Robert Redford, the Oscar-winning actor and director, has died at 89. According to The New York Times, he passed away in his sleep on Tuesday at his home in Utah. His death was confirmed by Cindi Berger, chief executive of Rogers & Cowan PMK.
Redford rose to fame with roles in classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. His breakthrough came in 1963 on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, later reprised on film with Jane Fonda. He also starred alongside Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973).
In 1980, Redford won an Oscar for directing Ordinary People. He later founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 and helped turn a struggling festival into the world-renowned Sundance Film Festival. Still, he criticized its commercialization, once saying, “I want the ambush marketers — the vodka brands and the gift-bag people and the Paris Hiltons — to go away forever.”
His later works included Indecent Proposal (1993) and A Walk in the Woods (2015). In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
An environmental advocate, Redford said in 1961, “I discovered how important nature was in my life.” He is survived by his wife Sibylle Szaggars and his four children.