{"id":148163,"date":"2025-09-16T13:44:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T13:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/148163\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T13:44:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T13:44:07","slug":"robert-redford-iconic-film-actor-and-director-dies-at-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/148163\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Redford, iconic film actor and director, dies at 89"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Actor Robert Redford died on Tuesday at the age of 89. His first outing as a director \u2013 the 1980 family drama Ordinary People \u2013 won Oscars for best picture and best director.STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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, had died at the age of 89, The New York Times reported, citing his publicist.<\/p>\n

Once dismissed as \u201cjust another California blond\u201d, Redford\u2019s charm and craggy good looks made him one of the industry\u2019s most bankable leading men for half a century, and one of the world\u2019s most recognizable and best-loved movie stars.<\/p>\n

Redford made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as Out of Africa, got political in The Candidate and All the President\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Robert Redford at the 74th Academy Awards with his honorary Oscar, March, 2002.MIKE NELSON\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director \u2013 the 1980 family drama Ordinary People \u2013 won Oscars for best picture and best director.<\/p>\n

Yet he remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman \u2013 the 1969 western caper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (1973), both of which became classics.<\/p>\n

Despite their chemistry and long personal friendship, Redford was never to team up again with Newman, who died in 2008.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have been so busy relating to how I look, it\u2019s a miracle I didn\u2019t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It\u2019s not easy being Robert Redford,\u201d he once told New York magazine.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people have analysis. I have Utah,\u201d he once remarked.<\/p>\n

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Director Sydney Pollack, left, with actors Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand during the filming of The Way We Were in New York, November, 1972.Marty Lederhandler\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpolitics is in a very dark place right now\u201d and that Trump should \u201cquit for our benefit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on Aug. 18, 1937, to what he described as a \u201clower working class family\u201d, Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.<\/p>\n

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 (\u201cActing seemed ludicrous to me,\u201d he recalled) 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.<\/p>\n

His made his movie debut in 1962 in a low budget film called Warhunt, but first won attention in Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes.Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

He turned down the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (\u201cI never did look like a 21 year-old college student who\u2019d never been laid,\u201d he said later) and held out for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The 1970s brought The Way We Were and The Great Gatsby.<\/p>\n

From the 1980s he devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute \u2013 a year round workshop for aspiring filmmakers \u2013 and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.<\/p>\n

In 2001, he won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.<\/p>\n

Redford remained active in films as an actor and producer right up to the end of his life. In 2017, he reunited with Fonda for the Netflix drama Our Souls at Night, a romance between a widow and widower.<\/p>\n

\u201cI live for sex scenes with him,\u201d Fonda told journalists when the film premiered in Venice. \u201cHe\u2019s a great kisser so it was fun to kiss him in my 20s and to kiss him again in my almost 80s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redford said at the time that it would be one of his last films as an actor and that he was planning to focus more on directing and his first love \u2013 art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Actor Robert Redford died on Tuesday at the age of 89. His first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[901,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,75,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-148163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-entertainment","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}