Academy Award-winning American actor, director, producer, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 90, according to the film portal Variety.com.
His agency reported that Redford died at his home in Utah, surrounded by his loved ones.
Redford was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1936. Thanks to his talent in baseball, he was admitted to the University of Colorado. After his mother’s death, his behavior became problematic, and because of frequent troubles and wild escapades, he lost his athletic scholarship after a year and a half and had to leave the university.
Taking odd jobs, he traveled extensively across the United States and Europe, studying painting in Paris and Florence, set design and acting in New York. After smaller stage roles, his breakthrough came with the Broadway play Barefoot in the Park.
His first major film role was in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), alongside Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda. That same year, he first collaborated with director Sydney Pollack in the romantic drama This Property Is Condemned, based on Tennessee Williams’s work—the beginning of a partnership that would span seven films. In 1967, he scored a huge success with the lighthearted film adaptation of Barefoot in the Park, again opposite Jane Fonda.
One of his most memorable roles came two years later in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he starred with Paul Newman. Their quarrelsome outlaw duo reunited for the 1973 caper comedy The Sting, which earned Redford an Academy Award nomination.
By the early 1970s, magazines were calling him the most handsome man alive, and he had his pick of roles. He starred in Pollack’s romantic The Way We Were (with Barbra Streisand), in the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, in the tense political thriller Three Days of the Condor, and in All the President’s Men with Dustin Hoffman, portraying the journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal.
Behind the camera, he made his directorial debut with Ordinary People (1980), a drama about the breakdown of a seemingly ordinary family, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. In the 1980s, he appeared in just three films: the baseball drama The Natural (showcasing his baseball talent), Legal Eagles, and Pollack’s Oscar-sweeping Out of Africa, opposite Meryl Streep.
Pollack also directed him in Havana (1990), a romance set in Batista’s Cuba on the eve of revolution, echoing Casablanca. He had success with Sneakers, directed A River Runs Through It, and played a charismatic but morally dubious billionaire in Indecent Proposal.
He was nominated again for Best Director for Quiz Show (1994), followed by Up Close and Personal (with Michelle Pfeiffer) and The Horse Whisperer (in which he directed and starred).
In 2000 he filmed Spy Game with Brad Pitt, largely shot in Budapest, and in 2005 he portrayed an aging alcoholic grandfather in An Unfinished Life. In the political thriller The Company You Keep (2012), he served as director, producer, and actor.
A year later, in the nearly wordless All Is Lost, he delivered a heroic performance as a lone sailor struggling against the elements after a boating accident. In 2017 he reunited with Jane Fonda in Our Souls at Night, about two widowed neighbors who form a platonic bond.
In the true-crime comedy The Old Man & the Gun, he portrayed a charming bank robber, earning a Golden Globe nomination. His final film appearance was in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame (2019).
In 1980 he founded the Sundance Institute in Utah to support independent filmmakers. Its annual Sundance Film Festival has since become one of the world’s most important showcases for cinema (named after one of his most iconic roles).
Although he became famous as an actor, he is among the few to have won an Academy Award as a director, joining Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Richard Attenborough, and Kevin Costner. In 2002 he received an Honorary Oscar recognizing his achievements as a director, producer, and mentor for new talent.
Among his many accolades are the Kennedy Center Honors, the Chaplin Award from New York’s Lincoln Center, two Golden Globe Awards, the Cecil B. DeMille Award (the honorary Golden Globe), and a BAFTA Award. He also received France’s Legion of Honour, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, and in 2019 an Honorary César (the French equivalent of the Oscar).
He is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars, two children, and several grandchildren.
(MTI)
