Robert Redford

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Robert Redford died in his sleep at his home in Sundance, Utah, on the 16th of September 2025. He was 89 years old. After a private funeral, he was buried on his own property there.

  The man who ended his days in a place that carried his name was one of the most recognizable faces in American film. Yet he spent much of his career uneasy about what that face meant. This documentary asks how a restless art student became a leading man, why he kept steering away from the easy road, and what he built beyond the screen that outlasted any single role.

  451877

• 2. Before Fame

  ›

  Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on the 18th of August 1936 in Santa Monica, California. His father, Charles Robert Redford Sr., was an accountant who worked in El Segundo. His mother, Martha Woodruff Redford, came from Austin, Texas. The family lived in Van Nuys, and they often traveled to Austin to visit his maternal grandfather. Redford later credited those Texas childhood visits with his love of nature.

  At Van Nuys High School, his classmates included a future professional baseball pitcher, Don Drysdale. Redford described himself as a "bad" student who found inspiration in art and sports. He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzalez at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to help the champion warm up for matches. At the age of 11 he had a mild case of polio.

  After graduating in 1954, he spent a year and a half at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He worked at a restaurant and bar called The Sink, where a painting of his likeness now figures prominently among the murals. He began drinking heavily, lost his half-scholarship, and was expelled. He then traveled through France, Spain and Italy. Back in the United States, he studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, graduating in the class of 1959.

  In 1959 he made his Broadway debut in a small role in Tall Story. Parts in The Highest Tree that year and Sunday in New York in 1961 followed. His biggest stage success came in 1963, when he played the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in the original cast of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park.

  Starting in 1960, he turned up as a guest star on a long list of television dramas. They included Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Maverick, The Untouchables and Route 66. In 1960 he played Danny Tilford, a disturbed young man trapped in the wreckage of his family garage, in an episode of Rescue 8 titled "Breakdown". He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for The Voice of Charlie Pont, broadcast on ABC in 1962. One of his last television appearances for decades aired on the 7th of October 1963, on the ABC medical drama Breaking Point.

  His first screen credit of any kind was an uncredited repeat of his Broadway role in the 1960 film of Tall Story, whose stars were Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda and Ray Walston. In 1962 came War Hunt, and soon after he joined Alec Guinness in the war comedy Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious. There he played a U.S. soldier falsely imprisoned by a German civilian even after the war had ended.

  Inside Daisy Clover, released in 1965, won him a Golden Globe for best new star. He played a bisexual movie star who marries the starlet played by Natalie Wood. He rejoined Wood, along with Charles Bronson, for Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned in 1966. That year also brought his first teaming with Jane Fonda on equal footing, in Arthur Penn's The Chase, the only film in which he starred opposite Marlon Brando. A year later, the cinema version of Barefoot in the Park would put his stage success in front of a far larger audience.

  78141517

• 3. Star Power

  ›

  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate were two roles Redford turned down. He had grown worried that audiences saw only a blond male stereotype, and he wanted something with more edge.

  He found what he was looking for in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, released in 1969. George Roy Hill directed from a script by William Goldman, and the film paired Redford for the first time with Paul Newman. It was a huge success. It fixed his screen image as an intelligent, reliable and sometimes sardonic good guy.

  Neither an Academy Award nor a Golden Globe nomination came for playing the Sundance Kid. He did win a BAFTA, which recognized that role together with his parts in Downhill Racer and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, both also from 1969. Those two films, along with Little Fauss and Big Halsy in 1970 and The Hot Rock in 1972, did poorly at the box office. Redford had long wanted to work on both sides of the camera, and he had been executive producer of Downhill Racer. The political satire The Candidate, released in 1972, was a moderate box-office and critical success.

  From 1973, a four-year run of hits began. The earnings of the western Jeremiah Johnson, counted from early 1973 until its second re-release in 1975, would have made it the second-highest-grossing film of 1973. The Way We Were, his romantic period drama with Barbra Streisand, ranked fifth for that year. The Sting, a crime caper reuniting him with Newman, became the top-grossing film of 1974. Adjusted for inflation, it sits among the twenty highest-grossing movies of all time, and it brought Redford the only Best Actor nomination of his career.

  The Great Gatsby, with Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston and Bruce Dern, finished eighth for 1974. Butch Cassidy was re-released on the strength of The Sting and ranked tenth. In 1974 Redford became the first performer since Bing Crosby in 1946 to have three films in a year's top ten. Movie exhibitors voted him Hollywood's top box-office star in each year from 1974 to 1976.

  The aviation drama The Great Waldo Pepper, set in the 1920s, and the spy thriller Three Days of the Condor, with Faye Dunaway, finished 16th and 17th in 1975. In 1976 he published a book, The Outlaw Trail: A Journey Through Time. Of its title, he said: "It was a name that fascinated me, a geographical anchor in Western folklore." He wanted to see the trail as the outlaws had, by horse and on foot, and to document it with text and photographs.

  All the President's Men, also from 1976, cast Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Redford was both executive producer and co-star, and its subject, the Watergate scandal, matched his offscreen political concerns. It earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Alan J. Pakula. Goldman won for the screenplay. It also took the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture and Best Director, and it ranked second at the box office that year.

  In 1977 he appeared in a segment of the war film A Bridge Too Far. Then he took a two-year break from movies. He returned in 1979 as a past-his-prime rodeo star in The Electric Horseman, reuniting with Fonda a dozen years after Barefoot in the Park. It finished ninth at the 1980 box office, and in that same year he would direct a film of his own.

  2824252627

• 4. Both Sides Camera

  ›

  Ordinary People, released in 1980, was Redford's first film as director. It follows the slow disintegration of an upper-middle-class family after the death of a son. He drew a powerful performance from Mary Tyler Moore, and strong work from Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Redford. Critic Roger Ebert declared it "an intelligent, perceptive and deeply moving film."

  Between his own directing jobs, Redford kept acting. Later in 1980 he played a prison warden attempting to reform the system in Brubaker. In 1984 he starred in the baseball drama The Natural. Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, released in 1985, paired him with Meryl Streep. It won a Golden Globe for Best Picture and seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Streep was nominated for Best Actress, but Redford received no nomination. It was his biggest success of the decade and the most successful of the seven movies he made with Pollack. Legal Eagles, with Debra Winger in 1986, was only a minor hit.

  The Milagro Beanfield War, released in 1988, brought him back to directing. It adapts John Nichols's novel about the people of Milagro, New Mexico, a town based on the real community of Truchas. They resist developers who try to force them out with tax increases. The film was well crafted but not commercially successful.

  A River Runs Through It followed in 1992, based on Norman Maclean's novella and starring Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt. Redford received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director. The film marked a return to mainstream success for him as a director, and it brought the young Pitt to greater prominence. In 1994 he directed Quiz Show, about the quiz show scandal of the late 1950s, from a screenplay by Paul Attanasio. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus worked on it, and the cast included Paul Scofield, John Turturro, Rob Morrow and Ralph Fiennes. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote that Redford "has become a more daring and accomplished filmmaker" and called the film his best since Ordinary People.

  As an actor in the 1990s he played a billionaire who tests a couple's morals in Indecent Proposal in 1993, a huge hit. He played Jack Weil, a professional gambler in 1959 Cuba during the Revolution, in Havana in 1990. In Sneakers in 1992 he co-starred with River Phoenix and Sidney Poitier. He shared a newsroom romance with Michelle Pfeiffer in Up Close & Personal in 1996. In 1998 he directed himself in The Horse Whisperer, alongside Kristin Scott Thomas and a young Scarlett Johansson. Cindy Meehl's 2011 documentary Buck later found him discussing his experience with the real horseman Buck Brannaman during that production.

  The Legend of Bagger Vance, released in 2000, put Matt Damon and Will Smith under his direction. In 2001 he acted in the prison drama The Last Castle, as a disgraced Army general sent to prison, and in Spy Game, reteaming with Pitt with Redford now acting rather than directing. He narrated the IMAX documentary Sacred Planet in 2004 and played the kidnapped businessman Wayne Hayes in The Clearing the same year. In 2005, An Unfinished Life brought him good notices as a cantankerous rancher who takes in his estranged daughter-in-law, played by Jennifer Lopez, and the granddaughter he never knew.

  In 2007, Lions for Lambs reunited him with Streep 22 years after Out of Africa, with Tom Cruise also starring. It opened to mixed reviews and disappointing box office. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote that it was "so square it's like something out of the gray twilight glow of the golden age of television." He directed The Conspirator, about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, in 2010. In 2012 he directed and starred in The Company You Keep, as a former Weather Underground activist who goes on the run after a journalist discovers his identity. A planned sequel to The Candidate, which he meant to direct and star in, never happened.

  Behind the scenes, he co-owned Wildwood Enterprises with the producer Bill Holderman. Its credits include Quiz Show, Ordinary People, A River Runs Through It, The Horse Whisperer, Slums of Beverly Hills and The Conspirator. It also produced The Motorcycle Diaries in 2004, a road film about the young Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado. The film took five years to make, and its director Walter Salles credited Redford as instrumental in getting it made and released. Redford also co-founded Sundance Productions with Laura Michalchyshyn. It produced Chicagoland for CNN, The March for PBS, and All The President's Men Revisited, an Emmy nominee. Its name pointed back to a patch of Utah mountainside he had bought years earlier.

  3031364785

• 5. Sundance

  ›

  On the east side of Mount Timpanogos, in the Wasatch Mountains northeast of Provo, Utah, sat a small ski area called Timp Haven. Redford bought it with the proceeds of his acting success, beginning with his salaries from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Downhill Racer. He renamed it Sundance, after the character he played in the first of those films.

  His first wife, Lola, was from Utah, and in 1963 they built a home in the area. Parts of Jeremiah Johnson were shot near the ski area. Redford counted that film among his favorites, and it heavily influenced him.

  From that land grew the Sundance Film Festival. It started under the name Utah/US festival and was eventually named for Redford's land. It became the country's largest festival for independent films. In 2008 it showed 125 feature-length films from 34 countries, drawing more than 50,000 attendees to Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah.

  The nonprofit Sundance Institute, based in Park City, offered workshop programs to independent filmmakers. Redford also founded Sundance Cinemas and the Sundance Catalog, all in and around Park City, 30 miles (48 km) north of the ski area. He also owned a Park City restaurant called Zoom, which closed in May 2017.

  In 1995 he signed a deal with Showtime to create a 24-hour cable channel devoted to independent films. The Sundance Channel premiered on the 29th of February 1996.

  7879808388

• 6. Final Roles

  ›

  All Is Lost, released in 2013, gave Redford a part unlike any he had played. Director J.C. Chandor placed him alone at sea as a man in trouble, with almost no dialogue and no other cast member. Redford earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. He also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor, his first win from that group after a nomination in 1969 for Downhill Racer. Ali Arikan of RogerEbert.com called it "the performance of the latter half of his career."

  In 2014 Redford joined the Marvel world as Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Pierce is the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. and secretly the leader of the Hydra cell operating the Triskelion. A Walk in the Woods followed in 2015, with Emma Thompson and Nick Nolte, and Redford was a co-producer. He had optioned Bill Bryson's book more than a decade earlier, planning to co-star with Paul Newman, and shelved the project after Newman's death.

  Truth, also from 2015, cast him as news anchor Dan Rather opposite Cate Blanchett. Justin Chang of Variety said Redford played the veteran newsman with "easy gravitas, inner strength and a gentle paternal twinkle." In 2016 he took the supporting role of Mr. Meacham in the Disney remake of Pete's Dragon. The next year, The Discovery and Our Souls at Night both reached Netflix. He also produced Our Souls at Night, which reunited him with Fonda for the fifth time and drew positive reviews.

  In August 2018, Redford announced that he would retire from acting after The Old Man & the Gun, in which he played the bank robber Forrest Tucker for director David Lowery. The film opened in September 2018 and earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Alissa Wikinson of Vox saw it as a fitting cap to a career launched by his work with Newman half a century earlier. The following month, Redford said he "regretted" announcing his retirement because "you never know".

  He had one more scene in the Marvel saga, a brief return as Pierce in Avengers: Endgame, filmed in 2017. In 2023 he gave an uncredited voice-only cameo as Bob Woodward in the HBO miniseries White House Plumbers. On the AMC series Dark Winds, where he was an executive producer, he appeared with fellow executive producer George R. R. Martin as a detainee playing chess. That episode aired in March 2025 and was his final acting performance.

  5153545658

• 7. Causes and Family

  ›

  In 1989, the National Audubon Society awarded Redford its highest honor, the Audubon Medal. He supported environmentalism, Native American rights, LGBT rights and the arts. He was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was also vice president of The Way of the Rain, a group that raises awareness of environmental issues through artistic performances, founded by his wife Sibylle Szaggars Redford.

  In 2013, TransCanada's CEO Russ Girling identified Redford as the leader of the protest movement against the company's Keystone Pipeline. In November 2012, Pitzer College, where he was a trustee, launched the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability. In April 2014, he and the college's president, Laura Skandera Trombley, announced that Pitzer would divest fossil fuel stocks from its endowment. At the time it was the U.S. higher-education institution with the largest endowment to make that commitment.

  Redford was executive producer and narrator of Incident at Oglala, a documentary about the American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier. In politics, he supported Brent Cornell Morris in his failed 1990 bid for the Republican nomination for Utah's 3rd congressional district. In 2004 he backed his friend Gary Herbert's successful campaign to become Utah's lieutenant governor. He endorsed Barack Obama for re-election in 2012. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed calling Donald Trump's administration a "monarchy in disguise", and in July 2020 he announced his support for Joe Biden.

  On the 9th of August 1958 in Las Vegas, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen. They had four children: Scott Anthony, Shauna Jean, David James and Amy Hart. Scott died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of two and a half months. Shauna is a painter married to the journalist Eric Schlosser. James, a writer and producer, died of cancer in 2020. Amy is an actress, director and producer. Redford had seven grandchildren.

  The couple never publicly announced a separation or divorce. In 1982 the entertainment columnist Shirley Eder reported that they had been very much apart for a number of years. Redford was negotiating their divorce settlement in 1984 while filming Out of Africa. As late as 1991, Parade magazine said it was unclear whether the divorce had been finalized.

  On the 11th of July 2009, Redford married his longtime girlfriend Sibylle Szaggars at the Louis C. Jacob Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. She had moved in with him in 1996 and shared his home in Sundance. In May 2011, Alfred A. Knopf published Robert Redford: The Biography. Its author, Michael Feeney Callan, wrote it with Redford's cooperation and drew on his personal papers, diaries and taped interviews. Redford also owned a house in Tiburon, California, which was sold in 2024, and a property in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  6689919399

• 8. Honors and Legacy

  ›

  In a 1974 interview with The New York Times, Redford said: "I never thought of myself as a glamorous guy, a handsome guy, any of that stuff." He rejected the label of sex symbol that the press had given him, particularly in the 1970s. The BBC News described his appeal as "all-American good looks", and the Associated Press wrote that his "wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him the most desired of leading men."

  After his death, an obituary in Variety called him a "godfather for independent film". Andrew Pulver of The Guardian described him as a "giant of American cinema" who crossed with ease between the Hollywood New Wave and the mainstream. France's Culture Minister, Rachida Dati, used the same phrase. The Hollywood Reporter called him "Hollywood's Golden Boy". The New York Times noted that he wanted his films to carry "cultural weight" and took risks with dark and challenging material. Ron Howard called him an "artistic gamechanger". In 2016, Barack Obama called him "one of the foremost conservationists of our generation."

  Honors arrived from many directions. The University of Colorado gave him an honorary degree in 1988. He received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1996. In 2002 he received the Academy Honorary Award at the 74th Academy Awards. The Kennedy Center Honors followed in December 2005, and he was named a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur on the 14th of October 2010. In 2008 he received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and in 2009 the University of Southern California School of Dramatic Arts announced the first Robert Redford Award for Engaged Artists. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014. Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the 22nd of November 2016. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 74th Venice Film Festival in 2017 and the Honorary César in Paris on the 22nd of February 2019.

  The tributes after his death came from every corner of his life. Jane Fonda wrote that he "stood for an America that we have to keep fighting for", and added that he had "really changed movies, lifted up independent movies." Meryl Streep wrote, "One of the lions has passed. Rest in peace, my lovely friend." Bob Woodward, whom Redford had played on screen, called him a close friend and a "principled force for good". Martin Scorsese, Morgan Freeman, Leonardo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson were among the many in the entertainment world who paid tribute, as were Obama, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. Barbra Streisand wrote that "Bob was charismatic, intelligent, intense, always interesting." At the 98th Academy Awards she eulogized him during the in memoriam segment, and she briefly sang "The Way We Were".

  6465637374