Robert Redford, screen idol turned director and activist, dies at 89
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Sep 17, 2025
- 6 min read
By BROOKS BARNES
Robert Redford, the big-screen charmer turned Oscar-winning director whose hit movies often helped America make sense of itself and who, off screen, evangelized for environmental causes and fostered the Sundance-centered independent film movement, died early Tuesday morning at his home in Utah. He was 89.
His death, in the mountains outside Provo, was announced in a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK. She said he had died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.
With a distaste for Hollywood’s dumb-it-down approach to moviemaking, Redford typically demanded that his films carry cultural weight, in many cases making serious topics like grief and political corruption resonate with audiences, in no small part because of his immense star power.
As an actor, his biggest films included “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), with its loving look at rogues in a dying West, and “All the President’s Men” (1976), about the journalistic pursuit of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate era. In “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) he was an introverted CIA codebreaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game. “The Sting” (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.
Redford was one of Hollywood’s preferred leads for decades, whether in comedies, dramas or thrillers; studios often sold him as a sex symbol. His body of work as a romantic leading man owed a great deal to the commanding actresses who were paired with him — Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were” (1973), Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa” (1985).
“Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous,” critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “as when we saw him through Barbra Streisand’s infatuated eyes.”
He branched into directing in his 40s and won an Academy Award for his first effort, “Ordinary People” (1980), about an upper-middle-class family’s disintegration after a son’s death. “Ordinary People” won three other Oscars, including for best picture.
His next film as a director, “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988), a comedic drama about a New Mexican farmer denied water rights by uncaring developers, was a flop. But Redford stubbornly refused to pursue less esoteric material. Instead, he directed and produced “A River Runs Through It” (1992), a spare period drama about Montana fly fishermen pondering existential questions, and “Quiz Show” (1994), about a notorious 1950s television scandal. “Quiz Show” was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and best director.
Perhaps Redford’s greatest cultural impact was as a make-it-up-as-he-went independent film impresario. In 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices. He took over a struggling film festival in Utah in 1984 and renamed it after the institute a few years later.
The Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, became a global showcase and freewheeling marketplace for American films made outside the Hollywood system. With heat generated by the discovery of talents like Steven Soderbergh, who unveiled his “Sex, Lies and Videotape” at the festival in 1989, Sundance became synonymous with the creative cutting edge.
Preferring life on his secluded Utah ranch, Redford created the image of a reluctant star. His Hollywood career, he insisted with characteristic orneriness, was incidental to his real concerns, one of which was the environment. In many ways, he created the actor-as-environmentalist archetype that stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo would adopt.
Redford did not like to be called an activist, a label he found too severe. But an activist he was.
In 1970, he successfully campaigned against a six-lane highway that was proposed in a Utah canyon (where one year he received eight tickets for speeding, rounding the curves in a Porsche Carrera). In 1975, he was hanged in effigy over his resistance, also successful, to a proposed coal-fired power plant in southern Utah; the area later became a national monument. A sign on the hanging dummy said: “I’m a Star. I Made My Money.”
For three decades, Redford was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. From time to time, people with similar priorities encouraged him to run for office. He brushed such chatter aside, having become disillusioned with politics in the late 1970s, when he was elected commissioner of the Provo Canyon sewer district. He had sought the office.
“I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.”
A California youth
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. His parents, Charles Redford and Martha Hart, married three months later. (Early in his career, 20th Century Fox publicists officially placed Redford’s birth in 1937, a falsehood that was often repeated over the years.)
After working as a milkman, Redford’s father became an accountant and was eventually employed by Standard Oil of California. His mother died in 1955, when Redford was 18; the cause was a blood disorder associated with the birth of twin girls, who had lived only a short while, leaving Redford an only child.
Later in life, Redford, in dozens of interviews, told and retold the story of his California youth. It was an oral history in which the details sometimes shifted. He liked to cast himself in memory as a juvenile delinquent, sometimes mentioning gang fights, other times hubcap stealing and nights spent in jail. “There was great fear I was going to end up a bum,” he told TV Guide in 2002.
Little was ever mentioned of early show business connections that suggested the possibility of a screen future, although he spoke about getting laughed off the Warner Bros. lot at age 15 when asking for stunt work.
In fact, at schools in west Los Angeles, he kept company with children of screenwriter Robert Rossen (“The Hustler”), actor Zachary Scott (“Mildred Pierce”) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Dore Schary. In 1959, Schary produced a Broadway play, “The Highest Tree,” in which Redford had one of his first stage roles.
He had made his Broadway debut earlier that year in “Tall Story,” in which he had a one-line part. His most successful Broadway appearance was in the Neil Simon hit comedy about newlyweds, “Barefoot in the Park,” in 1963, directed by Mike Nichols and co-starring Elizabeth Ashley.
After high school, Redford attended the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, but he soon dropped out, having chafed at too much “bureaucracy,” as he put it. For more than a year he bounced around Europe, where he studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, aspired to paint, and — working through what he later described as profound depression — sold sidewalk sketches for pocket cash.
Back in Los Angeles, he did oil-field work and met several Mormon students who were sent to proselytize after their first year at Brigham Young University in Utah. He dated one of them, Lola Van Wagenen, and married her in 1958.
The couple would become rooted in Utah. “It’s not trying to pretend to be something it’s not,” he told Rocky Mountain magazine in 1978, comparing Utah with Los Angeles, which he called phony and superficial. “It doesn’t invite you in and then kick you in the shins.”
Box-office gold
Redford enjoyed being a sex symbol, except when he didn’t. “This glamour image can be a real handicap,” he complained in a 1974 profile in The New York Times.
Nonetheless, it was his broad grin, tousled reddish-blond hair and all-American look (“WASP jock” in his own words) that first won the audience to his side. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was a well-reviewed picture, but it succeeded at the box office in large part because Redford was paired with another matinee idol, Paul Newman. They repeated the trick in 1973 for the same director, George Roy Hill, with “The Sting.”
Reviewing “The Sting” for the Times, Vincent Canby described the film as “Mr. Newman and Mr. Redford, dressed in best, fit-to-kill, snap-brim hat, thirties splendor, looking like a couple of guys in old Arrow shirt ads.”
His other acting successes included “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), about a legend-in-his-own-time mountain man, and “The Natural” (1984), the quintessentially American story of a man who gets a second chance at his dream baseball career.
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