Robert Redford, Sundance King

MARC HOM, GETTY IMAGES - 

Left, actor, producer and director Robert Redford, who has died, aged 89; 

top, from left, Redford the heart-throb with Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967); 

with Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973); with Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby (1974); and with Meryl Streep on the set of Out of Africa (1985)

OBITUARY

LAST OF THE OLD-FASHIONED MOVIE STARS

Robert Redford Actor, producer, director. 

Born Santa Monica, California, August 18, 1936; 

died near Provo, Utah, September 16, aged 89.

18 set 2025 - The Australian

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the northern autumn of 1969, Robert Redford appeared in two films that changed his life and the careers of generations of people who make movies. The first, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, about a pair of outlaws on the lam, turned him into a bankable leading man and a paragon of the movie star.

The second, Downhill Racer, about a competitive skier, had a small budget and a dark message. It was, as Redford said years later, a portrait of “somebody who would be completely disgraced and dismissed were it not for the fact that he was a winner”. Released by a major studio that hoped it would be a big movie, it flopped.

“It was tragic,” Redford said on American talk show Inside the Actors Studio in 2005, “and that’s what led me to really want to do something about independent film.” Redford spent the next 50 years making and appearing in some of the industry’s most expensive and most commercially successful films.

As the force behind the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, he also helped create an ecosystem for the industry’s smallest. Some films that premiered at the festival became popular with mainstream audiences, such as Reservoir Dogs and Napoleon Dynamite, but far more succeeded in finding a modest audience that appreciated them thanks to the infrastructure for independent films in the US that Redford and Sundance helped create.

Redford died, aged 89, on Tuesday morning at his home near Provo, Utah, according to a statement from representative Cindi Berger.

After Sundance Kid, Redford’s starring roles in award-winning and blockbuster films included The Sting (1973), All the President’s Men (1976) and The Natural (1984). Behind the camera, he picked up the Academy Award for best director for Ordinary People (1980). He additionally won two Golden Globes and was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although he was as celebrated a film star as you could find to come out of the 20th century, Redford was more interested in making movies than the trappings that came along with it.

“Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to,” he told Esquire in 2013. “I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood – I was born next door.”

Charles Robert Redford Jr was born in Santa Monica, California, on August 18, 1936, to Martha (nee Hart) and Charles Redford. Redford bristled against the conformity of his father, an accountant and milkman whose experience in the Depression left him “afraid to take chances” and who wanted “the straight and narrow path” for his son, the younger Redford said on Inside the Actors Studio. His mother was more understanding of his freewheeling impulses. “No matter what I did,” he said, “she was always forgiving and supportive and felt that I could do anything.”

Redford attended Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, where he was a self-professed “f..k up”, receiving poor grades and showing more interest in sports than the classroom. After high school, Redford attended the University of Colorado Boulder on a baseball scholarship, though he dropped out. He moved to Europe for a time, where he lived and studied art in places such as Italy, Spain and France. He ended up in New York, briefly enrolling at Pratt Institute, then taking acting classes at the American Academy of

Dramatic Arts. While in acting school he picked up roles in theatre and television, and caught a break when he was cast in Neil Simon’s 1963 hit Broadway play Barefoot in the Park, directed by Mike Nichols. (Later he also would star in the 1967 film version alongside Jane Fonda.)

In 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made Redford a household name. Studio 20th Century Fox had wanted Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando for the role of the Sundance Kid, but Paul Newman successfully advocated for Redford to star alongside him. Though it wasn’t initially a critical smash (Roger Ebert called it “slow and disappointing”), the film proved a success with audiences, grossing more than $US100m ($150m). It earned seven Oscar nominations and won four, including for William Goldman’s screenplay.

Redford and Newman, who would become lifelong friends, reunited as a pair of cons in 1973’s The Sting, another critical and box-office success. The film fetched 10 Oscar nominations, including best actor for Redford. It won seven, including best picture.

Across much of the 1970s and 80s Redford starred in celebrated and award-winning movies, including The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Out of Africa (1985), all directed by Sydney Pollack, another longtime friend. The pair met on the set of War Hunt (1962), where they bonded over both being young married fathers when “most guys were beginning to be in the swinging stage”, Pollack said.

“He was to me a throwback to the actors that I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies: real, classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie stars who were very, very redolent of some kind of American essence, if you will,” Pollack told journalist Charlie Rose in 1993. “They were very much a part of the American landscape and they were heroic in a kind of understated way.” Jane Fonda, too, became a close friend of Redford about this time, beginning with their work together on Arthur Penn’s film The Chase (1966). When they appeared jointly in the 2017 Netflix movie, Our Souls at Night, The Hollywood Reporter noted “their chemistry and sex appeal are still intact as they circle 80”.

An indie film haven

In addition to winning an Oscar for directing Ordinary People, Redford received directing and best picture nominations for 1994’s Quiz Show. He also directed the films The Horse Whisperer (1998) and Lions for Lambs (2007), among others.

Early in his career, Redford became disillusioned with the urban sprawl and pollution of Los Angeles, and he began buying land in Utah. “I was in my early 20s, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid,” Redford told Esquire in 2014. “It lost its identity – suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad – and I wanted out. I went to Utah because I didn’t know anybody there.”

In 1981, on his Utah property, Redford formed the non-profit Sundance Institute, which began by assembling independent filmmakers, helping them develop their craft. The institute later took over a film festival in Park City, Utah, which eventually became the Sundance Film Festival.

Initially, Sundance was something of a gamble. “Come in the middle of winter to see a film festival in Park City, Utah,” Redford told WSJ Magazine in 2015. “I thought maybe just the weirdness would make people come.” When Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein showed up at Sundance in 1989 with director Steven Soderbergh’s film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Sundance became an epicentre for the independent film business.

“Harvey was the main guy,” Redford said in 2015. “He was the first guy to come in and treat it like something major. Other people said, ‘Wait a minute, what’s Harvey doing out there in Utah?’ and then they came too.”

The festival ultimately sparked the independent film boom of the 90s by showing films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994).

Later years

Redford married Lola Van Wagenen in 1958 and they had four children: Shauna Jean Redford, a painter; David James Redford, a filmmaker, who died of cancer in 2020; Amy Hart Redford, an actor; and Scott Anthony, who was born in 1959 and died of sudden infant death syndrome the same year. The marriage ended in divorce. In 2009, Redford married artist Sibylle Szaggars, who survives him.

Redford kept making movies in his 70s and 80s, to varying degrees of artistic and commercial success. As a director, he helped introduce audiences to Brad Pitt with A River Runs Through It (1992) and they reunited for 2001 thriller Spy Game, in which they both acted. Redford also appeared in the Marvel films Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). His roles in All is Lost (2013) and The Old Man & The Gun (2018) were critically acclaimed.

“You make the most of what you’ve been given – that’s how I see it,” Redford said in the 2015 WSJ Magazine interview. “And you keep pushing to make more of it. I don’t see any reason to stop. I think retirement can lead to death, and that’s not for me.”

In an interview with Time magazine after Pollack’s death in 2008, Redford recounted that when he visited his friend in the last months of his life, he told Pollack that when he thought back to their many years working together, he had had the most fun when they were working on “original pieces and not adaptations and not remakes or anything like that … because it was always going slightly uphill, and you’re always fighting against whatever obstacles there were.

“I said: I don’t know about you, but success is a funny game,” Redford said. “I don’t know that the most fun wasn’t when you were striving toward it, rather than achieving it.”