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Robert Redford, the blue-eyed leading man who lit up screens in classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men before reshaping American cinema through his Sundance Institute and film festival, died Tuesday at his home near Provo, Utah. He was 89.
His death was announced by his publicist, Cindi Berger, who gave no cause.
With his golden looks and understated charm, Redford was one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars for decades, starring opposite screen legends from Paul Newman to Meryl Streep. But his biggest contribution came off-screen. In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, nurturing generations of filmmakers who might otherwise have been shut out of the studio system, among them Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and Ava DuVernay.
Redford won an Academy Award for directing Ordinary People (1980), but he was best known for roles that fused glamour with grit: the Sundance Kid, journalist Bob Woodward, a Depression-era con man, and Streep’s enigmatic lover in Out of Africa. He often played idealists or loners wrestling with larger-than-life forces, characters that mirrored his own restless, private nature.
Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. in Santa Monica in 1936, he had a rough start: expelled from college, running with street gangs, and nearly lost to drink before discovering acting. Broadway’s Barefoot in the Park launched him, and Hollywood quickly followed. His rugged-yet-vulnerable presence turned him into a sex symbol, but he resisted typecasting, pushing for projects that questioned power, politics, and society.
Beyond film, Redford was an outspoken environmentalist, using his fame to campaign for clean energy and against unchecked development in his beloved Utah. “Housing the Sundance Institute in the mountains was never about escaping Hollywood,” he once said. “It was about creating space for stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told.”
Despite the fame, Redford shunned Hollywood excess, preferring fast drives in his Porsche, solitude in nature, and the company of artists and activists. Friends described him as complicated, part golden boy, part rebel spirit.
He is survived by his wife, German-born artist Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford’s legacy spans more than 50 films, an Oscar-winning directing career, and the transformation of independent cinema into a cultural force. Yet for many fans, he will forever remain the charming outlaw who once leapt off a cliff with Paul Newman, grinning into immortality.
Source: Washington Post
