Hollywood actor and Oscar-winning director Robert Redford, known for films including Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men and The Sting, has died at the age of 89.
Redford, who was also the founder of the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the US, died on Tuesday morning.
In a statement, his representative said he was “surrounded by those he loved”, at home in “the place he loved” in the mountains of Utah. “He will be missed greatly,” she added.
Born Charles Robert Redford Jr in Santa Monica, California, in 1937, he attended college on a baseball scholarship but later went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
He debuted on Broadway in the late 1950s before moving into television, in shows such as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Untouchables.
Rising to stardom in the 1960s, Redford became a go-to leading man in Hollywood and a huge star of the following decade, leading films including The Candidate, All the President’s Men and The Way We Were.
He worked hard to transcend being typecast for his good looks, through his political advocacy and a willingness to take on unglamorous roles.
In the 1990s and 2000s, his film credits included Indecent Proposal, The Last Castle and Spy Game, and he also worked actively as a filmmaker – helming movies including A River Runs Through It and The Legend Of Bagger Vance. In 1998, he both starred in and directed The Horse Whisperer.
But he was best known for his role as wily outlaw the Sundance Kid, opposite Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy in the 1969 film. The pair became a famous screen partnership, starring opposite each other again in The Sting a few years later, and good friends.
As well as his starring roles, Redford was also an activist and an accomplished filmmaker – winning the Oscar for best director for Ordinary People in 1981. It was the second of his two Academy Awards – the first won for his acting performance in The Sting – as well as an honorary prize in 2002.
In a career spanning six decades, he also received three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement honor in 1994.
In his later years, Redford took on a challenging role in All Is Lost, a 2013 survival story that featured virtually no other characters and barely any dialogue. His performance earned a standing ovation after the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2018, he received critical acclaim again in what he called his farewell movie, The Old Man And The Gun.
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His legacy includes the Sundance Film Festival, which grew into a cornerstone of the film industry and provided a launching pad for filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Darren Aronofsky.
And in 2016, former President Barack Obama awarded him the presidential medal of freedom – onsidered the US government’s highest civilian honour – saying at the time that Americans “admire Bob not just for his remarkable acting, but for having figured out what to do next”.
Robert Redford leaves behind his wife Sibylle Szaggars and two children. He is survived by his two daughters – Shauna, a painter, and Amy, an actress and director.
He was previously married to Lola Van Wagenen. One of their children, Scott, died at the age of two months from sudden infant death syndrome. Another, James, died of cancer in 2020.
‘A genius has passed’
Tributes have been shared across social media following the announcement of Redford’s death.
Filmmaker Ron Howard, known for Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, described Redford as “a tremendously influential cultural figure for the creative choices” he made as an actor, producer and director, and said Sundance had been a “gamechanger”.
Marlee Matlin, star of the Oscar-winning CODA, said the film “came to the attention of everyone” because of the Sundance Festival.
“Sundance happened because of Robert Redford. A genius has passed,” she said.
“He was part of a new and exciting Hollywood in the 70s and 80s,” wrote author Stephen King. “Hard to believe he was 89.”
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