Robert Redford, the Oscar-winning actor, director and founder of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, died Tuesday at his home in Sundance, Utah. He was 89. His publicist said he was surrounded by family; no cause of death was disclosed.
Redford’s career spanned more than six decades, from early television work to stardom in the late 1960s and 1970s with films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the President’s Men and Out of Africa. He later moved behind the camera to make his feature directing debut with Ordinary People, which won him the Academy Award for best director. He received an honorary Oscar in 2002.
Born Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, Redford studied art and theater before finding success on Broadway and in Hollywood. His screen partnership with Paul Newman cemented his status as a leading man, while roles in political dramas and Westerns broadened his range and box office appeal. In the early 1980s he established the Sundance Institute to nurture independent storytellers; the program’s labs and the annual festival that grew alongside it became a launchpad for generations of filmmakers.
Redford remained an advocate for environmental causes and for artist development even as he continued to act, earning late-career acclaim for All Is Lost and a farewell performance in The Old Man & the Gun. Tributes from across the film community on Tuesday emphasized his dual legacy: an emblem of classic Hollywood who also built infrastructure for new voices and smaller films to reach audiences.
Family members and representatives asked for privacy. Survivors include his wife, artist Sibylle Szaggars Redford, and his extended family; two of his four children, Scott and James, predeceased him. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
