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Robert Redford, the actor and director who sailed to Hollywood stardom with turns in classics such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and invigorated American independent cinema as the founder of the organization behind the Sundance Film Festival, died Tuesday morning.
He was 89.
Cindi Berger, his publicist, said he died at his home “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
Redford was best known as a go-to leading man of the late 1960s and 1970s, instantly recognizable for his windswept hair and widely beloved for his easy charisma. But he was also an accomplished filmmaker, committed political activist and culture-shaping entrepreneur.
He won the best director Oscar for the family melodrama “Ordinary People” (1980), the first of his nine stints behind the camera.
Redford’s expansive spirit will live on through the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1981 that sponsors the Sundance Film Festival. The festival, held annually in snowy Park City, Utah, showcases offbeat projects and has helped launch many careers.
“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,’” Redford recalled in a 2018 interview. “As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
In a career that stretched more than six decades, Redford won two Academy Awards, including an honorary prize in 2002, and three Golden Globe Awards, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award lifetime achievement honor in 1994.
