Robert Redford

1936–2025

Breaking News: Robert Redford Dies at Age 89

Robert Redford, the Hollywood A-lister and Oscar-winning director, died at his Utah home on September 16. He was 89. His publicist announced the news but didn’t provide a cause of death.

Redford was the leading man in many classic movies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Way We Were, and The Candidate. In the 1980s, he began directing and won the Academy Award for Best Director for his debut film, Ordinary People. His contributions to cinema also extended to reviving a struggling Utah film festival that became the Sundance Film Festival.

For decades, the native California lived in Utah, where he often championed environmental preservation causes. He is survived by his second wife, the artist Sibylle Szaggars; his two daughters; and seven grandchildren.

Robert Redford, one of the great talents in American film, starred in classics such as The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Candidate, and The Way We Were. Also known for his attractive looks, the actor successfully moved into producing and directing, winning an Oscar for Ordinary People and receiving multiple nods for the Best Picture nominee Quiz Show. His love for independent cinema led him to start the Sundance Institute in the 1980s and champion the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. The California native was also an outspoken environmentalist. Redford died in September 2025 at age 89.

FULL NAME: Charles Robert Redford Jr.
BORN: August 18, 1936
DIED: September 16, 2025
BIRTHPLACE: Santa Monica, California
SPOUSES: Lola Van Wagenen (1958–1985) and Sibylle Szaggars (2009–2025)
CHILDREN: Shauna, Amy, Jamie, and Scott
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

Charles Robert Redford Jr., better known as Robert Redford, was born on August 18, 1936, in a heavily Latino neighborhood in Santa Monica, California. His father, Charles Sr., was a milk man who later worked as an oil company accountant, while his outgoing mother, Martha, had a passion for literature and film.

The public library fed Redford’s love of Greek mythology, as radio and comic strips offered their own entertainment. Redford excelled at sports during his youth, running track and playing tennis and football while also having a robust romantic life. In other arenas, however, Redford said he floundered.

“Actually, I was a failure at everything I tried. I worked as a box boy at a supermarket and got fired. Then my dad got me a job at Standard Oil—fired again,” he explained to Success magazine in 1980. Redford said he had a few run-ins with the law for purloining hubcaps and sneaking onto other people’s property to use their pools.

Eventually, he and his parents moved to the Van Nuys neighborhood in Los Angeles. Redford graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1954.

The following year, his mother died from septicemia, a bloodstream infection. By this point, Redford had also lost a beloved uncle in World War II and his younger twin sisters, who died shortly after birth. In the wake of his mother’s death, the deeply grieving 18-year-old felt lost emotionally.

Redford began attending the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship, but he didn’t distinguish himself as an athlete there. Instead, “I became the campus drunk and blew out before I could ever get going,” he told People magazine in a 1998 interview. Some reports say he dropped out, while others say that Redford was expelled from the university. In either case, he soon decided to move to Europe and become an artist.

His time overseas was an eye-opening experience for the young Redford, who lived the life of a bohemian and learned about art, culture, and international affairs. Redford’s interactions with students in Paris proved to be very significant. “We all lived in a kind of communal way, and I was challenged politically. I didn’t have a clue,” he said in a 2007 New Statesman article. “They would ask me questions—the Algerian War was going on, it was very big in France at the time, this was the late 1950s—I was humiliated. I was ashamed that I didn’t know much about my country’s politics. When I returned to America a year and a half later, I was much more focused on my country culturally and politically.”

After returning to the United States, Redford started a family with his first wife. They lived in New York City, where Redford studied design at the Pratt Institute and then acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1959, he and his wife experienced a terrible loss when the couple’s firstborn died of sudden infant death syndrome. A devastated Redford, who hadn’t been raised to openly express emotional trauma, poured himself into his acting.

Robert Redford started his acting career on stage and on TV shows like The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

His career started out in the theater. He first appeared on Broadway in the 1959 comedy Tall Story followed by The Highest Tree later that year. He landed a substantial part in the 1960 drama Little Moon of Alban with Julie Harris then co-starred with Conrad Janis in another humorous outing, 1961’s Sunday in the Park.

His stage work led to a fair amount of TV roles on shows such as Perry Mason, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and The Twilight Zone. He even picked up an Emmy nomination for a part in Fred Astaire’s Premiere. Still, his biggest breakthrough to date was a leading role in the 1963 theatrical production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. In the romantic comedy directed by Mike Nichols, Redford played Paul Bratter, a newlywed lawyer who establishes a Greenwich Village home with his wife, Corie, who was played by Elizabeth Ashley.

Redford made his big-screen debut in 1962’s War Hunt, but the actor’s film career didn’t really take off until 1967 when he reprised his stage role as Paul in the film adaptation of Barefoot in the Park, opposite Jane Fonda. Redford then gave an iconic, star-making turn in the 1969 western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the film, he played the outlaw known as the Sundance Kid while co-star Paul Newman portrayed Butch Cassidy. The two proved to be a dynamic duo onscreen and forged a lasting friendship, with the movie enjoying both critical and commercial success.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman co-starred in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. The 1969 classic movie established Redford as an in-demand leading man.

Not one to be typecast as a “pretty boy” and quite particular about the tone of his projects, Redford sought out more challenging fare and mostly avoided trading on his obvious sex appeal. He tackled the sports drama Downhill Racer and the western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, both released in 1969. Another important film for Redford was the 1972 political drama The Candidate, a dark, satirical look at campaigning.

As his career thrived, Redford sought refuge from the Hollywood scene. He had bought land in Utah in the 1960s, and he continued to add to his holdings there over the years. His love of land encouraged him to become active in environmental causes. In the 1970s, Redford even received death threats for his efforts to stop certain developments in Utah.

Redford had a banner year in 1973 with two major hit films: The Way We Were and The Sting. In Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were, Redford starred opposite Barbra Streisand in a drama that charts the ups and downs of a couple who can’t help but be together despite their differing backgrounds and passions. For The Sting, Redford again joined forces with Newman to play con artists in 1930s Chicago. Redford was subsequently nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards; it marked the only Oscar nod of his acting career.

The middle of the decade saw the actor starring with Mia Farrow in the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. He then teamed up with Faye Dunaway in the 1975 CIA thriller Three Days of the Condor, also directed by Pollack. After securing the film rights himself, Redford returned to political fare and scored another success with 1976’s All the President’s Men. He and Dustin Hoffman played reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the acclaimed drama about the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

With his focus largely on directing and the Sundance Institute, Redford chose only a few acting roles in the 1980s and ’90s. He starred in the baseball drama The Natural (1984) with Robert Duvall and Glenn Close as well as the romance Out of Africa (1985), opposite Meryl Streep. Indecent Proposal, with Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, was one of the major hits of 1993 despite mostly negative reviews. Redford returned to journalism drama with Up Close & Personal (1996), co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

With 1980’s Ordinary People, Redford proved he was more than a movie idol. His directorial debut provided a heartbreaking look at a family torn apart by loss and grief. The drama—starring Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton—won Redford the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Director.

The Oscar winner established the Sundance Institute in 1981 to support independent filmmakers through workshops and other means. The organization rescued a struggling film festival three years later and renamed it the Sundance Film Festival. The annual event has become one of the premier outlets for indie films to be viewed and promoted.

“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of,” Redford told the Associated Press in 2018. “But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”

Among the nine major movies Robert Redford directed were Ordinary People, Quiz Show, and A River Runs Through It.

Redford continued directing with The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), starring Ruben Blades and Sonia Braga. The film showcases a group of local farmers struggling against a major development project in their area. Redford then earned great accolades for his rural family drama A River Runs Through It (1992), which starred Brad Pitt and Tom Skerritt.

Two years later, the director explored the real-life corruption of 1950s game shows in Quiz Show, again earning strong praise for his work and two more Oscar nominations in the categories of Directing and Best Picture. Redford later became a triple threat in 1998’s The Horse Whisperer, working as director, producer, and star of the project.

In 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Redford’s contributions to cinema in 2001 with an honorary Oscar for serving as an “inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”

Redford became even more selective about his film work in the new millennium. After 2000’s The Legend of Bagger Vance, he directed and starred in 2007’s political drama Lions for Lambs with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, which proved to be a commercial and critical disappointment. His next directorial effort, The Conspirator, was released in 2011 and looks at the trial of Mary Surratt, the only woman charged in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. The following year, Redford directed and starred in The Company You Keep, co-starring Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie. The thriller tells the story of a 1960s radical who has been living underground and is discovered by a reporter.

Redford gave an impressive performance on the big screen in 2013’s All Is Lost, playing a sailor caught in dire, life-threatening circumstances. The one-man movie had shockingly little dialogue, and buzz brewed of possible awards in the Hollywood veteran’s future. Yet awards season came and went with Redford only having a Golden Globe nomination to show for it.

After co-starring in the 2014 Marvel Comics outing Captain America: The Winter Soldier (in a role he reprised for 2019’s Avengers: Endgame), Redford took on another kind of adventure in the adaptation of Bill Bryson’s memoir A Walk in the Woods. The following year, Redford portrayed real-world journalist Dan Rather in Truth, a film that explores 60 Minutes’s controversial coverage of George W. Bush’s military service.

In August 2018, two years after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, Redford announced that his starring role in the upcoming crime comedy The Old Man & the Gun would bring his long and distinguished acting career to a close. “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,” Redford, then 81, told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s enough.’ And why not go out with something that’s very upbeat and positive?”

Redford was married to Sibylle Szaggars, a German painter, for about 16 years. The couple’s relationship dated back to the mid-1990s. They wed in 2009 in Hamburg and remained together at the time of Redford’s death.

Sibylle Szaggars was Robert Redford’s second wife. The couple were together for roughly three decades up until his death.

Robert Redford and his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, were married for more than 25 years and had four children together.

The actor and director was previously married to Lola Van Wagenan from 1958 until 1985. They met in Los Angeles and spent some time in New York City before ultimately settling in Utah. Their marriage endured unfathomable tragedy early on. In 1959, their first child, Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was a few months old. Robert and Lola went on to have two daughters and a son—Shauna, born in 1960; David, who went by Jamie and was born in 1962; and Amy, born in 1970—before they divorced.

In her early 20s, Shauna survived a serious car accident when her car plunged into a river near Salt Lake City. She also endured the loss of her college boyfriend, who was murdered in a still-unsolved case. Today, she is a professional painter.

Both Jamie and Amy followed their father’s footsteps into show business. Jamie became a filmmaker, and Amy has worked as an actor and director.

Family tragedy struck again in October 2020 when Redford’s son, Jamie, died while waiting for a liver transplant. He had two previous transplants in 1993 as a result of a rare autoimmune disease. Then in November 2019, Jamie was diagnosed with cancer in his bile duct. He was 58 when he died.

• People think it’s been easy for me. That’s hard to live with. It’s so untrue. The hardest thing in the world is when your children have problems. There have been so many hits on our family that no one knows about, and I don’t want them to, for my family’s sake. I’ve made some interesting movies, and I’ve been very satisfied with the work, but if someone wrapped it all up and said to me, “What’s your greatest achievement?” I’d say, “The children. They’re the best thing in my life.”
• I’m not afraid of aging. It’s a fact of life, unless you go to some length to arrest it, and that’s not me... Nobody is swooning over someone my age. They see me, and they’re more likely to say, “Oh, is he still around?”
• Sundance is an arts community, a recreational community, a community of people who appreciate the beauty of nature and feel the responsibility to preserve it.
• I grew up in a Spanish-speaking part of Santa Monica, in a crackerbox home with a teeny strip of grass for a backyard. When I had a paper route, I’d finish and just take off. I’d ride some more and lie in the grass somewhere and stare, and I’d think about being someplace else, living a different life. You need to create your own solitude.
• I gave up a long time ago the idea that a film can change people’s lives, let alone their politics. I discovered we Americans enjoy the distraction of entertainment but aren’t really interested in the deeper message.
  
• I’ve always separated my public self from the private so I could have one. I don’t feel I’ve owed my life to the public—a performance, yes, but my life, no.
  

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