Robert Redford, Actor And Oscar-Winning Director, Dead At 89
Actor and Oscar-winning director Robert Redford has died at the age of 89.
His publicist, Cindi Berger, told The New York Times that he died in his sleep Tuesday morning at his Utah home. No cause of death was disclosed.
Redford won an Academy Award for directing Ordinary People (1980), along with a BAFTA Award and two Golden Globes. He later received the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and an Academy Honorary Award, as well as a Kennedy Center Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
His final acting appearance came earlier this year, when he made an uncredited cameo in the Season 3 premiere of AMC's Dark Winds, alongside fellow executive producer George R.R. Martin.
Additional TV credits early in his career included episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Dr. Kildare, Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone and The Virginian. In 2023, he voiced investigative journalist Bob Woodward in the HBO miniseries White House Plumbers — a role he first portrayed in the 1976 Watergate thriller All the President's Men.
Beyond All the President's Men, Redford starred in a string of film classics, including Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Way We Were (1973), The Sting (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Out of Africa (1985). The Sting earned him his only Oscar nomination as an actor, while Quiz Show (1994) brought him additional nominations for Best Director and Best Picture as a producer.
Redford's final big-screen role came in 2019's Avengers: Endgame, where he reprised Hydra leader Alexander Pierce — a character he originated in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
In 1981, Redford founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering new voices in independent film. Three years later, he took over the struggling U.S. Film and Video Festival in Utah, which by 1991 had become the Sundance Film Festival.
"Robert Redford was an immense talent and extraordinarily meaningful figure in our industry as an actor, director, producer and champion of story, character and independent film," AMC Networks said in a statement Tuesday. "We have been inspired and entertained, like so many, by his work over a remarkable career. For the last two decades, we have been proud to work and partner with him through his Sundance Film Festival as well Sundance TV, Sundance Now and, most recently, Dark Winds, a series he had been developing for almost 40 years. He was an American icon whose work will live on forever."