Robert Redford, the Hollywood golden boy who grew to become an Oscar-winning director, liberal activist and godfather for impartial cinema underneath the title of one in all his best-loved characters, died Tuesday at 89.
Redford died “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” publicist Cindi Berger stated in a press release. No reason for demise was supplied.
After rising to stardom within the Sixties, Redford was one of many largest stars of the ’70s with such movies as “The Candidate,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Way We Were,” capping that decade with the perfect director Oscar for 1980’s “Ordinary People,” which additionally received greatest image in 1980. His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him essentially the most desired of main males, however he labored onerous to transcend his appears to be like — whether or not by means of his political advocacy, his willingness to tackle unglamorous roles or his dedication to offering a platform for low-budget films.
His roles ranged from Washington Put up journalist Bob Woodward to a mountain man in “Jeremiah Johnson” to a double agent within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. However his most well-known display screen companion was his previous pal and fellow activist and sensible joker Paul Newman, their movies a variation of their heat, teasing relationship off display screen. Redford performed the wily outlaw reverse Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and competition obtained its title. He additionally teamed with Newman on 1973’s greatest image Oscar winner, “The Sting,” which earned Redford a best-actor nomination as a younger con artist in Nineteen Thirties Chicago.
Movie roles after the ’70s grew to become extra sporadic as Redford targeting directing and producing, and his new function as patriarch of the independent-film motion within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s by means of his Sundance Institute. However he starred in 1985’s greatest image champion “Out of Africa” and in 2013 obtained a number of the greatest critiques of his profession as a shipwrecked sailor in “All is Lost,” wherein he was the movie’s solely performer. In 2018, he was praised once more in what he referred to as his farewell film, “The Old Man and the Gun.”
“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21,” he advised The Related Press shortly earlier than the movie got here out. “I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family.”
Sundance is born
Redford had watched Hollywood develop extra cautious and controlling through the Nineteen Seventies and needed to recapture the inventive spirit of the early a part of the last decade. Sundance was created to nurture new expertise away from the pressures of Hollywood, the institute offering a coaching floor and the competition, based mostly in Park Metropolis, Utah, the place Redford had bought land with the preliminary hope of opening a ski resort. As a substitute, Park Metropolis grew to become a spot of discovery for such beforehand unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.
“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford advised the AP in 2018. “I’ve at all times believed in that phrase. That’s what led to me finally desirous to create a class that supported impartial artists who weren’t given an opportunity to be heard.
“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
Sundance was even criticized as consumers swarmed in in search of potential hits and celebrities overran the city every winter.
“We have never, ever changed our policies for how we program our festival. It’s always been built on diversity,” Redford advised the AP in 2004. “The fact is that the diversity has become commercial. Because independent films have achieved their own success, Hollywood, being just a business, is going to grab them. So when Hollywood grabs your films, they go, ‘Oh, it’s gone Hollywood.’”
By 2025, the competition had change into so outstanding that organizers determined they’d outgrown Park Metropolis and authorised relocating to Boulder, Colorado, beginning in 2027. Redford, who had attended the College of Colorado Boulder, issued a press release saying that “change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival.”
Redford’s affinity for the outside was effectively captured in “A River Runs Through It” and different movies and thru his a long time of advocacy for the surroundings, impressed partially by witnessing the transformation of Los Angeles right into a metropolis of smog and freeways. His actions ranged from lobbying for such laws because the Clear Air Act and Clear Water Act to pushing for land conservation in Utah to serving on the board of the Pure Assets Protection Council.
Redford was married twice, most just lately to Sibylle Szaggars. He had 4 kids, two of whom have died — Scott Anthony, who died in infancy, in 1959; and James Redford, an activist and filmmaker who died in 2020.
Redford’s youth
Robert Redford was born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, a California boy whose blond beauty eased his means over an apprenticeship in tv and reside theater that finally led to the massive display screen.
Redford attended faculty on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s “The Natural,” the variation of Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel. He had an early curiosity in drawing and portray, then went on to check on the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on Broadway within the late Fifties and shifting into tv on such reveals as “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Untouchables.”
After scoring a Broadway lead in “Sunday in New York,” Redford was solid by director Mike Nichols in a manufacturing of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” later starring with Fonda within the movie model. Redford did miss out on one in all Nichols’ best successes, “The Graduate,” launched in 1967. Nichols had thought-about casting Redford within the half finally performed by Dustin Hoffman, however Redford appeared unable to narrate to the socially awkward younger man who finally ends up having an affair with one in all his mother and father’ pals.
“I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols stated throughout a 2003 screening of the movie in New York. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
Indie champion, mainstream star
At the same time as Redford championed low-budget impartial filmmaking, he continued to star in mainstream Hollywood productions himself, scoring the occasional hit similar to 2001’s “Spy Game,” which co-starred Brad Pitt, an inheritor obvious to Redford’s good-looking legacy whom he had directed in “A River Runs Through It.”
Paradoxically, “The Blair Witch Project,” “Garden State,” “Napoleon Dynamite” and different scrappy movies that got here out of Sundance typically made greater waves — and more cash — than some Redford-starring box-office duds like “Havana,” “The Last Castle” and “An Unfinished Life.”
Redford additionally appeared in a number of political narratives. He satirized campaigning as an idealist working for U.S. senator in 1972’s “The Candidate” and uttered one of many extra memorable closing traces, “What do we do now?” after his character manages to win. He starred as Woodward to Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein in 1976’s “All the President’s Men,” the story of the Washington Put up reporters whose Watergate investigation helped convey down President Richard Nixon.
With 2007’s “Lions for Lambs,” Redford returned to directing in a saga of a congressman (Tom Cruise), a journalist (Meryl Streep) and an instructional (Redford) whose lives intersect over the battle on terrorism in Afghanistan.
His largest filmmaking triumph got here along with his directing debut on “Ordinary People,” which beat Martin Scorsese’s traditional “Raging Bull” on the Oscars. The movie starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore because the repressed mother and father of a troubled younger man, performed by Timothy Hutton, in his huge display screen debut. Redford was praised for casting Moore in an unexpectedly severe function and for his even-handed therapy of the characters, a high quality that Roger Ebert believed set “the film apart from the sophisticated suburban soap opera it could easily have become.”
Redford’s different directing efforts included “The Horse Whisperer,” “The Milagro Beanfield War” and 1994’s “Quiz Show,” the final of which additionally earned greatest image and director Oscar nominations. In 2002, Redford obtained an honorary Oscar, with academy organizers citing him as “actor, director, producer, creator of Sundance, inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”
“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” Redford stated in 2018. “From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside.”
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This story has been corrected to replace Redford’s start yr to 1936, not 1937.
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Related Press journalists Hillel Italie, Jake Coyle and Mallika Sen contributed to this report. Bob Thomas, a longtime Related Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal author of this obituary.
