Robert Redford, an actor whose beach-god looks and subtle magnetism in films such as \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u201d and \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d made him one of the biggest movie stars of all time, but who forged an even more profound legacy in cinema as a patron saint of American independent film, died Sept. 16 at his home in the mountains outside Provo, Utah. He was 89.<\/p>\n
His death was announced in a statement by publicist Cindi Berger, who did not cite a cause.<\/p>\n
Since 1981, Mr. Redford had been president and founder of the Sundance Institute in nearby Park City, Utah. He said his arts colony was not about \u201cinsurgents coming down from the mountain to attack the mainstream\u201d but about broadening the very concept of mainstream. Sundance provided a vital platform for two generations of outside-the-system filmmakers \u2014 from Quentin Tarantino to Ava DuVernay \u2014 who were embraced by ticketbuyers and studios and helped enlarge the definition of commercial fare in a risk-averse industry.<\/p>\n
This might have seemed an unlikely quest for Mr. Redford, whose square jaw, blue eyes and sun-dappled hair projected an almost blinding beauty that made him a Hollywood sex symbol for five decades. He became one of the most popular and highly paid actors in the world, his audiences reveling in his romantic chemistry with Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand, and his bromantic banter with Paul Newman<\/a> and Dustin Hoffman.<\/p>\n From an inauspicious upbringing \u2014 he ran with suburban gangs and drank his way out of college before finding focus in the adrenaline rush of acting \u2014 Mr. Redford also achieved success as a producer, Oscar-winning director, environmental activist and entrepreneur. Privately, he nursed a temperament that could be mercurial, aloof and in harmony with what Alan J. Pakula, director of \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d once called a \u201crebel heart\u201d beating under his glossy surface.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford remained essentially a loner who craved the solitude of his wilderness home in Utah and pushed 120 mph on the open highway in his Porsche. He described his acting and other endeavors as a search for himself and for meaningful connection with others.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of the reason that he was such an enduring star \u2026 is that people never felt like they got to know him completely,\u201d Sydney Pollack<\/a>, who directed Mr. Redford in seven movies, once told The Washington Post<\/a>. There was a \u201ctension,\u201d he said, \u201cbetween the stereotype of a pretty, handsome, blond Golden Boy and the interior, which is much more complicated and even darker.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Redford amassed dozens of film credits and a shelf full of generational milestones. With Newman as his fast-talking partner, he was the sardonic outlaw Sundance in \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid\u201d (1969) \u2014 a western buddy comedy that branded him into the national consciousness and featured a memorable cliff-dive sequence as they evade the law.<\/p>\n In what film critic Pauline Kael dubbed \u201cthe golden yes-yes\u201d of two of the world\u2019s sexiest male stars, Mr. Redford and Newman reteamed as Depression-era con men who pull an audacious scheme against a gangster in \u201cThe Sting\u201d (1973); it earned Mr. Redford his only Oscar nomination as an actor.<\/p>\n He had another touchstone role as Post reporter Bob Woodward in \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d (1976), a political and journalistic thriller about the investigation of the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard M. Nixon to resign. Mr. Redford was credited with being among the first to see the cinematic potential in The Post\u2019s Watergate coverage and securing the rights to the story.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford said he identified most closely with individualists and idealists \u2014 and few roles resonated more than the 19th-century trapper looking to escape White civilization in \u201cJeremiah Johnson\u201d (1972). \u201cI have very strong views about the injustice of our society, the injustices of our governmental systems, the preservation of values I think should be kept,\u201d he told the Boston Globe. \u201cSo I find a character that can inhabit the point, and I\u2019m able to put my truth in a character who delivers it for the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n He also traded liberally on his glamour \u2014 as a conformist writer to Streisand\u2019s liberal activist in \u201cThe Way We Were\u201d (1973), as the enigmatic, snappily dressed protagonist of \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d (1974), as a dashing CIA researcher hunted by corrupt forces in his own agency in \u201cThree Days of the Condor\u201d (1975) and as Streep\u2019s dreamy but elusive English lover<\/a> in \u201cOut of Africa\u201d (1985), winner of a best picture Oscar.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford turned to directing at the peak of his fame and won an Academy Award for his debut feature, the family drama \u201cOrdinary People\u201d (1980). He later made such films as the lyrical \u201cA River Runs Through It\u201d (1992) and the Oscar-nominated \u201cQuiz Show\u201d (1994), about the TV game-show scandals of the 1950s and the national obsession with winning at any cost.<\/p>\n He ran the commercial and critical gamut with his other directing efforts, including \u201cThe Horse Whisperer\u201d in 1998 (in which he played a mystical equestrian healer) and the golf fantasy \u201cThe Legend of Bagger Vance\u201d (2000). He helped produce films as varied as \u201cThe Motorcycle Diaries\u201d (2004), a hit drama about the prerevolutionary life of Che Guevara, and the Oscar-nominated short \u201cThe Solar Film\u201d (1980), about the benefits of solar energy.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford had long used his celebrity to lobby for renewable energy sources and to forewarn about the dangers of global warming. His activism grew from his decades living in central Utah on a property that would house the Sundance Institute.<\/p>\n He created the arts organization in 1981 to insulate fledgling artists from commercial compromise, functioning as an incubator for variety and experimentation in an era being defined by blockbusters such as \u201cJaws.\u201d One of its first successes was Gregory Nava\u2019s Oscar-nominated \u201cEl Norte\u201d (1983), about Mayan peasants who flee the Guatemalan civil war.<\/p>\n In 1985, the Sundance Institute absorbed the little-known U.S. Film and Video Festival in the sleepy ski town of Park City. In the Sundance Film Festival\u2019s first year, Mr. Redford stood outside the Egyptian Theatre on Park City\u2019s main street \u2014 \u201chanding out brochures like a street hawker, trying to talk people into coming inside,\u201d he once told <\/a>Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.<\/p>\n The turning point was Steven Soderbergh\u2019s \u201cSex, Lies and Videotape\u201d (1989), a modestly funded but innovative drama that snared a major distribution deal and turned a massive profit, turning its director into \u201cthe poster boy of the Sundance generation,\u201d as Ebert put it<\/a>. Tarantino, a former video-store clerk who received funding and training from the Sundance Institute, found similar success with \u201cReservoir Dogs\u201d (1992).<\/p>\n In time, Sundance began to challenge festivals such as Cannes as a powerhouse. David O. Russell, Kevin Smith and Paul Thomas Anderson were among the filmmakers boosted by Sundance applause over the decades.<\/p>\n \u201cRedford did not live inside his celebrity as a star,\u201d film scholar Jeanine Basinger said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. \u201cThe Sundance Institute had an enormous effect on filmmaking and film distribution through the development of new talent, shepherding the independent film scene and making it a legitimate rival to the Hollywood studio system.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, California, on Aug. 18, 1936; his parents married a few months later. His father, who had a severe stutter, was a milkman and spent years on the edge of poverty before joining Standard Oil as an accountant. Mr. Redford remembered him mostly for his angry disposition and penny-pinching.<\/p>\n He was close to his mother, the former Martha Hart, who spent much of her life in ill health and died of complications from a blood infection when Mr. Redford was 17. \u201cI\u2019d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,\u201d he later told his biographer Michael Feeney Callan, \u201cbut after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.\u201d<\/p>\n He grew up in Van Nuys, a Los Angeles bedroom community he likened to a \u201c\u2018Twilight Zone\u2019 version of suburbia.\u201d He channeled his restless energy into athletics, proving fiercely competitive on the baseball diamond. He also was lured into street gangs, with their all-night beer-drinking parties and hot-rod racing.<\/p>\n The University of Colorado at Boulder recruited him as a baseball prospect, but he was kicked out in 1956 for rowdy behavior. \u201cI was in a pretty bad way as a young guy,\u201d he later told public-television interviewer Charlie Rose. \u201cQuite lost, quite edgy, pretty much always seeking the edge of everything, which wasn\u2019t healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n A prizewinning illustrator in high school, he spent a year struggling through art schools in Paris and Florence before settling in New York to study set design. On a whim, he picked up a prospectus from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and impressed talent scouts with the tightly coiled anger he brought to his stage auditions. His extraordinary looks fetched immediate demand for his services on TV.<\/p>\n He became a stalwart of TV dramas, usually playing ultra-handsome psychopaths and neurotics. As his stature increased, so did his earnings. But he boggled his agents by refusing $10,000 a week to star in another TV drama, calling it a \u201choney trap.\u201d Instead he accepted $110 a week to appear in a Broadway-bound Neil Simon<\/a> comedy, \u201cBarefoot in the Park\u201d (1963), as an uptight young lawyer adjusting to life with his free-spirited new wife (Elizabeth Ashley).<\/p>\n After a series of wan movie parts, the 1967 film version of \u201cBarefoot in the Park\u201d co-starring Jane Fonda brought Mr. Redford a boost of attention for his light comic touch. He was soon approached to play Butch Cassidy, the glib second lead in a film about two inept bank robbers and their picaresque adventures, then titled \u201cThe Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.\u201d<\/p>\n Studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox were unenthusiastic about Mr. Redford, viewing him as the good-looking lightweight from \u201cBarefoot.\u201d Newman \u2014 who was initially cast as the Sundance Kid, a gambler and gunslinger \u2014 rose to Mr. Redford\u2019s defense.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford saw William Goldman\u2019s<\/a> Oscar-winning script as a virtuoso takedown of the heroic mythology surrounding the American West. But, wanting to avoid another comic part as the loquacious Butch, he suggested switching roles with Newman, who readily agreed. In deference to Newman, an established star, the title of the film also was flipped.<\/p>\n Critics were slow to embrace the film, but audiences responded to its comically absurdist, antiestablishment tone. The film cost $6.5 million to make and generated more than $40 million. Mr. Redford was a breakout sensation.<\/p>\n He used his power to star in and help produce the low-budget \u201cDownhill Racer\u201d (1969), which featured one of Mr. Redford\u2019s least-seen but most daring performances \u2014 as a world-class skier and abrasive cad.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford modeled his character on the brash Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz. \u201cIt was cool to be a jerk,\u201d Mr. Redford told Callan of the ethos of the time. \u201cWinning was everything, bad behavior now excused. \u2026 He isn\u2019t nice to the coach because he doesn\u2019t have to be. This is not a good role model marker for the way we, as a society, are going.\u201d<\/p>\n The film marked what Mr. Redford hoped would be several films about \u201cthe Pyrrhic victory of winning\u201d \u2014 a theme that he felt resonated with the era and what he said were the hypocrisies and misplaced values at the center of much of American life. His next venture as a producer was \u201cThe Candidate\u201d (1972), in which he played a California civil rights lawyer who loses his soul while running for the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person,\u201d Mr. Redford later told the U.K.\u2019s Daily Telegraph<\/a>. \u201cOnce my career got going and I was able to act, I tried to take parts that were offbeat. At the same time I got frustrated: There were stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to start producing my own films that I could act in. So I\u2019d say to Warner\u2019s or Columbia or Fox, \u2018Okay, I\u2019d be happy to do \u201cThe Way We Were.\u201d But if I do, would you let me make \u201cThe Candidate\u201d or \u201cDownhill Racer\u201d?\u2019 Finally they\u2019d say, \u2018Yes, if it\u2019s under $2 million.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A devoted follower of The Post\u2019s investigation of the Watergate crime and cover-up, he paid Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein $450,000 for the film rights to what became their book \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men.\u201d \u201cThis story was allegory, about a certain innocence that was corrupted by Watergate,\u201d Mr. Redford told Callan. \u201cWoodward and Bernstein personified the innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n After Goldman wrote an initial draft of the screenplay, Mr. Redford reportedly objected to the jokey tone reminiscent of \u201cButch Cassidy.\u201d He and Pakula, who immersed themselves in Washington journalism circles, took uncredited hands in reworking parts of the script. Goldman alone received the Academy Award for the screenplay.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford rounded out the decade as an arrogant barnstorming stunt pilot in \u201cThe Great Waldo Pepper\u201d (1975) and an ex-rodeo champion who steals a horse to save it from commercial exploitation in \u201cThe Electric Horseman\u201d (1979). For minimal screen time and maximum payout, he played an American war hero in the all-star World War II epic \u201cA Bridge Too Far\u201d (1977).<\/p>\n For his directing debut, Mr. Redford chose the Judith Guest novel \u201cOrdinary People,\u201d about a family struggling to cope with the death of a beloved son in a boating accident. Mr. Redford cast sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore<\/a> against type as the bottled-up mother, a performance that brought her an Oscar nod.<\/p>\n The film, made for $6 million, took in $115 million and was lavished with acclaim \u2014 including a best picture award \u2014 for its tasteful restraint. Mr. Redford told Callan he was unnerved by the success. \u201cThere are only so many times you want to be told, \u2018This is the best thing since \u2018Gone With the Wind\u2019 or \u2018You are the best leading man since Moses,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cI thought, Screw this! and disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n He dived into a depression, injured himself on a skiing trip and saw his long first marriage, to Lola Van Wagenen, dissolve. He sought escape, as he often did over the years, in a Hopi Indian chanting festival, which he called<\/a> \u201ca transcendental state of release that brought me away from the pain and anxieties of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight years passed before he returned to directing, with \u201cThe Milagro Beanfield War\u201d (1988). He took acting jobs, but only a few. In \u201cThe Natural\u201d (1984), he played a baseball player bedeviled by his past. His performances in \u201cHavana\u201d (1990), as a gambler in prerevolutionary Cuba, and in \u201cIndecent Proposal\u201d (1993), as a billionaire who offers $1 million for a night with a financially desperate Demi Moore, marked by most accounts a creative nadir as he focused on Sundance and his activism.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford had been an outdoorsman since his youth, when he hiked in the Sierra Nevada and worked summers at Yosemite National Park. Driving home to California from college, he was smitten with the Utah canyonlands.<\/p>\n He built an A-frame home there in 1961 on a small parcel of land he bought for $500, and over the next decade bought up 7,000 acres around it<\/a>. By the early 1970s, his holdings included a small ski resort that, along with a Western-oriented apparel catalogue, helped subsidize the Sundance Institute.<\/p>\n Perhaps his greatest environmental success, in 1976, was the scuttling of a proposed Kaiparowits coal-fired power plant touted by business interests as a much-needed jobs generator in southern Utah. Mr. Redford mounted a publicity blitz \u2014 including a 36-page photo spread in National Geographic featuring the actor traversing the landscape on horseback \u2014 that ignited fierce community backlash to his efforts. Derided as liberal carpetbagger, he was hanged in effigy.<\/p>\n \u201cI had to hear over and over again all through the \u201970s, \u2018Oh, what does he know, he\u2019s an actor,\u2019\u201d he said decades later while being honored by the League of Conservation Voters. \u201cUntil Reagan got elected, and that took that argument off the table.\u201d<\/p>\n Forging ties to lawmakers and allies in the media, Mr. Redford worked to promote renewable energy sources. In the early 1980s, he inaugurated the Sundance-based Institute for Resource Management, an environmental mediation group for environmentalists and industrialists.<\/p>\n It was not until the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that the environmental cost of greenhouse-gas emissions became more visible as a global agenda item. Mr. Redford, a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, remained outspoken on green issues and political leaders who fell short in his estimation of their stewardship of public lands.<\/p>\n Behind his sheen of good fortune, Mr. Redford endured crushing sorrows. His infant son Scott died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959, just as Mr. Redford embarked on his Broadway debut. \u201cThe gothic part of my nature came down on me,\u201d he told Callan. \u201cI know it sounds self-absorbed, and in hindsight it was, but it felt like retribution.\u201d His son James had a lifetime of health setbacks stemming from an autoimmune disease and died in 2020.<\/p>\n In 2009, Mr. Redford married German-born artist Sibylle Szaggars. He had two daughters from his first marriage, Shauna and Amy. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.<\/p>\n Mr. Redford received the National Medal of Arts in 1996, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016. An honorary Oscar in 2002 called him an \u201cinspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n As Sundance grew, it found detractors who deplored the hive of agents, publicists, marketers and celebutantes clogging the streets and threatening to co-opt attention from the art. The Slamdance Film Festival opened in 1995 in Park City to puncture the commercialization of Sundance. Mr. Redford bemoaned but did little to mitigate the slide into glitz.<\/p>\n In his later years, as his features became appealingly weather-beaten, Mr. Redford seemed intent on returning to the stripped-down basics of his craft and grew refreshingly devoid of the vanity, artifice and bland self-seriousness that critics felt marred some of his work.<\/p>\n As a solitude-seeking adventurer who faces distress at sea in \u201cAll Is Lost\u201d (2013), he gave a desperate performance made all the more compelling by its near-total absence of dialogue. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott called him<\/a> \u201ca magnificent underplayer, a master of small, clear gestures and soft-spoken intensity.\u201d He later starred as a bank robber and prison escape artist in \u201cThe Old Man & the Gun\u201d (2018).<\/p>\n Mr. Redford said that even as his activism became a defining part of his spirit, a vast majority of people would never take him seriously as anything other than the Sundance Kid.<\/p>\n