ROBERT REDFORD, 1936 – 2025
Steve Schapiro Fahey / Klein Gallery
OFF THE BEATEN PATH - Redford as Halsy Knox, a motorcyclist banned from the track, alongside Lauren Hutton in 1970’s “Little Fauss and Big Halsy.”
17 set 2025 - Los Angeles Times
By Nardine Saad
Sundance Kid’s reach surpassed the big screen
Robert Redford, a generational icon who commanded the big screen as the star of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Way We Were” and won awards and lasting praise for directing films such as “Ordinary People,” has died. He was 89.
Long a critical force in the elevation of independent filmmaking through the Sundance Institute, Redford died Tuesday morning at his home, his publicist confirmed. He was “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” the statement said.
Redford was a natural star who seemed to comfortably reflect the postwar zeitgeist in America with his choice of movie roles and side projects. As Newsweek put it, “What Redford has always captured best is the flawed American hero.”
Redford’s most memorable roles were arguably those that exploited the juxtaposition of the actor’s chiseled, class-president good looks and his ability to conjure up a scarred and hostile psyche. Whether he was playing the sulky, driven Olympic hopeful in “Downhill Racer,” the corruptible political idealist in “The Candidate” or the charismatic outlaw in “Butch Cassidy,” Redford said he hewed to that line “between what appears and what is.”
“There was always that tension, and the darker side is what interests me,” he said. “People always ask me, ‘Why did you play all those inarticulate guys?’ Well, that was the way you made the point — playing a character who can’t always articulate what he’s feeling and who has to develop action to find out.”
The late director Sydney Pollack, a frequent Redford collaborator, explained his allure this way: “Bob is a minimalist; he withholds, he never seduces his audience but makes them come to him.”
In films such as “Jeremiah Johnson,” “Downhill Racer,” “The Candidate,” and “Ordinary People,” which were among his favorites, Redford examined ways that individuals are affected and sometimes broken by their environments. Later in his career, that notion held true for his performance as Our Man, a tormented sailor adrift at sea in “All Is Lost.” Redford was the only actor in the film and had all of 51 spoken words, yet was nominated for a Golden Globe.
By turns a wry comic, matinee idol, bankable box-office draw, indie titan and devoted preservationist, Redford carefully cultivated the superstardom based on his boyish charms and capitalized on the post-studio-boss system as he became the de facto godfather of the independent film movement.
As a filmmaker — one with carefully wrought ideas and a genuine cinematic palette — Redford lobbied for various environmental causes onscreen and off, including Native American rights, offshore oil drilling and global warming.
“I gave up a long time ago the idea that a film can change people’s lives, let alone their politics,” Redford said in a 2007 Playboy interview. “I discovered we Americans enjoy the distraction of entertainment but aren’t really interested in the deeper message.”
The Santa Monica native eventually turned his back on L.A. and headed to the Rockies, where he spent his first decent paycheck on land.
“I lived through that moment when Los Angeles traded its rural soul to a smog-spewing industry machine, and it made me very sad,” he told biographer Michael Feeney Callan.
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in 1936 in Santa Monica to a working-class family and grew up in a heavily Latino neighborhood in South L.A.
“There was this real camaraderie, with the paper drives and everybody sacrificing,” Redford told The Times in 2007. “And suddenly the war [World War II] ended and this weird thing happened. Suddenly everything was about class. And then there was an anger you could just feel.”
His father, Charles Sr., took the family on weekly outings to the Santa Monica Public Library, where young “Charlie” devoured Greek mythology. Comic strips and radio were among the family’s affordable pleasures, but on occasion, his mother, Martha, took her son to the Aero Theatre.
“These weren’t happy times; nobody had much,” he told The Times in 2000. “The library’s where I got into this mythology. But how the people came together was radio or the funny papers. Sunday was a huge deal. You’d go racing for the funnies. Without knowing it, I was very connected to them.”
The family moved to Van Nuys, but Redford found it sterile and loathed his new neighborhood.
After graduating high school in 1954, he went to the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, but he promptly drank his way off the team. He brief ly studied painting in Paris before returning to the U.S. to pursue acting.
“I think part of the reason I became an actor is to deal with that exhibitionistic side of yourself,” he said. “I love performing. It’s agony, but it’s also terrific. Don’t ever let anybody tell you differently.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Redford’s road to stardom took him by way of theater and television, appearing on the usual slate of variety and anthology series in the early 1960s — “Playhouse 90,” “Perry Mason,” “Play of the Week” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” — while booking what he could in theaters.
By 1962, he had appeared with then-actor Sydney Pollack in a “Twilight Zone” episode and the low-budget Korean War thriller “War Hunt.” Pollack first directed his friend in 1966's “This Property Is Condemned.”
Still a relatively unknown stage actor, Redford’s break came in his 20s when director Mike Nichols cast him as the lead in Neil Simon’s Broadway comedy “Barefoot in the Park.” The 1963 comedy was a hit and Redford was touted as the new Cary Grant.
The play opened the door to more films, including the film adaptation of “Barefoot in the Park” opposite Jane Fonda, which made him a popular leading man.
But he arguably became the Robert Redford when he was paired with Paul Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” his character later serving as the namesake for his annual film festival. The picture about two affable bandits who have outlived their time became the highestgrossing western in motion picture history and highlighted the duo’s near-perfect comic timing.
Redford said it was the most fun he had ever had on a film and cemented a lifelong friendship with Newman.
“We developed a friendship off that film, and things fell into place,” he told The Times in 2015. “It didn’t require a lot of talk, but what came with it was fun. I owe much of my career to Paul.”
Redford followed “Butch Cassidy” with 1969’s “Downhill Racer” and then the 1972 comedy “The Hot Rock.” He re-teamed with Pollack in “Jeremiah Johnson,” in which he played a mountain man who becomes the object of a vendetta. In 1973, Redford made his producing debut on “The Candidate,” a dark, satirical look at campaigning that further established him as a serious actor.
Redford returned as a romantic lead in Pollack’s 1973 glossy “The Way We Were” with Barbra Streisand. He was the all-too content Hubbell to Streisand’s Katie — one of the more talked-about movie couples of the year. The blockbuster won Academy Awards for original song and original music score, and a Grammy for top song from a film.
He partnered with Newman again in 1973’s “The Sting” as they played two con men trying to get even with a mob boss. Its seven Oscar wins, including best picture, capped off a great year for the actor, who received his one and only lead actor Oscar nomination for his breezy performance.
His hot streak continued with Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 drama “All the President’s Men,” in which he and Dustin Hoffman embodied Washington Post newsmen Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively. The film won four Oscars, including one for William Goldman’s adaptation of the Watergate reporters’ bestseller and another for Jason Robards’ role as then-Post editor Ben Bradlee. The drama was the third-highest-grossing of the year, was listed on AFI’s 100 greatest films of all time and was hailed as an instant classic by Times film critic Charles Champlin.
When it was revealed that the Watergate burglars had connections to the Nixon White House in 1972, Redford convinced Woodward to secretly meet with him in Washington, D.C., and the reporter “confessed that he didn’t think I was for real. That I was a setup,” Redford told The Times in 2006. “They were so paranoid. They knew they were being watched.”
Redford reached out to the reporters before their book was even written, as the story was still evolving, and bought the film rights for $450,000 through Warner Bros. in 1974.
In 1978, Redford’s production partner Sterling Van Wagenen launched the U.S. Film Festival in Utah with John Earle and Cirina Hampton. Redford’s wife Lola Van Wagenen, Sterling’s older cousin whom Redford wed in 1958, loved Utah and the star bought land there in the 1970s.
In 1981, the Sundance Institute was established, a film and theater development lab on a corner of his Utah property that spawned such films as “El Norte,” “Heartland” and the Oscar-winning “The Trip to Bountiful.” Redford’s presence at the festival was erratic, and at times shadowy, as not to eclipse the festival’s filmmakers.
Liz O. Baylen Los Angeles Times
REACHING FOR MORE - Redford spent much of his time
advocating for the environment and Native American rights.
“One of the things that made me nervous in the last 10 years is how the film industry has become more centralized,” Redford said. “One of the things that I think is most valuable is its diversity, which is exactly why I developed Sundance — a mechanism for developing new ideas and new talent.”
In 1984, the institute took over the U.S. Film Fest and later installed the Sundance name. Redford served as the honorary chairman, supporting independent films that help drive the organization and the festival. His annual directors’ brunch became a rite of passage for young filmmakers and a prime networking opportunity for new directors.
In the 1980s, Redford seemed to deliberately slow down in order to do more thoughtful work, such as his Oscar-winning directorial debut in 1980’s “Ordinary People,” based on Judith Guest’s novel about a repressed well-to-do family and the emptiness lurking beneath the facade of white, uppermiddle-class propriety. Redford clinched an Oscar, a Golden Globe, the Directors Guild’s top prize and numerous other prizes for the film.
He followed that with “The Milagro Beanfield War” and then “The Natural,” a mythical baseball story based on the Bernard Malamud novel of the same name. In 1985, he played another romantic lead in Pollack’s “Out of Africa” opposite Meryl Streep. The commercial hit earned another seven Oscars, but critics were not kind about Redford’s performance. He also starred in the widely panned 1986 romantic comedy “Legal Eagles” with Debra Winger and Darryl Hannah.
Despite his celebrity, Redford led a remarkably private life. He spent most of his time in Utah or the Napa Valley, and raised his four children with Van Wagenen in New York before they divorced in 1985. He married German abstract artist Sibylle Szaggars in Germany in 2009.
When “Havana” was released in 1990, Redford agreed to give a rare glimpse into his private life for an NBC documentary, a concession he made to help promote the film.
“I have kind of a purist view that is no longer practical, that I would rather have my work speak for me. ... But then I’ve always separated my public self from the private so I could have one. I don’t feel I’ve owed my life to the public — a performance, yes, but my life, no.”
“Havana” was his seventh and final big-screen collaboration with Pollack — a big-ticket “Casablana”-style romance that opened during a crowded holiday season, pitting it against “Hamlet” and “The Godfather Part III.”
Though he didn’t want to cast Redford in the role, Pollack praised the actor’s aristocratic qualities and the actor’s instincts and intuition. However, Redford was panned for lacking chemistry with his younger co-star, Lena Olin.
“Bob is an easy target. You know the attitude, ‘Why does he always have to be a hero? Why doesn’t he gain 30 pounds for a role or wear a funny nose?’ ” Pollack recalled in a 1990 interview with The Times. “Well, I don’t think we want Redford to be that way. For three decades he’s been a kind of metaphor for this country and his film roles have reflected that.”
Redford acknowledged that the criticism stung.
“Yeah, it does bother me,” Redford said. “There’s not a lot I can do about it. You lose something and you gain something somewhere else. You move from doing the work and having that carry the day to having your own persona confused in the performance by other people and, yeah, by maybe yourself too.”
The 1990s were an up-and-down period for Redford. “Quiz Show,” a film about the real-life TV game show scandals, was nominated for four Oscars and “A River Runs Through It,” an endearing comingof-age story set in the outback of Montana, was a hit with critics but less so with audiences. It won an Oscar for cinematography.
In 1993, he earned his first Razzie Award playing a rich man who offers a couple a million dollars to spend a night with the wife in “Indecent Proposal.” He fared no better in “Up Close & Personal” in 1996. He directed “The Horse Whisperer” and the golf biopic “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” neither a critical success.
He went on to work on the 2004 Che Guevara biopic, “The Motorcycle Diaries,” directed the Lincoln period piece “The Conspirator” in 2010 and “Lions for Lambs,” a 2007 Afghanistan war thriller that again paired him with Streep and Tom Cruise.
In 2012, he starred and directed “The Company You Keep,” playing a former Weather Underground militant in hiding for 30 years. Though he had been involved with smaller-scale, socially conscious dramas, he also jumped on the superhero bandwagon by enlisting in Marvel’s juggernaut franchise entry “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
“I’m doing this film because it’s different. It’s a new thing for me,” he told The Times. “I think these films are really powerful. I think they’re great. This is the kind of film I would have loved to see as a kid.”
The adulation washed over him in 2013 as the star of J.C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost,” a film with no dialogue that featured only Redford onscreen. His character, simply referred to as Our Man, was a lone sailor adrift on a broken boat. At 77, he did more of his own stunts than originally intended and said he lost 60% of hearing in one ear after high pressure water was sprayed onto him during a storm simulation. With no dialogue or other performers as a crutch, Redford was forced to act on an elemental level in a manner he had never done before.
Though physically demanding and unsure of the film’s general reception, Redford told The Times that he “just liked doing it.”
“It was my ego,” Redford said. “My ego jumped in and said, ‘Hey, you can do this. You can do this.’ ”
In 2014, the International Documentary Assn. gave him the Career Achievement Award for having had “a major impact on the documentary genre though a long and distinguished body of work.” He had already received an honorary Oscar in 2002 for his body of work. In 2016, President Obama awarded Redford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Much of his time was spent on activism, however. In 2012, Pitzer College in Claremont launched the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, emulating the actor’s penchant for combining art, media and environmental science to educate students about policymaking. Redford was a trustee and special advisor to the university on environmental matters
After an aging Newman passed on joining Redford for “A Walk in the Woods” in 2004, he instead teamed up with Nick Nolte for the film, which was released in 2015. Nolte recalled the advice given to him by their mutual lawyer and Redford’s frequent partner, Gary Hendler:
“You have to have a career like Bob. He does a couple of studio movies and then gets to do one for himself.”
In 2018, Redford announced his retirement from acting ahead of the release of his light-hearted caper, “The Old Man & the Gun.”
Redford is survived by his second wife, Sibylle, children Shauna and Amy, and seven grandchildren. His son James, a filmmaker, died in 2020 at 58 of complications of cancer and his son Scott died in 1959 at 2 months old of sudden infant death syndrome.
***
Champion of indie filmmakers
His institute and festival nurture new generations of creators
17 set 2025 - Los Angeles Times
By Mark Olsen
It all started with a purchase of land in the 1960s. Then, from that small slice of Utah and the founding of the Sundance Institute in 1981 and, later, its expansion into the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford developed a vision that would reshape on-screen storytelling as we know it. Sundance opened doors for multiple generations of filmmakers who might not otherwise have gained entry to the movie business.20th Century FoxROBERT Redford, left, Paul Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89, was already a hugely successful actor, producer and director, having just won an Oscar for his directorial debut “Ordinary People,” when he founded the Sundance Institute as a support system for independent filmmakers. His Utah property, named after his role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” would become a haven for creativity in an idyllic setting. Evincing a rugged, hands-on attitude marked by curiosity and enthusiasm about the work, Redford embodied a philosophy for Sundance that was clear from its earliest days.
“When I started the Institute, the major studios dominated the game, which I was a part of,” Redford said to The Times via email in 2021. “I wanted to focus on the word ‘independence’ and those sidelined by the majors — supporting those sidelined by the dominant voices. To give them a voice. The intent was not to cancel or go against the studios. It wasn’t about going against the mainstream. It was about providing another avenue and more opportunity.”
The first of the Sundance Lab programs, which continue today, also launched in 1981, bringing emerging filmmakers together in the mountains to develop projects with the support of more established advisors.
The Institute would take over a small film festival in Utah, the U.S. Film Festival, for its 1985 edition and eventually rename it the Sundance Film Festival, a showcase that would go on to introduce directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nia DaCosta, Taika Waititi, Gregg Araki, Damien Chazelle and countless others while refashioning independent filmmaking into a viable career path.
Before directing “Black Panther” and “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler went through the Sundance Lab at the beginning of his career and saw his debut feature “Fruitvale Station” premiere in 2013 at Sundance, where it won both the grand jury and audience awards.
“Mr. Redford was a shining example of how to leverage success into community building, discovery, and empowerment,” Coogler said in a statement to The Times on Tuesday. “I’ll be forever grateful for what he did when he empowered and supported Michelle Satter in developing the Sundance Labs. In these trying times it hurts to lose an elder like Mr. Redford — someone who through their words, their actions and their commitment left their industry in a better place than they found it.”
Chloé Zhao’s debut feature, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” premiered at the festival in 2015 after she took the project through the labs. With her later effort “Nomadland,” Zhao would go on to become the second woman — and still the only woman of color — to win the Academy Award for directing.
“Sundance changed my life,” Zhao said in a statement on Tuesday. “I didn’t know anyone in the industry or how to get my first film made. Being accepted into the Sundance Labs was like entering a lush and nurturing garden holding my tiny fragile seedling and watching it take root and grow. It was there I found my voice, became a part of a community I still treasure deeply today.”
Satter, Sundance Institute’s founding senior director of artist programs, was involved since the organization’s earliest days. Even from relatively humble origins, Satter could already feel there was something powerful and unique happening under Redford’s guidance.
“He made us all feel like we were part of the conversation, part of building Sundance, right from the beginning,” Satter said of Redford in a 2021 interview. “He was really interested in others’ point of view, all perspectives. At the same time, he had a real clarity of vision and what he wanted this to be.”
For many years Redford was indeed the face of the film festival, making frequent appearances and regularly speaking at the opening news conference. Starting in 2019 he reduced his public role at the festival, in tandem with the moment he stepped back from acting.
The festival has gone through many different eras over the years, with festival directors handing off leadership from Geoffrey Gilmore to John Cooper to Tabitha Jackson and current fest director Eugene Hernandez.
The festival has also weathered changes in the industry, as streaming platforms have upended distribution models. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 drama “sex, lies and videotape” is often cited as a key title in the industry’s discovery of the Utah event as a must-attend spot on their calendars, a place where buyers could acquire movies for distribution and scout new talent.
“Before Sundance, there wasn’t really a marketplace for new voices and independent film in the way that we know it today,” said Kent Sanderson, chief executive of Bleecker Street, which has premiered multiple films at the festival over the years. “The way Sundance supports filmmakers by giving their early works a real platform is key to the health of our business.”
Over time, Sundance became a place not only to acquire films but also to launch them, with distributors bringing films to put in front of the high number of media and industry attendees. Investors come to scope out films and filmmakers look to raise money.
“It all started with Redford having this vision of wanting to create an environment where alternative approaches to filmmaking could be supported and thrive,” said Joe Pichirallo, an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and one of the original executives at Searchlight Pictures. “And he succeeded and it’s continuing. Even though the business is going through various changes, Sundance’s significance as a mecca for independent film is still pretty high.”
At the 2006 festival, “Little Miss Sunshine,” directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, sold to Searchlight for what was then a record-setting $10.5 million. In 2021, Apple TV+ purchased Siân Heder’s “CODA” for a record-breaking $25 million. The film would go on to be the first to have premiered at Sundance to win the Oscar for best picture.
Yet the festival, the labs and the institute have remained a constant through it all, continuing to incubate fresh talent to launch to the industry.
“Redford put together basically a factory of how to do independent films,” said Tom Bernard, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics. Over the years the company has distributed many titles that premiered at Sundance, including “Call Me by Your Name” and “Whiplash.”
“He adapted as the landscape changed,” Bernard added of the longevity of Sundance’s influence. “And as you watched the evolution to where it is today, it’s an amazing journey and an amazing feat that he did for the world of independent film. It wouldn’t be the same without him.”
Through it all, Redford balanced his roles between his career making and starring in movies and leading Sundance. Filmmaker Allison Anders, whose 1992 film “Gas Food Lodging” was among the earliest breakout titles from the Sundance Film Festival, remembered Redford on Instagram.
“You could easily have just been the best looking guy to walk into any room and stopped there and lived off of that your whole life,” Anders wrote. “You wanted to help writers and filmmakers like me who were shut out to create characters not seen before, and you did. You could have just been handsome. But you nurtured us.”
The upcoming 2026 Sundance Film Festival in January will be the last one in its longtime home of Park City, Utah.
The festival had previously announced that a tribute to Redford and his vision of the festival would be a part of that final bow, which will now carry an added emotional resonance.
Starting in 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will unspool in in Boulder, Colo.
Regardless of where the event takes place, the legacy of what Robert Redford first conceived will remain.
As Redford himself said in 2021 about the founding of the Institute, “I believed in the concept and because it was just that, a concept, I expected and hoped that it would evolve over time. And happily, it has.”
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