Robert Redford, movie star and Sundance founder, dies at 89 -Pics n Videos

His death was announced in a statement by publicist Cindi Berger, who did not cite a cause. 

He won a massive following with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men.” Through the Sundance Institute and festival, he became a patron saint of American independent film.

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 “insurgents coming down from the mountain to attack the mainstream” but about broadening the very concept of mainstream. Sundance provided a vital platform for two generations of outside-the-system filmmakers — from Quentin Tarantino to Ava DuVernay — who were embraced by ticketbuyers and studios and helped enlarge the definition of commercial fare in a risk-averse industry.

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 and Dustin Hoffman.

From an inauspicious upbringing — he ran with suburban gangs and drank his way out of college before finding focus in the adrenaline rush of acting — 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 “All the President’s Men,” once called a “rebel heart” beating under his glossy surface.

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.

“Part of the reason that he was such an enduring star … is that people never felt like they got to know him completely,” Sydney Pollack, who directed Mr. Redford in seven movies, once told The Washington Post. There was a “tension,” he said, “between the stereotype of a pretty, handsome, blond Golden Boy and the interior, which is much more complicated and even darker.”

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 “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) — a western buddy comedy that branded him into the national consciousness and featured a memorable cliff-dive sequence as they evade the law.

In what film critic Pauline Kael dubbed “the golden yes-yes” of two of the world’s sexiest male stars, Mr. Redford and Newman reteamed as Depression-era con men who pull an audacious scheme against a gangster in “The Sting” (1973); it earned Mr. Redford his only Oscar nomination as an actor.

He had another touchstone role as Post reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men” (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’s Watergate coverage and securing the rights to the story.

Mr. Redford said he identified most closely with individualists and idealists — and few roles resonated more than the 19th-century trapper looking to escape White civilization in “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972). “I 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,” he told the Boston Globe. “So I find a character that can inhabit the point, and I’m able to put my truth in a character who delivers it for the audience.”

He also traded liberally on his glamour — as a conformist writer to Streisand’s liberal activist in “The Way We Were” (1973), as the enigmatic, snappily dressed protagonist of “The Great Gatsby” (1974), as a dashing CIA researcher hunted by corrupt forces in his own agency in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) and as Streep’s dreamy but elusive English lover in “Out of Africa” (1985), winner of a best picture Oscar.

Mr. Redford turned to directing at the peak of his fame and won an Academy Award for his debut feature, the family drama “Ordinary People” (1980). He later made such films as the lyrical “A River Runs Through It” (1992) and the Oscar-nominated “Quiz Show” (1994), about the TV game-show scandals of the 1950s and the national obsession with winning at any cost.

He ran the commercial and critical gamut with his other directing efforts, including “The Horse Whisperer” in 1998 (in which he played a mystical equestrian healer) and the golf fantasy “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000). He helped produce films as varied as “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), a hit drama about the prerevolutionary life of Che Guevara, and the Oscar-nominated short “The Solar Film” (1980), about the benefits of solar energy.

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.

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 “Jaws.” One of its first successes was Gregory Nava’s Oscar-nominated “El Norte” (1983), about Mayan peasants who flee the Guatemalan civil war.

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’s first year, Mr. Redford stood outside the Egyptian Theatre on Park City’s main street — “handing out brochures like a street hawker, trying to talk people into coming inside,” he once told Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.

The turning point was Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape” (1989), a modestly funded but innovative drama that snared a major distribution deal and turned a massive profit, turning its director into “the poster boy of the Sundance generation,” as Ebert put it. Tarantino, a former video-store clerk who received funding and training from the Sundance Institute, found similar success with “Reservoir Dogs” (1992).

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.

“Redford did not live inside his celebrity as a star,” film scholar Jeanine Basinger said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. “The 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.”

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.

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. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he later told his biographer Michael Feeney Callan, “but after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.”

He grew up in Van Nuys, a Los Angeles bedroom community he likened to a “‘Twilight Zone’ version of suburbia.” 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.

The University of Colorado at Boulder recruited him as a baseball prospect, but he was kicked out in 1956 for rowdy behavior. “I was in a pretty bad way as a young guy,” he later told public-television interviewer Charlie Rose. “Quite lost, quite edgy, pretty much always seeking the edge of everything, which wasn’t healthy.”

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.

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 “honey trap.” Instead he accepted $110 a week to appear in a Broadway-bound Neil Simon comedy, “Barefoot in the Park” (1963), as an uptight young lawyer adjusting to life with his free-spirited new wife (Elizabeth Ashley).

After a series of wan movie parts, the 1967 film version of “Barefoot in the Park” 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 “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.”

Studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox were unenthusiastic about Mr. Redford, viewing him as the good-looking lightweight from “Barefoot.” Newman — who was initially cast as the Sundance Kid, a gambler and gunslinger — rose to Mr. Redford’s defense.

Mr. Redford saw William Goldman’s 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.

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.

He used his power to star in and help produce the low-budget “Downhill Racer” (1969), which featured one of Mr. Redford’s least-seen but most daring performances — as a world-class skier and abrasive cad.

Mr. Redford modeled his character on the brash Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz. “It was cool to be a jerk,” Mr. Redford told Callan of the ethos of the time. “Winning was everything, bad behavior now excused. … He isn’t nice to the coach because he doesn’t have to be. This is not a good role model marker for the way we, as a society, are going.”

The film marked what Mr. Redford hoped would be several films about “the Pyrrhic victory of winning” — 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 “The Candidate” (1972), in which he played a California civil rights lawyer who loses his soul while running for the U.S. Senate.

“I’ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person,” Mr. Redford later told the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph. “Once 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’d say to Warner’s or Columbia or Fox, ‘Okay, I’d be happy to do “The Way We Were.” But if I do, would you let me make “The Candidate” or “Downhill Racer”?’ Finally they’d say, ‘Yes, if it’s under $2 million.’”

A devoted follower of The Post’s 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 “All the President’s Men.” “This story was allegory, about a certain innocence that was corrupted by Watergate,” Mr. Redford told Callan. “Woodward and Bernstein personified the innocence.”

After Goldman wrote an initial draft of the screenplay, Mr. Redford reportedly objected to the jokey tone reminiscent of “Butch Cassidy.” 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.

Mr. Redford rounded out the decade as an arrogant barnstorming stunt pilot in “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975) and an ex-rodeo champion who steals a horse to save it from commercial exploitation in “The Electric Horseman” (1979). For minimal screen time and maximum payout, he played an American war hero in the all-star World War II epic “A Bridge Too Far” (1977).

For his directing debut, Mr. Redford chose the Judith Guest novel “Ordinary People,” 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 against type as the bottled-up mother, a performance that brought her an Oscar nod.

The film, made for $6 million, took in $115 million and was lavished with acclaim — including a best picture award — for its tasteful restraint. Mr. Redford told Callan he was unnerved by the success. “There are only so many times you want to be told, ‘This is the best thing since ‘Gone With the Wind’ or ‘You are the best leading man since Moses,’ ” he said. “I thought, Screw this! and disappeared.”

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 transcendental state of release that brought me away from the pain and anxieties of the world.”

Eight years passed before he returned to directing, with “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988). He took acting jobs, but only a few. In “The Natural” (1984), he played a baseball player bedeviled by his past. His performances in “Havana” (1990), as a gambler in prerevolutionary Cuba, and in “Indecent Proposal” (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.

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.

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. By the early 1970s, his holdings included a small ski resort that, along with a Western-oriented apparel catalogue, helped subsidize the Sundance Institute.

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 — including a 36-page photo spread in National Geographic featuring the actor traversing the landscape on horseback — that ignited fierce community backlash to his efforts. Derided as liberal carpetbagger, he was hanged in effigy.

“I had to hear over and over again all through the ’70s, ‘Oh, what does he know, he’s an actor,’” he said decades later while being honored by the League of Conservation Voters. “Until Reagan got elected, and that took that argument off the table.”

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.

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.

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. “The gothic part of my nature came down on me,” he told Callan. “I know it sounds self-absorbed, and in hindsight it was, but it felt like retribution.” His son James had a lifetime of health setbacks stemming from an autoimmune disease and died in 2020.

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.

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 “inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”

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.

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.

As a solitude-seeking adventurer who faces distress at sea in “All Is Lost” (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 magnificent underplayer, a master of small, clear gestures and soft-spoken intensity.” He later starred as a bank robber and prison escape artist in “The Old Man & the Gun” (2018).

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.