Hollywood actor and director Robert Redford has died at his home in Utah aged 89, his publicist confirmed.
Cindi Berger, his publicist, said he died at his home “in the mountains of Utah – the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
In a career that stretched across more than six decades, Redford won two Academy Awards, including an honorary prize in 2002 and three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award lifetime achievement honour in 1994.
Redford made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as Out of Africa, got political in The Candidate and All the President’s Men and skewered his golden-boy image in roles like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in The Electric Horseman and middle-aged millionaire who offers to buy sex in Indecent Proposal.
He used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.
He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director – the 1980 family drama Ordinary People – won Oscars for best picture and best director.
Yet he remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman – the 1969 western caper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (1973), both of which became classics.
Butch Cassidy made blue-eyed Redford an overnight star but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.
“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he once told New York magazine.
Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars. He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, before their divorce in 1985. In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, during the presidency of Donald Trump, he told Esquire magazine that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Trump should “quit for our benefit”.
Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on August 18, 1937, to what he described as a “lower working class family”, Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.
Deciding he wanted to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to study painting. He enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design but was persuaded to take to the stage and by 1959 he was a full time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.
His made his movie debut in 1962 in a low budget film called Warhunt, but first won attention in Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.
The 1970s brought The Way We Were and The Great Gatsby. From the 1980s Redford devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute – a year round workshop for aspiring filmmakers – and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.
In 2002, he won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.
Redford remained active in films as an actor and producer right up to the end of his life. In 2017, he reunited with Fonda for the Netflix drama Our Souls at Night, a romance between a widow and widower.
“I live for sex scenes with him,” Fonda told journalists when the film premiered in Venice. “He’s a great kisser so it was fun to kiss him in my 20s and to kiss him again in my almost 80s.”
Redford said at the time that it would be one of his last films as an actor and that he was planning to focus more on directing and his first love – art.
He is survived by his wife, Szaggars, and two children from a previous marriage to Lola Van Wagenen: Shauna Jean Redford and Amy Hart Redford. Redford and his first wife lost two sons: Scott Anthony Redford, born in 1959, died of sudden infant death syndrome, and David James Redford died of cancer in 2020.
