LOS ANGELES: 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, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.

Redford passed away at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah surrounded by his loved ones, Cindi Berger, CEO of publicity firm Rogers & Cowan, said in an email. She 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.

Intensely private, Redford 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 Defence Council and the National Wildlife Federation.

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”.

Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on Aug 18, 1936, to what he described as a “lower working class family”, Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.

Deciding he wanted to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to study painting. He enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design, but was persuaded to take to the stage and by 1959 he was a full-time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.

He made his movie debut in 1962 in a low-budget film, Warhunt, but first won attention in Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.

He turned down the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and held out for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 2001, he won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2025