Robert Redford’s Legacy as a Director and Storyteller.
The legendary actor-director brought legendary characters to life in hits like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the President’s Men, and Ordinary People.
Robert Redford, the enduring Hollywood giant and star of unforgettable classics like 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and 1985’s Out of Africa, has passed away. He was 89.
The New York Times reports that Redford died peacefully at his mountain home near Provo, Utah, the morning of Tuesday, September 16. A cause of death was not disclosed, but the outlet noted that Rogers & Cowan PMK CEO Cindi Berger shared in a statement that he “passed in his sleep.”
Considered one of the 1970s biggest heartthrobs, Redford was also one of Hollywood’s most versatile artists. His sweeping career included a Best Actor Oscar nod for 1973’s The Sting, the Best Director award for 1980’s Ordinary People, and a second Best Director nomination for 1994’s Quiz Show.
“I’ve spent most of my life just focused on the road ahead, not looking back,” Robert Redford reflected while accepting the honorary Oscar in 2002. “But tonight, I’m seeing in the rearview mirror that there is something I’ve not thought about much, called history.”
Robert Redford arrived on this planet August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California. He took acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then launched his Broadway career in 1959 with a show called Tall Story. By 1963, he jumped into a bigger part in Barefoot in the Park, a role he later took to film in 1967, acting opposite Jane Fonda. At the same time, his television resume was filling up with guest spots on shows like Tate, Route 66, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Untouchables.
Success—real game-change, Hollywood-level success—came in 1969. That was the year he and Paul Newman rode the same horse, shared the same outlaw charm, and redefined the word “cool” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Redford stepped into the spurs of the Sundance Kid, a part that sent his star blazing across every marquee.
In a 2019 interview with Collider, Redford revealed how he nabbed the part of the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “I was being considered for Butch because I’d just done the comedy. But that role didn’t speak to me. I was drawn to the Sundance Kid because I recognized him in my own life—especially my childhood—always the guy who felt like the outlaw.”
He explained that when he pitched George Roy Hill, the director agreed immediately: “He knew Paul already and that he was naturally Butch. They had a little chat, a friendly argument, until Paul accepted the idea. He was already a bigger star, I was still the new guy, and that’s why the movie’s title changed to The Sundance Kid.”
Redford’s résumé includes a treasure trove: The Way We Were in 1973, the same year’s The Sting, The Great Gatsby the next year, the Watergate thriller All the President’s Men in 1976, the baseball fable The Natural in 1984, Indecent Proposal in 1993, The Horse Whisperer in 1998, and the stripped-back siege of All Is Lost in 2013.
Find Related Stories! Fashion Giant Giorgio Armani Dies at 91
On the other side of the camera, he directed Ordinary People in 1980, winning him an Oscar, and then kept at it with A River Runs Through It in 1992, Quiz Show in 1994, The Legend of Bagger Vance in 2000, Lions for Lambs in 2007, and several others, cementing his legacy in both acting and directing.
Back in August of 2018, Robert Redford opened up to Entertainment Weekly about stepping away from acting. He was wrapping up work on The Old Man & the Gun, a film that featured Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter, and Tom Waits alongside him.
“Never say never, but I pretty well concluded that this would be it for me in terms of acting, and I’ll move towards retirement after this ’cause I’ve been doing it since I was 21,” Redford shared. That statement felt like a quiet farewell from a star whose smile shaped the silver screen for decades.
A month after announcing his “retirement,” he stood on the carpet for his film’s premiere and openly wished he hadn’t used the word “retire.” “When I said it felt like the right time, I probably should have added a never say never,” he shrugged candidly, shrugging off the decision like a jacket that no longer fit.
In March 2025, the movie world was pleasantly surprised when Redford popped up for a blink-and-you-miss-it role in Dark Winds—the first time he’d been on camera in six years. Even before that, he was quietly recording. In 2020, he lent his gravelly but calming voice to the animated Omniboat:
A Fast Boat Fantasia and, a little later, took on a prominent role in a project cowritten by his wife, the artist Sibylle Szaggars Redford: “The Way of the Rain — Hope for Earth,” a live-performance meditation on rising tides, forest fires, and time.
Awards have streamed in over the years, top honors like the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globes and the Life Achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild, but off-camera Redford quietly bore the heaviest kind of acclaim: heartache. In 2020, his son, documentary filmmaker James Redford, passed away after a rapid battle with bile-duct cancer that had spread to the liver. He was 58 and still full of plans—much like his father once was.
“The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child,” Robert Redford’s representative shared that sad afternoon of Jamie Redford’s death. “Jamie was a loving son, husband and father. His legacy lives on through his children, art, filmmaking, and devoted passion to conservation and the environment.”
Robert and ex-wife Lola Van Wagenen had four children: Scott, who passed within two months of his 1959 birth from sudden infant death syndrome; then Shauna, Jamie, and youngest Amy. Ironically, Robert’s mom passed after a complicated pregnancy, the kind that left Redford mostly acting as a young dad when he was a teen. His mom’s absence drove home the fragility of family bonds.
Found love again when he married Sibylle Szaggars Redford in 2009. In a cover profile for AARP Magazine a couple of years later, he described his second wife—20 years his junior— as a “very special person” who gave him a “whole new life.” The two first crossed paths in 1996 while she was visiting Sundance Mountain Resort, and Szaggars admits she was mostly clueless about Robert’s legendary acting resume.
“The encounter was a sweet beginning, a meeting of two humans, far from flashing lights or Oscars,” Robert recalled. It’s one of those perfect moments you hear about, two souls colliding in a quiet, snow-covered lobby and seeing first, not the fame, but two people, side by side, just the way life often works when you least expect it.
In 2005, Robert Redford and filmmaker James Redford launched The Redford Center, a nonprofit dedicated to creating films and giving grants to directors making documentaries about climate change and environmental care. Redford’s love for nature and his worry about its future inspired the project.
Ten years later, in 2015, Redford traveled to Paris with stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn to support the United Nations in its climate talks and to urge world leaders to cut down on the burning of fossil fuels. The conference, whose final document committed 195 nations to hold warming to below 2 degrees, stretched for almost 11 days. On camera and off, Redford hammered the message home: “This has to be the time. We’re running out of time. There’s no more time.”
Redford’s environmental stance goes way back. In 1975, he appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes to confront plans for a coal plant in the Utah desert. He invited reporter Dan Rather—who Robert later portrayed in the film Truth in 2015—to visit the proposed site. The segment reached millions, and the power plant never got built.
Redford never stopped cheering for rising filmmakers. He started the Sundance Institute in the early 1980s, and that grew into the Sundance Film Festival about a decade later. When he won the Oscar in 2002, he told the audience that the festival gives him the chance to “put something back into an industry that’s been good to me.” He called Sundance “a manifestation” of that gratitude.
He kept going, saying that artists need the space to tell their own stories if the industry—and the country—are going to thrive. “Freedom of artistic expression has to be fed.” He told the crowd that each-person-its-own-way goodness of film is a gift every crew member snaps a photo.
He later remarked that “the glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.” When he ended, he said, “As an artist, I just can’t think of a better life than the one that I’ve been blessed with,” and he waved farewell to the audience.
Redford leaves behind his wife, daughters, and grandchildren.
