Robert Redford, actor and Oscar-winning director, died early Tuesday morning in his residence in Utah. He was 89.
His dying was introduced in a press release by Cindi Berger, the chief govt of the publicity agency Rogers & Cowan PMK.
Berger stated Redford died at his residence “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
His reason for dying was not revealed.
After rising to stardom within the Sixties, Redford was one of many largest stars of the ’70s with such movies as The Candidate, All the President’s Men and The Way We Were, capping that decade with the perfect director Oscar for 1980’s Ordinary People, which additionally gained greatest image in 1980. His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him probably the most desired of main males, however he labored arduous to transcend his seems to be — whether or not by his political advocacy, his willingness to tackle unglamourous roles or his dedication to offering a platform for low-budget films.
His roles ranged from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward to a mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson to a double agent within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.
But his most well-known display accomplice was his previous good friend and fellow activist and sensible joker Paul Newman, their movies a variation of their heat, teasing relationship off display. Redford performed the wily outlaw reverse Newman in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and pageant acquired its title. He additionally teamed with Newman on 1973’s greatest image Oscar winner, The Sting, which earned Redford a best-actor nomination as a younger con artist in Thirties Chicago.
Robert Redford (left) as Sundance Kid and Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy within the 1969 western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis by way of Getty Images
Film roles after the ’70s turned extra sporadic as Redford targeting directing and producing, and his new function as patriarch of the independent-film motion within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s by his Sundance Institute. But he starred in 1985’s greatest image champion Out of Africa and in 2013 obtained a number of the greatest critiques of his profession as a shipwrecked sailor in All is Lost, during which he was the movie’s solely performer. In 2018, he was praised once more in what he known as his farewell film, The Old Man and the Gun.
“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21,” he advised The Associated Press shortly earlier than the movie got here out. “I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family.”
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Sundance is born
Redford had watched Hollywood develop extra cautious and controlling through the Nineteen Seventies and wished to recapture the inventive spirit of the early a part of the last decade. Sundance was created to nurture new expertise away from the pressures of Hollywood, the institute offering a coaching floor and the pageant, primarily based in Park City, Utah, the place Redford had bought land with the preliminary hope of opening a ski resort. Instead, Park City turned a spot of discovery for such beforehand unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.
“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford advised the AP in 2018. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard.
“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But 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.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”
Sundance was even criticized as consumers swarmed in on the lookout for potential hits and celebrities overran the city every winter.
“We have never, ever changed our policies for how we program our festival. It’s always been built on diversity,” Redford advised the AP in 2004. “The fact is that the diversity has become commercial. Because independent films have achieved their own success, Hollywood, being just a business, is going to grab them. So when Hollywood grabs your films, they go, ‘Oh, it’s gone Hollywood.’”
By 2025, the pageant had develop into so distinguished that organizers determined they’d outgrown Park City and authorized relocating to Boulder, Colorado, beginning in 2027. Redford, who had attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, issued a press release saying that “change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival.”
Redford was married twice, most lately to Sibylle Szaggars. He had 4 kids, two of whom have died — Scott Anthony, who died in infancy, in 1959; and James Redford, an activist and filmmaker who died in 2020.
Redford’s adolescence
Robert Redford was born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, a California boy whose blond beauty eased his means over an apprenticeship in tv and dwell theatre that finally led to the large display.
Redford attended school on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s The Natural, the difference of Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel. He had an early curiosity in drawing and portray, then went on to check on the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on Broadway within the late Nineteen Fifties and transferring into tv on such exhibits as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Untouchables.
American actor Robert Redford carrying a gray tweed blazer over an identical waistcoat and a white shirt, with a diagonally striped tie, with a gray fedora, in a scene from ‘The Sting’, filmed within the United States, 1973. The crime caper directed by George Roy Hill, starred Redford as Johnny Hooker.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
After scoring a Broadway lead in Sunday in New York, Redford was forged by director Mike Nichols in a manufacturing of Neil Simon’s Barefoot within the Park, later starring with Fonda within the movie model. Redford did miss out on one in every of Nichols’ best successes, The Graduate, launched in 1967. Nichols had thought-about casting Redford within the half finally performed by Dustin Hoffman, however Redford appeared unable to narrate to the socially awkward younger man who finally ends up having an affair with one in every of his mother and father’ mates.
“I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols stated throughout a 2003 screening of the movie in New York. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”
Indie champion, mainstream star
Even as Redford championed low-budget impartial filmmaking, he continued to star in mainstream Hollywood productions himself, scoring the occasional hit akin to 2001’s Spy Game, which co-starred Brad Pitt, an inheritor obvious to Redford’s good-looking legacy whom he had directed in A River Runs Through It.
Ironically, The Blair Witch Project, Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite and different scrappy movies that got here out of Sundance typically made larger waves — and extra money — than some Redford-starring box-office duds like Havana, The Last Castle and An Unfinished Life.
Redford additionally appeared in a number of political narratives. He satirized campaigning as an idealist operating for U.S. senator in 1972’s The Candidate and uttered one of many extra memorable closing strains, “What do we do now?” after his character manages to win. He starred as Woodward to Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein in 1976’s All the President’s Men, the story of the Washington Post reporters whose Watergate investigation helped deliver down President Richard Nixon.
With 2007’s Lions for Lambs, Redford returned to directing in a saga of a congressman (Tom Cruise), a journalist (Meryl Streep) and a tutorial (Redford) whose lives intersect over the warfare on terrorism in Afghanistan.
Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield, Tom Cruise and Robert Redford attend a photocall for ‘Lions For Lambs’ throughout day 6 of the 2nd Rome Film Festival on October 23, 2007 in Rome, Italy.
Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
His largest filmmaking triumph got here together with his directing debut on Ordinary People, which beat Martin Scorsese’s traditional Raging Bull on the Oscars. The movie starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore because the repressed mother and father of a troubled younger man, performed by Timothy Hutton, in his large display debut. Redford was praised for casting Moore in an unexpectedly critical function and for his even-handed therapy of the characters, a top quality that Roger Ebert believed set “the film apart from the sophisticated suburban soap opera it could easily have become.”
Redford’s different directing efforts included The Horse Whisperer, The Milagro Beanfield War and 1994’s Quiz Show, the final of which additionally earned greatest image and director Oscar nominations. In 2002, Redford obtained an honorary Oscar, with academy organizers citing him as “actor, director, producer, creator of Sundance, inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”
“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” Redford stated in 2018. “From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside.”
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Associated Press journalists Hillel Italie, Jake Coyle and Mallika Sen contributed to this report. Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal author of this obituary.
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— With information from Global News’ Katie Scott
