Actor, director and producer Robert Redford, who was both the quintessential handsome Hollywood leading man and an influential supporter of independent films through his Sundance Institute, has died at the age of 89, The New York Times reported, citing his publicist.
Redford passed away at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah surrounded by his loved ones, Cindi Berger, CEO of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, said in an email to Reuters.
Berger did not disclose the cause of death.
Once dismissed as “just another California blond”, Redford’s charm and craggy good looks made him one of the industry’s most bankable leading men for half a century, and one of the world’s most recognisable and best-loved movie stars.
Redford made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as Out of Africa, got political in The Candidate and All the President’s Men and skewered his golden-boy image in roles like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in The Electric Horseman and middle-aged millionaire who offers to buy sex in Indecent Proposal.
He used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.
He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director – the 1980 family drama Ordinary People – won Oscars for best picture and best director.
Yet he remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman – the 1969 western caper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (1973), both of which became classics.
Despite their chemistry and long personal friendship, Redford was never to team up again with Newman, who died in 2008.
Butch Cassidy made blue-eyed Redford an overnight star but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.
“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he once told New York magazine.
Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars. He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, before their divorce in 1985. In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist and longtime partner Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
“Some people have analysis. I have Utah,” he once remarked.
Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, during the presidency of Donald Trump, he told Esquire magazine that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Trump should “quit for our benefit”.
