{"id":429344,"date":"2025-09-16T16:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429344\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T16:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:47:10","slug":"robert-redford-oscar-winning-actor-and-director-dead-at-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429344\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Redford, Oscar-Winning Actor and Director, Dead at 89"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRobert Redford<\/a>, an Oscar-winning actor and director whose passion for activism led to the formation of the Sundance Institute and its formidable film festival, died on Tuesday morning at his Utah home. He was 89.<\/p>\n

\n\tRedford\u2019s publicist, Cindi Berger, confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, but did not specify a cause. \u201cRobert Redford passed away on Sept. 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah \u2014 the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,\u201d Berger said. \u201cHe will be missed greatly.\u00a0The family requests privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne of the lions has passed,\u201d Meryl Streep, who starred with Redford in 1985\u2019s Out of Africa, said in a statement. \u201cRest in peace my lovely friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA heartthrob with a soulful spirit, Redford could easily play dreamboats who captured the collective imagination \u2014 he was a wholly credible Jay Gatsby \u2014 but there was also within him a dogged determination to seek out riskier projects that challenged him as an actor and subverted his golden-boy visage. After becoming a star in the 1970s thanks to hits that ran the gamut from expert escapism (The Sting) to topical political thrillers (All the President\u2019s Men), Redford shifted toward directing, winning Best Director for his 1980 debut, Ordinary People, before going on to helm a string of critically acclaimed dramas such as A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show. And through his nurturing of the Sundance Film Festival, he helped boost the careers of fledgling filmmakers such as the Coen brothers, David O. Russell, and Quentin Tarantino. But wherever his passions took him, he remained a Southern California kid who resisted the trappings of his lifelong stardom.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere was nothing at the end of the rainbow for me here,\u201d Redford told Esquire<\/a> in 2013 of his hometown. \u201cHollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood \u2014 I was born next door.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in Santa Monica in the summer of 1936, Charles Robert Redford Jr. moved with his family to Van Nuys, California, as a boy. An unfocused student \u2014 biographer Michael Feeney Callan claimed that during Redford\u2019s high school graduation, he \u201csat at the back of the assembly hall, reading Mad magazine\u201d \u2014 he went to the University of Colorado Boulder for baseball. But the arts soon occupied his time, as well as partying. Redford was kicked out after a year: \u201cOne of the reasons I was asked to leave was that I was having too much fun\u200a,\u201d he admitted to ThinkProgress in 2012<\/a>. \u201c\u200aI spent too much time in the mountains, and I didn\u2019t spend enough time studying.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tHe traveled around Europe and then set his sights on New York to focus on acting, working in theater and on television. He appeared on Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and a TV adaptation of The Iceman Cometh, earning an Emmy nomination in 1963 for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the mid-Sixties, Redford was starting to land steady film work, winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer \u2013 Male in 1966. One of his first major movie successes was in the adaptation of Neil Simon\u2019s play Barefoot in the Park, as the uptight newlywed Paul Brattera, a role he originated on Broadway. But he cemented his stardom with 1969\u2019s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the most popular of the revisionist Westerns, which starred Redford alongside Paul Newman, who would remain one of his closest friends until his death in 2008. The two men played wisecracking outlaws who seemed to be thumbing their nose at the romantic, rose-colored notion of the Old West, and in his role as the Sundance Kid, Redford articulated his resistance to mythmaking that would become a central tenet of his career.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tHe parlayed that success into a string of well-liked films, including the Western drama Jeremiah Johnson and his smash reunion with Newman, the Best Picture-winning heist film The Sting. But Redford always bristled at Hollywood fame, wanting to be sure he was still making worthwhile movies and not just star vehicles. \u201cI started to get uncomfortable. I felt I wasn\u2019t free to do other things,\u201d he would later say. \u201cSo I\u2019d go to Warner Bros. and say, \u2018I\u2019d like to make a film about the election process \u2014 about how we elect somebody based on cosmetics rather than substance \u2014 and call it The Candidate.\u2019 They\u2019d say, \u2018If you do this larger film, we\u2019ll let you make it.\u2019 That allowed me to make small films within the studio system.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tIndeed, a movie like 1972\u2019s The Candidate, in which he plays a blank slate of a senatorial hopeful, has only proved more prescient in its indictment of the American political system, and he followed it up with other films critical of the U.S. government, including All the President\u2019s Men (about the Watergate cover-up) and Three Days of the Condor (a thriller about a CIA conspiracy). His willingness to look critically at his homeland had stemmed from being challenged by Parisians while he was studying art in France in the late 1950s. \u201c[I was] beginning to realize that there was mythology about my own country given to me \u2014 and that there was a wonderful country there, which I still believe there is \u2014 but it was a different one than the sloganeering that was going on about the country,\u201d Redford told Democracy Now!<\/a>. \u201cAnd I began to see the other side of it and think. And I felt that there was a story to be told \u2014 there are really a series of good stories about what\u2019s the story beneath the story you were given about your own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRedford tried his hand at directing for 1980\u2019s Ordinary People, a chronicle of an emotionally distant family demolished by tragedy, which went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. Over the next several decades, he would continue to direct, often focusing on social and political issues such as the corrosive power of television (Quiz Show), American foreign policy (Lions for Lambs) and the shortcomings of our legal system (The Conspirator).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn subsequent years, he continued to act, playing handsome, sensitive figures in 1980s dramas such as The Natural and Out of Africa, but he also invested his time in spreading the word about environmental issues and developing the Sundance Institute, which he launched in the early Eighties as a way to shepherd new filmmaking talent. \u201cI thought I\u2019d like to put something back,\u201d he once explained, \u201cbecause I had been taken with a Native American policy: When you take something out of the land, you want to put something back. So I decided to think for a while about what I could do that might generate some opportunity for somebody else.\u201d The institute and the Sundance Film Festival have served as an incubator for promising careers for generations now, the festival remaining the annual kickoff of prestige cinema each January in Park City, Utah.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Redford still delivered powerful performances, most notably in the nearly silent 2013 survival story All Is Lost, in which he appeared alone onscreen as his character battles to stay afloat in a damaged boat in the middle of the ocean. But in late 2016, he hinted that he\u2019d be retiring from acting after finishing two films: Our Souls at Night and Old Man and the Gun. In an interview<\/a> with his grandson Dylan Redford, he noted, \u201cOnce they\u2019re done then I\u2019m going to say, \u2018OK, that\u2019s goodbye to all that,\u2019 and then just focus on directing.\u201d He also expressed a desire to return to an adolescent love: painting. \u201cAt this point in my life, age 80, it\u2019d give me more satisfaction because I\u2019m not dependent on anybody,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just me, just the way it used to be, and so going back to sketching \u2014 that\u2019s sort of where my head is right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tIn 2002, Redford won an Honorary Oscar, and in 1994 he was bestowed the Golden Globes\u2019 Cecil B. DeMille Award for his body of work. Redford\u2019s career stands as a testament to forging one\u2019s own path, and the independent filmmakers he ushered into the world are an extension of that philosophy of questioning the cinematic status quo. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn a 1994 conversation<\/a> with Interview, Redford proclaimed that, as a director, he preferred nuance and ambiguity to the simplicity of Hollywood commercial fare. \u201cThe art of making a film and its content are far more interesting to me than the result or impact,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course, you hope it has impact. In fact, I think more broadly now about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn\u2019t one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Redford, an Oscar-winning actor and director whose passion for activism led to the formation of the Sundance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3940],"tags":[4080,77,127292,23502,40347,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-429344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-obit","11":"tag-obituary","12":"tag-robert-redford","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115214997721797014","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}