Robert Redford — a two-time Oscar winner who charmed audiences with “The Way We Were” and “Barefoot in the Park,” directed the complex dramas “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show,” and founded the Sundance Institute to promote independent storytelling — has died. He was 89.
“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” Rogers & Cowan PMK chief executive Cindi Berger told The Post in a statement. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”
Berger told the New York Times that Redford died in his sleep. No cause of death was given.
Known for his strawberry-blond hair and boyishly handsome looks, Redford’s Hollywood career spanned over six decades, garnering him five Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
His most memorable acting work includes roles in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “The Sting” (1973), “All the President’s Men” (1976), “The Natural” (1984) and “Out of Africa” (1985).
“The idea of being an actor was to have a sense of freedom. You were free to be, to act as someone else, if you were paying attention to the people around you,” Redford told Collider in 2019.
“You had a chance to be an artist, because acting is an art form. You had a chance to say, ‘I know this person, I’ve seen this person before and I want to bring that forward.’”
Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1936, the acclaimed actor-director grew up in Southern California.
He was a sportsman during his youth, having played football and tennis and run track. His father, Charles, was an oil company accountant, while his mother, Martha, had a passion for literature and the arts.
He struggled to find his own path.
“I was a failure at everything I tried. I worked as a box boy at a supermarket and got fired. Then my dad got me a job at Standard Oil — fired again,” he told Success magazine in 1980 about his teenage work ethic.
He graduated high school in 1954 and briefly attended the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Tragedy struck in 1955 when his mom died of septicemia — a bacterial infection in the bloodstream. He was 18 years old.
He dashed off to Europe shortly thereafter and focused on being an artist.
“I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting. Doing that, I realized how much I loved it,” he told his grandson, producer-director Dylan Redford, in an interview published in 2016.
“Later, when I became an actor, I suffered for four or five years not being sure I wanted to be in that business because I so wanted to be an artist. I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.”
He returned to the US to study in NYC at the Pratt Institute and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
In 1959, he made his Broadway debut in “Tall Story.” The starring part as conservative lawyer-turned-newlywed Paul Bratter in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” followed in 1963.
He would reprise his Broadway role in the 1967 film adaptation opposite Jane Fonda, his frequent co-star.
He made his film debut in the adaptation of “Tall Story” (1960), led by Fonda. They also appeared in “The Chase” (1966) and “The Electric Horseman” (1979).
In fact, Redford starred alongside an impressive batch of actresses over the years, such as Barbra Streisand, Faye Dunaway, Meryl Streep, Michelle Pfeiffer, Debra Winger and Natalie Wood.
He initially didn’t want to be paired with Streisand in “The Way We Were,” finding the “Funny Girl” actress to have a “controlling” reputation.
Robert Hofler reported in his 2023 book “The Way They Were: How Epic Battles and Bruised Egos Brought a Classic Hollywood Love Story to the Screen” that Redford told director Sydney Pollack: “She will direct herself. It’ll never work.”
The flick itself was close to not being made, according to Hofler. The stars had clashing acting styles. Scripts were frequently changed, and filming was difficult as the actors didn’t like to rehearse beforehand.
But when it premiered in 1973, it was a commercial success, winning two Oscars and earning Streisand a Best Actress nod.
For his part, Redford was very prolific in the 1960s and ’70s.
“When I was young, I said to myself, ‘You’ve got to make the most of your life.’ It’s all about taking risks,’” Redford told Esquire UK in 2017. “Push yourself to do as much exploration as possible. Find yourself. Because sometimes we think we’ve found ourselves, but it’s only part of ourselves we’ve found.”
He won the Golden Globe for Best New Star for “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965) alongside Wood and cemented his status as a leading man in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with Paul Newman.
Redford and Newman starred together again, as conniving grifters in the crime drama “The Sting,” which is considered the greatest hit of Redford’s career. He was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, his first and only nomination in that category. (He would win an honorary Academy Award in 2002.)
He found success in the ’70s playing a political nepo baby in “The Candidate” (1972); Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby” (1974); and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in the Watergate scandal retelling “All The President’s Men.”
He won the Golden Globe for Favorite World Film Star in 1975, 1977 and 1978.
He dipped his toes in the directing world by helming “Ordinary People” in 1980.
The emotional family drama won four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture.
Four years later, Redford starred as Roy Hobbs in “The Natural,” which has been called “arguably the best baseball movie ever made.”
He also played Streep’s character’s lover in “Out of Africa,” which won seven Oscars.
His heartthrob roles continued in the ’90s with “Indecent Proposal” (1993) and “Up Close & Personal” (1996).
He also directed Brad Pitt in “A River Runs Through It” (1992); “Quiz Show” (1994), which scored four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director; “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), which featured himself as the lead; and “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), starring Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2008, Redford couldn’t pinpoint his favorite project.
“If something were to impress or satisfy me most it is having made films that I was told couldn’t be made. That was very satisfying for me,” Redford explained.
Redford reconnected with his “Horse Whisperer” co-star Scarlett Johansson for Marvel’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014), playing villain Alexander Pierce.
When asked what drew him to that role, the filmmaker told the Los Angeles Times in 2013 that it was different from his typical work.
“I wanted to experience this new form of filmmaking that’s taken over where you have kind of cartoon characters brought to life through high technology,” he said.
He starred again with Fonda in the Netflix film “Our Souls at Night” (2017).
He announced in August 2018 that he would be retiring from acting, with “The Old Man & The Gun” serving as his final project.
At the time, he noted that he “can’t last forever” and he “put my soul and heart into it over the years.”
“I thought, ‘That’s enough. Why don’t you quit while you’re a little bit ahead? Don’t wait for the bell to toll. Just get out.’ So I felt my time had come and I couldn’t think of a better project to go out on than this film,” he said at the Telluride Film Festival about the western flick.
But a month later, Redford admitted that he regretted saying he was retiring.
“I think it was a mistake to say that I was retiring because you never know,” he told People in September 2018. “It did feel like it was time maybe, to concentrate on another category.”
In March 2025, Redford returned to acting after a six-year break in the AMC show “Dark Winds,” a crime drama set in the ‘70s about Navajo Tribal Police officers
Redford made a cameo in the Season 3 premiere alongside “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin. Both men also served as executive producers on the project.
According to Vulture, Redford and Martin’s scene was shot on a closed set at Redford’s request.
“He was adamant that — I remember distinctly him saying, ‘Whatever Chris wants,’” the episode’s director, Chris Eyre, told The Post about Redford’s rare taping. “As we said, ‘How do you want this, and how should we do this?’ [Redford] just kept saying, ‘Whatever Chris wants.’”
Eyre continued of the legendary actor, “He has always been generous. I think what he wanted was to give me that right as a director and a filmmaker.”
Redford’s voice has been used in subsequent projects including grandson Dylan’s “Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia” (2020) and “White House Plumbers” (2022), a satirical drama about Watergate.
Off screen, the “Legal Eagles” star founded the Sundance Institute and became the face of the Sundance Film Festival, which celebrates the indie genre.
“Call it masochistic, but I don’t accept failure easily. And I’m very competitive. The good thing about Sundance is that I’m competing for what I consider to be a higher purpose: making the world safe for artistic diversity,” Redford said in an interview with Harvard Business Review in 2002.
“If you want to bring about real, sustained change, you have to be constantly aware that you are not just taking care of yourself.”
The star-studded annual film festival in Park City, Utah, was spearheaded in 1978 by the since-disgraced Sterling Van Wagenen, head of Redford’s production company Wildwood.
Van Wagenen’s cousin, Lola, married Redford in 1958. They had four children together.
Their eldest son, Scott, died in 1959 at 2 months old due to sudden infant death syndrome.
The pair also welcomed Shauna in 1960, David James in 1962, and Amy in 1970. They divorced in 1985.
Redford married his second wife, Sibylle Szaggars, in 2009.
His son David, who went by James, died in 2020 at the age of 58 after a battle with liver cancer.
“The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child,” Redford told Page Six in a statement at the time.
James and his father co-founded the Redford Center, which promises to “use impact-driven film and media to accelerate environmental and climate justice, solutions and repair.”
Redford had long been an environmental activist, having joined the Natural Resources Defense Council as a trustee in 1975.
“I was attending a conference in Denver, in 1989, where there was a presentation by two scientists who explained Earth’s temperatures were rising — they called it global warming. They explained what would happen if we ignored this threat,” Redford recalled to Rolling Stone in 2021.
“That moment was my wake-up call. I knew they were speaking the truth. Because one thing we’ve learned is that time waits for no one. I realized that when there’s something you have to do, you better act, and act quickly.”
Redford also had the distinct honor of meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2019.
Redford had applauded the leader of the Catholic Church’s advocacy for climate change, writing an essay for MSNBC in 2015 in which he described the pope as someone who finally “moved” the “needle.”
“The pontiff’s timely message of more dialogue and less discord, respect for life in all of its stages, and a call to protect our common home was irrepressible and impossible to ignore,” he wrote. “Sometimes you need a friend to tell you the truth.”
“It took someone from outside the US to come and remind us who we are — and who we are supposed to be,” he added.
Redford is survived by Szaggars and his two daughters.
He had seven grandchildren.
When Rolling Stone asked what advice he wished he could pass on to his younger self, at first Redford laughed and said, “Why did you ever get into this?”
Then he answered: “I’d probably say always look for the truth, even though truths can be elusive. I’m always inspired by the words of T.S. Eliot: ‘For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’ So maybe, ‘Just follow your instincts and keep searching for the truth.’”
