Robert Redford, the actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker who at his peak was concurrently certainly one of Hollywood’s most critically lauded administrators and bankable main males, has died at age 89.
“Robert Redford handed away on September 16, 2025, at his dwelling at Sundance within the mountains of Utah — the place he beloved, surrounded by these he beloved. He will likely be missed significantly,” his consultant confirmed to ABC Information. “The household requests privateness.”
In a profession that spanned greater than six many years, Redford was generally known as a lot for his memorable performances in film classics together with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Sting,” “The Manner We Had been,” “All of the President’s Males” and “The Pure,” as he was as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, directing critically acclaimed works like “Abnormal Folks,” “A River Runs By means of It” and “Quiz Present.” Redford additionally co-founded the annual Sundance Movie Pageant, in help of impartial filmmakers, and was an outspoken supporter of progressive politics, civil rights and environmentalism.
Requested by Esquire UK in 2017 how he’d prefer to be remembered, Redford replied: “For the work. What actually issues is the work. And what issues to me is doing the work. I am not trying on the again finish: ‘What am I going to get out of this? What is going on to be the reward?’ I am simply trying on the work, the pleasure of having the ability to do the work.”
“And that is what the enjoyable is: to climb up the mountain is the enjoyable, not standing on the high,” Redford continued. “There’s nowhere to go. However climbing up, that battle, that to me is the place the enjoyable is. That to me is the fun.
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born Aug. 18, 1936 in Van Nuys, California. After graduating from highschool, he attended the College of Colorado on a partial baseball scholarship, however left throughout his sophomore yr to journey Europe for a time, the place he studied portray. Returning to the U.S., he switched vocations, enrolling within the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York Metropolis to review performing, graduating in 1959.
Aided by his putting blond-haired, blue-eyed attractiveness and athletic construct, Redford had little problem discovering work proper out of school. He appeared in numerous fashionable TV reveals within the early Sixties, together with “Perry Mason,” “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone” and lots of others. He made his movie debut in an uncredited position the 1960 romantic comedy “Tall Story,” starring Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda, the latter additionally making her big-screen debut and with whom Redford would share the display screen 4 extra instances.
However Redford’s huge break got here when he was forged reverse Elizabeth Ashley within the 1963 Broadway debut of the Neil Simon comedy “Barefoot within the Park.” The play was successful and led to Redford showing in additional and bigger movie roles, together with the 1965 drama “Inside Daisy Clover,” reverse Natalie Wooden, which earned Redford a Golden Globe for New Star of the Yr. His star rose additional when, in 1967, he reprised his Broadway position on the massive display screen reverse Jane Fonda within the hit movie adaptation of “Barefoot within the Park.”
Robert Redford in 1973’s “The Manner We Had been.”
Herbert Dorfman/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
What adopted was a two-decade run of flicks that had been each business and, for probably the most half, essential successes, and which cemented Redford’s popularity as an A-list field workplace draw. He starred reverse Paul Newman within the 1969 Western action-comedy “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child,” the yr’s top-grossing movie. That success led to Redford and Newman re-teaming as Chicago con males for the 1973 Despair-era comedy “The Sting,” which was second solely to “The Exorcist” as that yr’s highest-grossing movie, and which earned Redford an Academy Award nomination for Greatest Actor.
The hits stored coming, amongst them the 1972 political satire “The Candidate” and the existential Western drama “Jeremiah Johnson,” with Redford taking the latter position of a Nineteenth-century mountain man to deliberately play in opposition to sort. He starred in twelve movies in all of the Seventies, however the decade’s zenith arguably got here with the 1976 Watergate-inspired drama “All of the President’s Males.” Redford and Dustin Hoffman performed real-life Washington Submit reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, within the hit movie primarily based on their best-selling e book of the identical title, which advised the story of their investigation into the Watergate scandal and White Home cover-up.
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, respectively, in 1976’s “All of the President’s Males.”
Warner Bros./Sundown Boulevard/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
“What attracted me there was right here had been two guys, one man is a Jew, the opposite man is a WASP. One man is a Republican, the opposite man is a radical liberal,” Redford later advised ABC Information concerning the movie. “They do not get alongside very properly. One man is claiming to be a greater author than the opposite one. They do not significantly like one another, however they must work collectively.”
Launched lower than two years after President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, “All of the President’s Males” tapped into the nationwide political zeitgeist to change into a field workplace hit and earned eight Oscar nominations, profitable 4. In 2010, it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry , acknowledged as being “culturally, traditionally, or aesthetically important.”
Redford wrapped the Seventies with the romantic comedy “The Electrical Horseman,” his third movie partnership with Jane Fonda, however by this time he was already engaged on his directorial debut: the 1980 drama “Abnormal Folks.” Based mostly on the novel by Judith Visitor, the movie – concerning the collapse of an upper-middle-class suburban household following the demise of a son – starred Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore in a uncommon dramatic position, and Timothy Hutton. The movie was a monetary and significant success, incomes six Oscar nods and profitable 4, together with Greatest Image and Greatest Director, for Redford.
Robert Redford on the 53rd annual Academy Awards, March 31, 1981, in Los Angeles, the place he gained the perfect director Academy Award for “Abnormal Folks.”
ABC Photograph Archives/ABC
Redford directed 9 characteristic movies in all, with various levels of essential and field workplace success, together with 1992’s “A River Runs By means of It,” 1998’s “The Horse Whisperer,” by which Redford starred reverse a younger Scarlett Johansson, and the 2012 political thriller “The Firm You Preserve.” His most profitable effort, nevertheless, after “Abnormal Folks,” was 1994’s “Quiz Present,” primarily based on the Fifties scandal surrounding recreation fixing by producers of the TV quiz present “Twenty-One,” and the next congressional investigation. Starring John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes and Rob Morrow, “Quiz Present” earned Redford his second of two profession Greatest Director Oscar nominations, together with his win for “Abnormal Folks,” and was universally praised by critics.
Robert Redford stars as baseball prodigy Roy Hobbs in 1984’s “The Pure.”
Juergen Vollmer/popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Pictures
Redford additionally remained a relentless presence in entrance of the digicam from the Eighties onward, delivering well-received performances in trendy classics like 1984’s “The Pure,” taking part in the mysterious, middle-aged baseball prodigy Roy Hobbs, and within the romantic drama “Out of Africa” the next yr, reverse Meryl Streep. Redford’s sixth of seven profession collaborations with director Sydney Pollack, “Out of Africa” swept the Academy Awards, nominated in eleven classes and profitable seven, together with Greatest Image.
Robert Redford with Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer within the 1985 Oscar-winning movie “Out of Africa.”
Sundown Boulevard/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
Different notable Redford performances included the 1992 espionage caper comedy “Sneakers,” the controversial 1993 erotic drama “Indecent Proposal,” the Tony Scott-directed “Spy Recreation,” in 2001, and 2013’s “All Is Misplaced,” by which Redford was the one performer, taking part in a person who struggles to stay afloat and alive when his sailboat is irreparably broken at sea. Later roles included a well-received villainous flip within the 2014 Marvel movie “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and the 2017 romantic drama “Our Souls at Evening,” which reunited him with Jane Fonda of their fifth on-screen pairing.
Robert Redford as a lone sailor preventing to outlive at sea in 2013’s “All Is Misplaced.”
Common Photos UK
2018’s “The Outdated Man & the Gun” featured an 82-year-old Redford taking part in a serial financial institution robber in a efficiency that earned him a Golden Globe performing nomination. That very same yr, Redford declared that after greater than six many years in entrance of the digicam, he deliberate to retire from performing.
“I have been doing it since I used to be 21,” Redford stated, partially. “I believed, ‘Properly, that is sufficient.'”
Whilst he starred in a few of the most profitable big-studio motion pictures of the twentieth century, Redford was a supporter of impartial filmmakers. He co-founded the non-profit Sundance Institute in 1981, named after his “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child” character, with the said mission of “fostering new voices in American storytelling” by providing applications and grants to aspiring filmmakers. In 1985, it acquired the seven-year-old annual US Movie Pageant and renamed it the Sundance Movie Pageant, which at the moment stays the biggest annual impartial movie showcase in America.
Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford speaks throughout the first day of the 2014 Sundance Movie Pageant in Park Metropolis, Utah.
George Pimentel/Getty Pictures
Redford did not shrink back from political involvement, each on- and off-screen. Within the 1972 political satire “The Candidate,” he performed Invoice McKay, an inexperienced Senate hopeful who turns into extra fashionable the extra generic he makes his message, in the end profitable the election in a shock upset. The movie ends with McKay, newly victorious, uttering the well-known last line: “What will we do now?”
“I felt that the political system was producing candidate that had been extra by beauty somewhat than substance,” Redford later advised ABC Information of the movie.
Thirty-five years after “The Candidate,” Redford directed three movies in simply three years, all of which both straight or obliquely addressed up to date politics: 2007’s “Lions for Lambs,” exploring American navy involvement within the Center East; 2011’s “The Conspirator,” a historic drama centering on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; and 2012’s “The Firm You Preserve,” a couple of fugitive Vietnam-era anti-government radical whose true id is unearthed by a reporter.
In a 2011 interview with ABC News, Redford drew particular parallels between “The Conspirator” – a couple of lady accused of conspiring within the Lincoln assassination plot who was denied a civil trial – and the U.S. authorities’s refusal to attempt alleged 9/11 assault conspirators in civilian court docket.
“I am just a little cautious about speaking concerning the parallels as a result of it might seem like they had been invented by me,” Redford stated. “They weren’t. They are a matter of historic report.”
Redford additionally stated throughout that very same interview that his view of latest politics was “so dim it is virtually black. It is fairly grim proper now.”
“I am so depressed to assume that this nation with all of its potential might cut back itself to video games being performed with – what feels just like the dialog is being completed with stone-age instruments,” Redford declared. “It is actually miserable to assume that as a substitute of an alternate of concepts between two alternative ways of pondering you’ve got simply bought a conflict zone.”
Robert Redford attends Sundance Institute’s ‘An Artist on the Desk Offered by IMDbPro’ on the 2020 Sundance Movie Pageant in Park Metropolis, Utah.
Wealthy Polk/Getty Pictures
But Redford remained politically lively all through his life, significantly when concerning points that concerned safety of the atmosphere, Native American points and civil rights, supporting each Republican and Democratic candidates for workplace over the many years. Along with his son, filmmaker James Redford, he based the Redford Center in 2005, with the said mission of “merging the powers of environmental justice, collective motion, training, and affect filmmaking.” He additionally was a longtime trustee of the Pure Assets Protection Council and a vocal advocate for efforts to deal with anthropogenic local weather change.
Along with his 1980 Greatest Director Academy Award, Redford acquired an honorary Oscar in 2002 for his lifetime of labor, in addition to the Hollywood International Press Affiliation’s Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994 and the Display screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1995. The Nationwide Audubon Society acknowledged his dedication to environmental points by awarding him the Audubon Medal, their highest honor, in 1989.
Robert Redford attend the Cesar Movie Awards 2019 at Salle Pleyel in Paris, France.
Stephane Cardinale/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures, FILE
President Invoice Clinton introduced Redford with the Nationwide Medal of the Arts in 1996. He was acknowledged by the Kennedy Heart Honors in 2005, introduced to artists for his or her “profound contributions” to American Tradition. In 2016, President Barack Obama introduced Redford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Redford was married twice. His first union, to producer and activist Lola Van Wagenen, lasted 27 years and produced 4 kids, certainly one of whom died in infancy, earlier than ending in divorce in 1985. In 2009, Redford married his longtime companion, artist Sibylle Szaggars. She survives him, as do his kids.
