Robert Redford, the Oscar-winning actor, director and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, died in his sleep Tuesday at his home in Utah. He was 89, The New York Times reported.
Redford became one of Hollywood’s best-known leading men, starring in films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men and making his Broadway breakthrough in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park in 1963. He remained active behind the camera as well, directing films including Ordinary People and, in 2018, announcing that The Old Man and the Gun would be his final onscreen role.
Redford’s life and work were marked from an early age by illness and loss. At 11, he contracted a mild case of polio after swimming in the ocean and was bedridden for weeks, an experience he later said left a lasting impression. "It wasn't an iron lung case. It was a case of mild polio, but it was severe enough to put me in bed for two weeks," he said, recalling the era before the Salk vaccine brought broad protection. In 2014, Redford directed a short film about the Salk Institute for a series titled Cathedrals of Culture and linked the building and the vaccine’s development to his own childhood memory of the disease.
After recovering, a trip to Yosemite National Park with his mother proved formative. He later said the visit awakened a deep love of the outdoors and led him to spend two summers working in the park as a teenager. "I distinctly remember the moment I stood in awe of the natural world," he told Smithsonian.com in 2020, recalling that the experience made him want "to be in this." Conservation and wilderness advocacy would remain central themes across his public life.
Redford’s early life also included risky behavior and personal setbacks. Awarded a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado, he became involved in campus drinking circles, experimented with marijuana and pursued drag racing and motorbike racing. He survived a high-speed crash on the way to a race and later lost his scholarship after his academic standing suffered following his mother’s death when he was 18. In his 2011 memoir, Robert Redford: The Biography, he recounted an episode in which bullies forced him to jump from a building, writing that the incident crystallized a lesson about confronting fears.
Private grief shadowed his public success. Redford and his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, had four children: Scott, Shauna, James and Amy. Their first son, Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks old, a loss Redford described as leaving a permanent scar. In 2020, their son James, a filmmaker and transplant activist who had long battled chronic liver disease and complications related to bile duct cancer, died at 58. The family issued a statement saying, "The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child. 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."
Over a career that spanned decades, Redford earned critical acclaim and industry honors, including an Academy Award for directing Ordinary People and an honorary Academy Award in 2002. He also founded the Sundance Film Festival, which became a major platform for independent filmmaking and a locus for conversations about art and the natural world.
Colleagues and cultural institutions have over the years noted his dual reputation as a charismatic screen presence and a private, sometimes guarded, public figure with deep commitments to conservation and independent film. Redford narrated a documentary about Yosemite in 2016 and frequently spoke about the influence of nature and the environment on his life and work.
Details about mourning and memorial arrangements were not immediately available. Redford is survived by family members, including two children from his first marriage; his full family statement and further tributes were expected in the days following the report of his death.
Redford’s life combined high-profile Hollywood success with personal tragedy and a long-standing public commitment to environmental causes and independent cinema. His passing marks the end of a career that shaped American film and helped create one of the nation’s most influential arts festivals, while also reminding many of the private losses that accompanied his public achievements.