Robert Redford, star actor and champion of independent film, 89
ACTOR, director, and producer Robert Redford, who was both the quintessential handsome Hollywood leading man and an influential supporter of independent films through his Sundance Institute, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, his publicist said.
Mr. Redford passed away at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah surrounded by his loved ones, Cindi Berger, chief executive officer (CEO) of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, said in an e-mail to Reuters. Ms. Berger did not disclose the cause of death.
Once dismissed as “just another California blond,” Mr. Redford’s charm and craggy good looks made him one of the industry’s most bankable leading men for half a century, and one of the world’s most recognizable and best-loved movie stars.
Mr. Redford made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as Out of Africa, got political in The Candidate and All the President’s Men and skewered his golden-boy image in roles like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in The Electric Horseman and middle-aged millionaire who offers to buy sex in Indecent Proposal.
He used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.
He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director — the 1980 family drama Ordinary People — won Oscars for best picture and best director.
Yet he remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman — the 1969 western caper Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (1973), both of which became classics.
Despite their chemistry and long personal friendship, Mr. Redford was never to team up again with Mr. Newman, who died in 2008.
Butch Cassidy made blue-eyed Mr. Redford an overnight star but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.
“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he once told New York magazine.
Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars. He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, before their divorce in 1985. In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist and longtime partner Sibylle Szaggars.
Mr. Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
“Some people have analysis. I have Utah,” he once remarked.
Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, he told Esquire magazine that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Mr. Trump should “quit for our benefit.”
DREAMS OF BEING A PAINTER
Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on Aug. 18, 1937, to what he described as a “lower working class family,” Mr. Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.
Deciding he wanted to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to study painting. He enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design (“Acting seemed ludicrous to me,” he recalled) but was persuaded to take to the stage and by 1959 he was a full-time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.
He made his movie debut in 1962 in a low-budget film called Warhunt, but first won attention in Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.
He turned down the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (“I never did look like a 21-year-old college student who’d never been laid,” he said later) and held out for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The 1970s brought The Way We Were and The Great Gatsby.
From the 1980s he devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute — a year-round workshop for aspiring filmmakers — and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.
In 2001, he won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.
Mr. Redford remained active in films as an actor and producer right up to the end of his life. In 2017, he reunited with Ms. Fonda for the Netflix drama Our Souls at Night, a romance between a widow and widower.
“I live for sex scenes with him,” Ms. Fonda told journalists when the film premiered in Venice. “He’s a great kisser so it was fun to kiss him in my 20s and to kiss him again in my almost 80s.”
Mr. Redford said at the time that it would be one of his last films as an actor and that he was planning to focus more on directing and his first love — art.
INDEPENDENT FILMS
In 1981, Mr. Redford launched an experiment when he invited the makers of 10 low-budget movies to what film critic Roger Ebert described as a “cinematic summer camp” in the Utah mountains.
Four decades later, Mr. Redford and the annual Sundance Film Festival that he founded are being celebrated as the foremost champions of independent films.
“I can think of no other human being that has had an impact on independent film and storytelling, and cinema in the independent film world, than Robert Redford,” said Tori A. Baker, CEO and president of the Salt Lake Film Society.
“Nobody did what Bob did,” added Ms. Baker, who is also vice-chair of the Cinema Foundation. “He looked around and said ‘it’s not just about my art and the film I’m making and story I’m telling.’ Instead, he turned that outward and said ‘how can I help you make your story, and how can I support the story?’”
He used his Hollywood fortune to launch the nonprofit Sundance Institute, a workshop for aspiring filmmakers named after his role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
His goal was to nurture artists who were making movies that were not the traditional fodder of the big Hollywood studios. Mr. Redford invited filmmakers to spend time with him and other established directors, writers and editors who helped guide their projects.
The Sundance Film Festival debuted a few years later. Typically held in January and February, it earned a reputation as a showcase for creative risk-taking and a pathway to distribution for low-budget films to reach broader audiences.
“Sundance showed that you could create a community around independent films that was discrete from Hollywood, and that Hollywood wasn’t the only thing American cinema had to offer,” said Eric Kohn, artistic director for the Southampton Playhouse in New York and a former journalist who attended Sundance.
The festival grabbed Tinseltown’s attention when Hollywood’s Miramax studio bought Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989.
“The next year, all of these buyers were coming, looking for the next version of that movie,” Mr. Kohn said.
Filmmakers who came through Sundance included Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Chloe Zhao. Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, Donnie Darko, The Blair Witch Project, and Oscar best picture winner Coda are among the films that debuted there.
“Our film Coda came to the attention of everyone because of Sundance,” actor Marlee Matlin wrote on social media on Tuesday. “And Sundance happened because of Robert Redford. A genius has passed.”
Ms. Baker, who worked for the Sundance Institute in the 2000s, said Mr. Redford personally took part in the organization’s work and often read scripts and met with directors.
“We always knew when Bob was around, because his motorcycle was always parked out in front of the offices,” Ms. Baker said.
Mr. Redford told Reuters in 2016 it was “a tremendous thrill for me” that Sundance had succeeded in its objective, which he said was “to make some kind of contribution to the industry that would keep diversity alive by supporting other artists, and particularly nurturing artistic freedom of expression.”
The Sundance Film Festival became so big that organizers announced this year that the event was moving out of Park City, Utah, to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. — Reuters
