Oscar-Winning Film Icon Robert Redford Has Died At 89

Robert Redford, an icon of the entertainment industry who founded the Sundance Institute and helped shape the independent film industry, died at age 89, the New York Times first reported.

“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,” Cindi Berger, chief executive of the public relations firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, told HuffPost. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”

Redford served as a leading man early in his career before making a name for himself as a director, winning an Oscar for the film Ordinary People in 1981. He earned a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Among his iconic acting roles were John “Kelly” Hooker in The Sting, Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, Roy Hobbs in The Natural, Hubbell Gardiner in The Way We Were, and the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In 1969, he opened the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, the same year Butch Cassidy was released. He was initially hesitant about the resort’s name — a nod to his character in that film — because he worried the film would be “a disaster” and felt using the term would be too “self-serving.” The group he was working with convinced him to use “Sundance.”

Redford helped found the Utah/US Film Festival in 1978, and created the Sundance Institute, an organization intended to foster independent storytelling talent, in 1981. Eventually the film festival changed its name, and grew into the largest independent film festival in the United States.

Redford told Democracy Now in 2015 the festival was the result of changes to the film industry, which veered toward making blockbusters for younger audiences in the 1980s.

“You can have the big blockbusters. You can have — with technology coming along, creating more special effects possibilities, you knew that they were going to use that, and that’s great,” he said. “But I felt it was going to be at the expense of giving up those other kinds of films, so that’s what led to Sundance.” 

Redford also became a leader in environmental activism, working to protect wilderness spaces since the early 1970s and raising awareness about global warming since the 1980s. In 2005, he founded the Redford Center with his children, an organization that makes movies that advocate for various environmental causes.

“We have one planet, and as far as we know, that’s the only one we’ve got,” Redford said in 2014 while accepting the Walden Woods Project’s Global Environmental Leadership Award. “We are, or should be, guardians of that planet.”

Redford was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. He graduated high school in 1954, attended a year and a half of college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and eventually ended up in New York, attending classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1959 in the play Tall Story, which turned into a movie the next year, giving Redford his film debut. In 1960, Redford made appearances on various television shows, and as soon as 1963, he got a Best Supporting Actor Emmy nomination for an anthology drama on ABC.

By the mid-1960s, Redford had pivoted to focusing on movies. In 1966, he won a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, a category that no longer exists.

Redford became an extremely prolific actor in over a half-century in this business, with nearly 100 credits. 

“When you get older, you learn certain life lessons,” Redford said to AARP The Magazine in 2011. “You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new lease on this thing. So let’s go.’”

Redford is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars; his two daughters, Amy and Shauna; and their mother, his previous wife, Lola Van Wagenen. He is preceded in death by his sons: Scott Anthony Redford, who died at 2 months old in 1959, and James, who died of cancer in 2020 at age 58.

Carly Ledbetter and Todd Van Luling contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.