Robert Redford (born Charles Robert Redford Jr.; 18 August 1936 – 16 September 2025)

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on 18 August 1936 in Santa Monica, California, to Martha Hart (1914–1955) and Charles Robert Redford (1914–1991), an accountant and milkman. Redford is of English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry.

His mother died when he was eighteen, a loss he later described as one of the defining sorrows of his early life.

After graduating from high school in 1954, he attended the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, Colorado for a year and a half, but was kicked out of school because of his heavy drinking. He went on to travel in Europe, living in France, Spain, and Italy. 

After a period studying art in Paris, Redford returned to the United States in 1957 and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. That same year, in Los Angeles, he met Lola Van Wagenen, a Mormon college student from Provo, Utah. The two married in Las Vegas on 9 August 1958.

Their first child, a son named Scott Anthony Redford, was born in September 1959 and died two months later of sudden infant death syndrome, a loss that left Redford, only twenty-three, guilt-ridden for years afterward even though nothing could have prevented it. The couple went on to have three more children: Jean Redford, born 1960, David James Redford, born 1962, and Amy Hart Redford, born 1970.

Redford's acting career began on television, with his first credited role on an episode of Perry Mason in 1959, and built steadily through stage work, including a role in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park on Broadway in 1963 that he later reprised on screen opposite Jane Fonda.

His defining break came in 1969, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a role he won largely thanks to his co-star Paul Newman, who pushed to have him cast. 

Redford called it the most fun he ever had making a film, and the friendship it began lasted the rest of both men's lives; for years the two families lived within a mile of each other in Connecticut, and traded elaborate practical jokes, on one occasion a junked Porsche delivered to Newman's driveway as a gag gift. 

Redford and Newman reunited in 1973 for The Sting, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and brought Redford his only Oscar nomination for acting.

Redford starred in a run of major films through the 1970s, Starting in 1973, Redford experienced an almost-unparalleled four-year run of box office success, including The Way We Were (1973) opposite Barbra Streisand, the romantic drama The Great Gatsby (1974), and All the President's Men (1976), playing the journalist Bob Woodward. Each year between 1974 and 1976, movie exhibitors voted Redford Hollywood's top box-office star.

​All the President's Men (1976), in which Redford and Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was a landmark film for Redford. The film landed eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director (Alan J. Pakula), while winning for the Best Screenplay (Goldman). It actually won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture and Best Director.

Robert Redford had long harbored ambitions to work on both sides of the camera. In 1980, he moved behind the camera to direct Ordinary People, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director in his very first outing.

​With the financial proceeds of his acting success, Redford bought an entire ski area on the east side of Mount Timpanogos northeast of Provo, Utah, called "Timp Haven", in 1969, and renamed it "Sundance."  based on his Sundance Kid character.

In 1978, Lola's cousin Sterling Van Wagenen founded the Utah/US Film Festival in Salt Lake City; Redford joined its board, and by 1985 his own Sundance Institute had taken over the event entirely, transforming it over the following decades into the Sundance Film Festival, the most influential launching pad for American independent film.

Redford and Van Wagenen's marriage quietly ended over the following years without a public announcement; reports place the actual divorce around 1985, though its finalization was murky enough that a 1991 magazine report still called it unclear. 

Redford continued acting and directing through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, he starred in Out of Africa (1985) directed by Sydney Pollack opposite Meryl Streep. 

The movie became a large box office success, won a Golden Globe for Best Picture, and won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress but Redford did not receive a nomination. The movie proved to be Redford's biggest success of the decade and Redford and Pollack's most successful of their seven movies together. 

In 1992, Redford released his third film as a director, A River Runs Through It, , which was a return to mainstream success for Redford as a director and brought a young Brad Pitt to greater prominence. 

In 1993, Redford played what became one of his most popular and recognized roles, starring in Indecent Proposal as a millionaire businessman who tests a couple's morals; the film became one of the year's biggest hits.

In the 1990s Robert Redford started a relationship with German painter Sibylle Szaggars, and moved in with Redford into his home in Sundance, Utah. In July 2009, the two married married at the Louis C. Jacob Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. They remained married for the rest of his life.

Tragedy returned to Redford's family in October 2020, when his son James, a documentary filmmaker and fellow environmental advocate, died of bile-duct cancer at fifty-eight, the second of Redford's sons he outlived.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Redford an Honorary Award in 2002 for his career and his contributions to independent film. He continued acting into his eighties, gradually favoring smaller and more personal projects.

Robert Redford died at his home in Sundance, Utah, on 16 September 2025, at eighty-nine, "in the mountains he loved," as his publicist put it, "surrounded by those he loved." 

He was survived by Sibylle Szaggars, his daughters Shauna and Amy, and seven grandchildren. Tributes poured in from across the industry he had spent six decades shaping both in front of the camera and, through Sundance, far behind it; Meryl Streep summed up the loss in four words: "One of the lions has passed."