Robert Redford, an Oscar-winning actor and director whose passion for activism led to the formation of the Sundance Institute and its formidable film festival, died this morning at his Utah home. He was 89.
Redford’s publicist, Cindi Berger, confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, but did not specify a cause. “Robert Redford passed away on Sept. 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” Berger said. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
“One of the lions has passed,” Meryl Streep, who starred with Redford in 1985’s Out of Africa, said in a statement. “Rest in peace my lovely friend.”
A heartthrob with a soulful spirit, Redford could easily play dreamboats who captured the collective imagination — he was a wholly credible Jay Gatsby — but there was also within him a dogged determination to seek out riskier projects that challenged him as an actor and subverted his golden-boy visage. After becoming a star in the 1970s thanks to hits that ran the gamut from expert escapism (The Sting) to topical political thrillers (All the President’s Men), Redford shifted toward directing, winning Best Director for his 1980 debut, Ordinary People, before going on to helm a string of critically acclaimed dramas such as A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show. And through his nurturing of the Sundance Film Festival, he helped boost the careers of fledgling filmmakers such as the Coen brothers, David O. Russell, and Quentin Tarantino. But wherever his passions took him, he remained a Southern California kid who resisted the trappings of his lifelong stardom.
“There was nothing at the end of the rainbow for me here,” Redford told Esquire in 2013 of his hometown. “Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood — I was born next door.”
Born in Santa Monica in the summer of 1936, Charles Robert Redford Jr. moved with his family to Van Nuys, California, as a boy. An unfocused student — biographer Michael Feeney Callan claimed that during Redford’s high school graduation, he “sat at the back of the assembly hall, reading Mad magazine” — he went to the University of Colorado Boulder for baseball. But the arts soon occupied his time, as well as partying. Redford was kicked out after a year: “One of the reasons I was asked to leave was that I was having too much fun ,” he admitted to ThinkProgress in 2012. “ I spent too much time in the mountains, and I didn’t spend enough time studying.”
He traveled around Europe and then set his sights on New York to focus on acting, working in theater and on television. He appeared on Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a TV adaptation of The Iceman Cometh, earning an Emmy nomination in 1963 for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont.
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By the mid-Sixties, Redford was starting to land steady film work, winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer – Male in 1966. One of his first major movie successes was in the adaptation of Neil Simon’s play Barefoot in the Park, as the uptight newlywed Paul Brattera, a role he originated on Broadway. But he cemented his stardom with 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the most popular of the revisionist Westerns, which starred Redford alongside Paul Newman, who would remain one of his closest friends until his death in 2008. The two men played wisecracking outlaws who seemed to be thumbing their nose at the romantic, rose-colored notion of the Old West, and in his role as the Sundance Kid, Redford articulated his resistance to mythmaking that would become a central tenet of his career.
He parlayed that success into a string of well-liked films, including the Western drama Jeremiah Johnson and his smash reunion with Newman, the Best Picture-winning heist film The Sting. But Redford always bristled at Hollywood fame, wanting to be sure he was still making worthwhile movies and not just star vehicles. “I started to get uncomfortable. I felt I wasn’t free to do other things,” he would later say. “So I’d go to Warner Bros. and say, ‘I’d like to make a film about the election process — about how we elect somebody based on cosmetics rather than substance — and call it The Candidate.’ They’d say, ‘If you do this larger film, we’ll let you make it.’ That allowed me to make small films within the studio system.”
Indeed, a movie like 1972’s The Candidate, in which he plays a blank slate of a senatorial hopeful, has only proved more prescient in its indictment of the American political system, and he followed it up with other films critical of the U.S. government, including All the President’s Men (about the Watergate cover-up) and Three Days of the Condor (a thriller about a CIA conspiracy).
“Robert Redford was genuine, a noble and principled force for good who fought successfully to find and communicate the truth. Over 50 years of friendship, he always said what he was going to do and then did it,” journalist Bob Woodward, who Redford played in All the President’s Men, tells Rolling Stone in a statement. “He urged Carl Bernstein and myself to tell the Watergate story through the eyes and experiences of our reporting and the relations between the two of us … His impact and influence on my life cannot be overstated. I loved him, and admired him — for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others. He will be remembered as one of the great storytellers in our country’s history.”
Redford’s willingness to look critically at his homeland had stemmed from being challenged by Parisians while he was studying art in France in the late 1950s. “[I was] beginning to realize that there was mythology about my own country given to me — and that there was a wonderful country there, which I still believe there is — but it was a different one than the sloganeering that was going on about the country,” Redford told Democracy Now!. “And I began to see the other side of it and think. And I felt that there was a story to be told — there are really a series of good stories about what’s the story beneath the story you were given about your own country.”
Redford tried his hand at directing for 1980’s Ordinary People, a chronicle of an emotionally distant family demolished by tragedy, which went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. Over the next several decades, he would continue to direct, often focusing on social and political issues such as the corrosive power of television (Quiz Show), American foreign policy (Lions for Lambs) and the shortcomings of our legal system (The Conspirator).
In subsequent years, he continued to act, playing handsome, sensitive figures in 1980s dramas such as The Natural and Out of Africa, but he also invested his time in spreading the word about environmental issues and developing the Sundance Institute, which he launched in the early Eighties as a way to shepherd new filmmaking talent. “I thought I’d like to put something back,” he once explained, “because I had been taken with a Native American policy: When you take something out of the land, you want to put something back. So I decided to think for a while about what I could do that might generate some opportunity for somebody else.” The institute and the Sundance Film Festival have served as an incubator for promising careers for generations now, the festival remaining the annual kickoff of prestige cinema each January in Park City, Utah.
But Redford still delivered powerful performances, most notably in the nearly silent 2013 survival story All Is Lost, in which he appeared alone onscreen as his character battles to stay afloat in a damaged boat in the middle of the ocean. But in late 2016, he hinted that he’d be retiring from acting after finishing two films: Our Souls at Night and Old Man and the Gun. In an interview with his grandson Dylan Redford, he noted, “Once they’re done then I’m going to say, ‘OK, that’s goodbye to all that,’ and then just focus on directing.” He also expressed a desire to return to an adolescent love: painting. “At this point in my life, age 80, it’d give me more satisfaction because I’m not dependent on anybody,” he said. “It’s just me, just the way it used to be, and so going back to sketching — that’s sort of where my head is right now.”
In 2002, Redford won an Honorary Oscar, and in 1994 he was bestowed the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award for his body of work. Redford’s career stands as a testament to forging one’s own path, and the independent filmmakers he ushered into the world are an extension of that philosophy of questioning the cinematic status quo.
In a 1994 conversation with Interview, Redford proclaimed that, as a director, he preferred nuance and ambiguity to the simplicity of Hollywood commercial fare. “The art of making a film and its content are far more interesting to me than the result or impact,” he said. “Of course, you hope it has impact. In fact, I think more broadly now about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn’t one.”
From Rolling Stone US
