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Robert Redford, the golden-haired American star of films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, who later co-founded the Sundance Institute and championed environmentalist causes, has died at 89. His death at his home in Utah was announced by a publicist, though a cause was not disclosed.
Redford was one of Hollywood’s leading men of the postwar period, anchoring films that became popular classics with a sense of serious decency and later winning an Oscar as director for Ordinary People (1980). Yet even as his camera-ready face became a byword for all-American good looks, Redford cultivated an apartness from Hollywood, like his sometime screen partner, Paul Newman. After taking up residence in the mountains of Utah, he fostered the birth of the Sundance Film Festival, an essential alternative to the industry where he had excelled.
He was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, to a milkman-turned-accountant and a strong-willed homemaker. By Redford’s own account, he thought he might draw, paint or even become an animator, rather than act. But after moving to New York, he soon found success on the stage, beginning with a small role in Tall Story (1959) and within a few years hit pay dirt as a newly-wed in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park on Broadway. Mike Nichols directed the play and later considered Redford for The Graduate, but the star’s breezy glow just didn’t seem to match the role of nervous Benjamin Braddock — which went to Dustin Hoffman.
Redford’s stardom was secured soon enough as one half of a train-robbing duo in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the top-grossing film of 1969. Playing it quiet and wry opposite a rambunctious Newman, Redford seemed to relish the fresh-faced role and set a mould for later crowd-pleasing performances by forging a good-natured connection with the cinema audience. He’d later count Butch Cassidy as his favourite film because, he said, he liked doing the stunts and being out in nature.
Redford’s roles could reflect a sympathy for social issues, as in This Property Is Condemned (1966) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), and he garnered admirers over the years for the election satire The Candidate (1972). But he would also embrace the matinee-idol glow that led some critics to underrate him, with films like the 1973 romantic period drama The Way We Were — opposite a beaming Barbra Streisand — and the ill-fated adaptation a year later of The Great Gatsby — as the all-American anti-hero of the title.
Far from hogging the limelight, Redford excelled as a scene partner to his co-stars (in a way returning to the byplay of Butch Cassidy). All the President’s Men, the 1976 chronicle of the exposé of Watergate that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, is a consummate two-hander with Hoffman. If Redford had until then looked too clean-cut to be properly considered a counterculture figure, he showed his bona fides with a seriousness of purpose as journalist Bob Woodward.
That knack for collaboration went for actresses too, with Jane Fonda on the screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967) and on The Way We Were with Streisand, who in a social media post on Tuesday remembered filming as “Every day . . . Exciting, intense, and pure joy”. His continued stardom in the 1980s had as its capstone a sun-kissed role opposite Meryl Streep in the Oscar-friendly adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1985). Streep likewise paid tribute online: “One of the lions has passed.”
Yet even as Redford was enjoying continued success, he had opened an entirely new chapter with the Sundance Film Festival, which was formed out of the US Film Festival in 1984 and officially renamed in 1991. Redford had laid the groundwork by purchasing land in Utah and inviting young filmmakers to his institute to develop projects. He would become a vital face of the festival for years thereafter. Actor Ethan Hawke said on Facebook that Redford was “our ultimate champion of independent film”.
Beyond the screen, Redford supported environmental causes such as land conservation, climate change awareness and clean energy initiatives. He lobbied for legislation that led to the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His death garnered respectful tributes from both Unesco and fellow actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio.
Redford continued acting and directing works ranging from picturesque prestige dramas (Quiz Show, A River Runs Through It) to socially conscious work (Lions for Lambs). His post-2000 roles did not attain the pop prominence of 1993’s Indecent Proposal or 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, but a definitive late triumph came with All Is Lost in 2013. As a man battling to survive on a boat adrift at sea, he seemed to relish showing his mettle in an unadorned role that got his hair mussed, far from the klieg lights of Hollywood.
He was married twice and is survived by his wife Sibylle Szaggars and two children from his first marriage to Lola Van Wagenen.
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