginning in 1966 with This Property Is Condemned, also included Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Out of Africa, starring Redford and Streep, brought Pollack his only Academy Award for directing.
Late in his career, Redford directed civic-minded films reflecting his political interests. They included Lions for Lambs (2007), starring Streep and Tom Cruise, which took a critical view of the US government’s military pursuits in the Middle East, and The Company You Keep (2012), which offered a sympathetic view of 1960s counterculture revolutionaries.
Redford told Time in 2011 that he was “passionate” and “political” but added: “I am not a left-wing person. I’m just a person interested in the sustainability of my country.”
Redford earned renewed acclaim for one of his final works, All Is Lost (2013), in which he played a stranded, unnamed and mostly silent yachtsman adrift at sea. Though denied an Academy Award nomination for best actor, Redford said he loved that the film “gave me the chance as an actor to go back to my roots.”
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