Robert Redford, an icon of the leisure trade who based the Sundance Institute and helped form the impartial movie trade, died at age 89, The New York Occasions first reported.
“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah ― the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” Cindi Berger, chief govt of the general public relations agency Rogers & Cowan PMK, instructed HuffPost. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
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Redford served as a number one man early in his profession earlier than making a reputation for himself as a director, successful an Oscar for the movie “Ordinary People” in 1981. He earned a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences in 2002.
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Amongst his iconic performing roles had been John “Kelly” Hooker in “The Sting,” Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” Roy Hobbs in “The Natural,” Hubbell Gardiner in “The Way We Were” and the Sundance Child in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
In 1969, he opened the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, the identical 12 months “Butch Cassidy” was launched. He was initially hesitant in regards to the resort’s identify — a nod to his character in that movie — as a result of he fearful the movie could be “a disaster” and felt utilizing the time period could be too “self-serving.” The group he was working with satisfied him to make use of “Sundance.”
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Redford helped discovered the Utah/US Movie Pageant in 1978, and created the Sundance Institute, a company supposed to foster impartial storytelling expertise, in 1981. Ultimately the movie competition modified its identify, and grew into the biggest impartial movie competition in the US.
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Redford instructed Democracy Now in 2015 the competition was the results of modifications to the movie trade, which veered towards making blockbusters for youthful audiences within the Nineteen Eighties.
“You can have the big blockbusters. You can have — with technology coming along, creating more special effects possibilities, you knew that they were going to use that, and that’s great,” he stated. “But I felt it was going to be at the expense of giving up those other kinds of films, so that’s what led to Sundance.”
Redford additionally grew to become a frontrunner in environmental activism, working to guard wilderness areas because the early Seventies and elevating consciousness about world warming because the Nineteen Eighties. In 2005, he based the Redford Heart along with his youngsters, a company that makes films that advocate for varied environmental causes.
“We have one planet, and as far as we know, that’s the only one we’ve got,” Redford stated in 2014 whereas accepting the Walden Woods Undertaking’s World Environmental Management Award. “We are, or should be, guardians of that planet.”
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Redford was born on Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. He graduated highschool in 1954, attended a 12 months and a half of school on the College of Colorado in Boulder, and finally ended up in New York, attending lessons on the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1959 within the play “Tall Story,” which was a film the subsequent 12 months, giving Redford his movie debut. In 1960, Redford made appearances on varied tv reveals, and as quickly as 1963, he acquired a Finest Supporting Actor Emmy nomination for an anthology drama on ABC.
By the mid-Sixties, Redford had pivoted to specializing in films. In 1966, he gained a Golden Globe for New Star of the 12 months, a class that not exists.
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Redford grew to become a particularly prolific actor in over a half-century on this enterprise, with practically 100 credit.
“When you get older, you learn certain life lessons,” Redford stated to AARP The Journal in 2011. “You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new lease on this thing. So let’s go.’”
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Redford is survived by his spouse, Sibylle Szaggars; his two daughters, Amy and Shauna; and their mom, his earlier spouse, Lola Van Wagenen. He’s preceded in dying by his sons: Scott Anthony Redford, who died at 2 months outdated in 1959, and James, who died of most cancers in 2020 at age 58.
Carly Ledbetter and Todd Van Luling contributed to this report.
