Robert Redford, Activist, Actor, Director, and Sundance Leader, Dead at 89

Redford's golden boy aura made him perfect for roles like "The Great Gatsby" and "The Way We Were," but cost him others like "The Graduate."

Robert Redford, the golden-haired leading man whose progressive politics informed his choices over a 60-year career, died on Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.

The New York Times announced his death. In a statement provided to the outlet, Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, said he died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Redford studied painting at the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship. He began his acting journey at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and debuted on Broadway playing a baseball player in 1959 in “Tall Story.”

He played roles in television, theater and film, breaking out in 1966 with a trio of well-received movies, “Inside Daisy Clover,” “This Property Is Condemned” and “The Chase,” opposite ingenue Jane Fonda, who also costarred in romantic comedy “Barefoot in the Park,” in which Redford reprised his role from Broadway, as well as “The Electric Horseman” and 38 years later, Netflix romance “Our Souls at Night.”

“It was fun to kiss him in my twenties and then to kiss him again in my almost-eighties,” Fonda said at the Venice Film Festival.

Redford’s charm and golden boy aura made him perfect for roles like “The Great Gatsby” and “The Way We Were,” but cost him others like “The Graduate,” for which his friend Mike Nichols refused to cast him, telling Vanity Fair he wasn’t right because he could “never play a loser.”

In “The Way We Were,” Katie (Barbra Streisand) tells Hubbell (Redford) that everything seems to come easy for him. That image stuck to the star. “I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts,” Redford told Oprah. “And suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me,” he says. “And then I would hear, ‘Well, but that’s easy for you.’ Or, ‘You look like somebody who’s educated in the East,’ which I wasn’t. ‘And came from an elegant background,’ which I didn’t.”

Redford worked hard to establish himself outside of that trope in a range of genres, from sports films (“The Natural,” “Downhill Racer”) to Westerns (“Jeremiah Johnson”). He held his own against major stars, including Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and Best-Picture winner “The Sting” (Redford’s only acting Oscar nod), Streisand in “The Way We Were” and Meryl Streep in Best-Picture winner “Out of Africa.”

Redford also pursued politically-charged movies, and helped to get made “The Candidate” and “All the President’s Men,” another Best Picture winner. In 1974, Redford was the first performer since Bing Crosby in 1946 to have three films in the year’s top ten grossers. And each year between 1974 and 1976, exhibitors named Redford as Hollywood’s top box-office star.

Redford’s closest collaborator over the years was Sydney Pollack, who he first met as an actor on 1962’s “War Hunt.” Pollack went on to direct Redford in seven movies: “This Property is Condemned,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Way We Were,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Electric Horseman,” “Out of Africa,” and, less successfully, their final film, “Havana.” “I was his actor; he was my director,” Redford once said.

Redford paid attention on set, and enjoyed taking control as a director on a total of nine features. He scored with his debut in 1980: “Ordinary People” took home four Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Timothy Hutton for Best Supporting Actor and Alvin Sargent for Original Screenplay. Redford also directed, with varying critical and box-office success, “Quiz Show,” “A River Runs Through It,” “The Milagro Beanfield War,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” “Lions for Lambs,” “The Conspirator,” “The Horse Whisperer,” and “The Company You Keep.”

Finally, Redford’s significant legacy was The Sundance Institute. Founded in 1979 at Redford’s Provo Canyon ski resort in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, Sundance for the next 40 years pursued its unwavering help-the-filmmakers mission to provide a support system for independents. The Institute mounted mentor workshops that eventually led to a place to showcase the work: the Sundance Film Festival. (The name comes from the character Redford played opposite Newman in William Goldman and George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning 1969 buddy Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”)

At a 2013 fundraiser in Los Angeles, Redford restated his original goal: “To create opportunity for new artists to have a voice and focus on a category that was DOA at that time, independent film.”

Over the decades, the Sundance Film festival morphed from a classics and good-for-you granola film showcase to a vital hub in indie distribution, serving as a gatekeeper and exhibition platform for filmmakers and a farm system for emerging talent heading for Hollywood. The festival grew with the burgeoning indie film movement, evolving into one of the most influential forces in American cinema.

Its first breakout came in 1989, the year that twenty-six-year-old writer/director Steven Soderbergh introduced “sex, lies and videotape,” which was scooped up by Bob and Harvey Weinstein and entered in competition at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or. People remembered what a zero-to-sixty festival rocket launch looked like. After a long search for a new home, the festival will relocate to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Its 2026 edition will be the last to take place in Utah.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” Sally Potter’s “Orlando,” Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” and Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” are among the films that launched careers at Sundance, along with myriad talent from Tilda Swinton, Edward Burns and Ashley Judd to Kerry Washington, Sam Rockwell, and Jennifer Lawrence. And every year a selection of Sundance entries moves into Oscar contention, from features to documentaries.

While he stopped directing, Redford kept acting through his eighties, often threatening to retire, shining in such films as the solo survival tale “All Is Lost” (winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor), and two films for David Lowery, “Pete’s Dragon” and con-man romance “The Old Man & The Gun,” opposite Sissy Spacek. He even worked for Marvel Studios, playing Alexander Pierce, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).

His final on-screen credit was a cameo in the AMC series “Dark Winds,” which he also produced, playing an unnamed chess player.

Redford accepted an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2002; in 2014, Time named him the “Godfather of Indie Film” in the magazine’s “Most Influential People in the World” round-up. And In 2016, Redford accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars Redford, daughters Shauna Schlosser Redford and Amy Redford, and seven grandchildren.