Robert Redford, Oscar-Winning Actor and Director, Dies at 89

NEED TO KNOW

• Robert Redford, Oscar-winning actor, director and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, has died

• Redford was known for his performances in movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, All the President's Men and Ordinary People

• He was also outspoken as a climate activist and founded The Redford Center with his late son James in 2005

Robert Redford, the longtime Hollywood icon and star of classic films such as 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and 1985's Out of Africa, has died. He was 89.

"Robert Redford passed away on Sept. 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved," Cindi Berger, chairman and CEO of Rogers & Cowan PMK, tells PEOPLE in a statement. "He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy."

According The New York Times, who was the first to report the actor's death, Redford died at his home outside Provo on Tuesday morning. No cause of death was given, but Berger told the outlet in a statement that he died in his sleep.

A leading Hollywood heartthrob at his peak in the 1970s, Redford had talent to back up his good looks. His decades-long career earned him a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for 1973's The Sting, the Best Director award for 1980's Ordinary People and another Best Director nomination for 1994's Quiz Show.

"I've spent most of my life just focused on the road ahead, not looking back," Redford said in the acceptance speech for his 2002 honorary Oscar. "But now tonight, I'm seeing in the rearview mirror that there is something I've not thought about much, called history."

Born Aug. 18, 1936 in Santa Monica, California, Redford was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his Broadway debut in 1959's Tall Story, followed by a lead in 1963's Barefoot in the Park — a role he reprised in the 1967 film adaptation alongside Jane Fonda. His onscreen career began in the early 1960s with roles on TV shows like Tate, Route 66, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables.

And of course, his career reached new heights in 1969 when he landed the role of outlaw the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alongside the late Paul Newman.

“I was being put up for Butch Cassidy because I’d done the comedy. But that part didn't interest me,” Redford told Collider in 2019. “What interested me was the Sundance Kid because I could relate to that based on my own experience and particularly my own childhood and feeling like an outlaw most of my life."

He added, "So I told [director] George [Roy Hill], and he knew Paul really well and knew he was much more like Butch Cassidy, so George turned it all around. He went to Paul and they argued a bit until Paul finally realized that George was right. He was well known and I wasn't, which is why they switched the title, too.”

More of Redford's most memorable films included The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), All the President's Men (1976), The Natural (1984), Indecent Proposal (1993), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and All Is Lost (2013).

In addition to Ordinary People, he directed A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Lions for Lambs (2007) and several other films.

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In August 2018, Redford told Entertainment Weekly that he would be retiring after making The Old Man & the Gun, in which he starred alongside Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter and Tom Waits.

"Never say never, but I pretty well concluded that this would be it for me in terms of acting, and [I'll] move towards retirement after this 'cause I've been doing it since I was 21," he said at the time.

A month later, at the premiere of the film, he told PEOPLE he regretted saying he was retiring and emphasized he was not sure what the future held.

As Redford explained, "I think it was a mistake to say that I was retiring because you never know. It did feel like it was time, maybe, to concentrate on another category."

This past March, Redford returned to the screen for the first time in six years with a cameo on the thriller series Dark Winds. It would mark his final screen role.

Leading up to that cameo, Redford had lent his voice to 2020's Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia, as well as his wife Sibylle Szaggars Redford's 2024 performance-art piece "The Way of the Rain — Hope for Earth."

While he collected many accolades for his work onscreen and behind the camera (including the Golden Globes' prestigious Cecil B. DeMille Award and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award), Redford experienced tragedy in his personal life. In 2020, his son James Redford died from bile-duct cancer in his liver at the age of 58.

"The grief is immeasurable with the loss of a child," Redford's rep said in a statement at the time. "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."

Redford and ex-wife Lola Van Wagenen had four children together: Scott (who died just two months after his birth in 1959 from sudden infant death syndrome), Shauna, James and Amy. Redford also lost his mother after a difficult pregnancy, when Redford was a teen.

Redford married Sibylle in 2009. In a cover story for AARP The Magazine a few years later, he said his wife, who was 20 years his junior, was a "very special person" and gave him a "whole new life."

The two first met in 1996 at his Sundance Mountain Resort, though Sibylle, who is a multimedia artist, admitted later on that she knew very little about the actor.

"It was a wonderful beginning of a relationship, because it began as two human beings meeting each other and finding a connection as two human beings, rather than being colored by success," Redford once said.

Together with James, Redford co-founded The Redford Center in 2005, a nonprofit focusing on producing films and providing grants to filmmakers who direct films that touch on climate change and the environment, a cause the actor cared deeply about.

In 2015, Redford was among a group of celebrities who gathered in Paris to help encourage the United Nations to strengthen their stance on global warming. The conference brought together 195 nations and lasted nearly 11 days. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn were also among those who made a personal pleas to reduce fossil-fuel emissions.

"This has to be the time because we're running out of time. It's been so many years but there's no more time," Redford said at the time.

In 1975, Redford cemented his reputation as an environmental activist after he appeared on 60 Minutes and invited Dan Rather (whom Redford later portrayed in 2015's Truth) to visit the site of a proposed power-plant construction he opposed. The nationally televised report forced the plant's cancellation.

Redford was also passionate about supporting filmmakers and artists, and founded the Sundance Institute before launching the Sundance Film Festival in 1984.

In his 2002 honorary-Oscar acceptance speech, he said that his personal work is "most important to me," along with "trying to put something back into an industry that's been good to me. And, of course, Sundance is a manifestation of that."

Also in the speech, Redford said it was "important" to "make sure the freedom of artistic expression is nurtured and kept alive, because I believe that in keeping diversity alive it will help keep our industry alive."

"To be able to be part of a freedom of expression that allows us as artists to tell our stories in our own way about the human condition, the complexities of life, the world around us, is a gift and not one to be taken lightly," he added. "And I think the glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it. As an artist, I just can't think of a better life than the one that I've been blessed with."

Redford is survived by his wife, daughters Shauna and Amy and grandchildren.

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