Robert Redford, Oscar-Winning Actor and Director, Dies at 89

The legendary actor-director was known for films like ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’, ‘The Sting’, ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘Ordinary People’

Robert Redford, the longtime Hollywood icon and star of classic films such as 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and 1985’s Out of Africa, has died. He was 89.

“Robert Redford passed away on Sept. 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” Cindi Berger, chairman and CEO of Rogers & Cowan PMK, said in a statement. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”

According to theThe New York Times, who was the first to report the actor’s death, Redford died at his home outside Provo on Tuesday morning. No cause of death was given, but Berger told the outlet in a statement that he died in his sleep.

A leading Hollywood heartthrob at his peak in the 1970s, Redford had talent to back up his good looks. His decades-long career earned him a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for 1973’s The Sting, the Best Director award for 1980’s Ordinary People and another Best Director nomination for 1994’s Quiz Show.

“I’ve spent most of my life just focused on the road ahead, not looking back,” Redford said in the acceptance speech for his 2002 honorary Oscar. “But now tonight, I’m seeing in the rearview mirror that there is something I’ve not thought about much, called history.”

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1936 in Santa Monica, California, Redford was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his Broadway debut in 1959’s Tall Story, followed by a lead in 1963’s Barefoot in the Park a role he reprised in the 1967 film adaptation alongside Jane Fonda.

His onscreen career began in the early 1960s with roles on TV shows like Tate, Route 66, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables. And of course, he reached new heights in 1969 when he landed the role of outlaw the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alongside the late Paul Newman.

“I was being put up for Butch Cassidy because I’d done the comedy. But that part didn’t interest me,” Redford told Collider in 2019. “What interested me was the Sundance Kid because I could relate to that based on my own experience and particularly my own childhood and feeling like an outlaw most of my life.”

He added, “So I told [director] George [Roy Hill], and he knew Paul really well and knew he was much more like Butch Cassidy, so George turned it all around. He went to Paul and they argued a bit until Paul finally realized that George was right. He was well known and I wasn’t, which is why they switched the title, too.”

More of Redford’s memorable films include The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), All the President’s Men (1976), The Natural (1984), Indecent Proposal (1993), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and All Is Lost (2013).

In addition to Ordinary People, he directed A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Lions for Lambs (2007) and several other films.

In August 2018, Redford told Entertainment Weekly that he would be retiring after making The Old Man & the Gun, inwhich he starred alongside Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter and Tom Waits.

“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,” he said at the time.

A month later, at the premiere of the film, he said that he regretted saying he was retiring and emphasized he was not sure what the future held.

As Redford explained, “I think it was a mistake to say that I was retiring because you never know. It did feel like it was time, maybe, to concentrate on another category.”