Robert Redford Dead at 89

Longtime Hollywood icon and classic film star Robert Redford has died, The New York Times reports. He was 89.

Redford, who starred in classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Out of Africa, died at his home in the mountains outside Provost, Utah, on Tuesday morning, the Times reports. No cause of death was given. Rogers & Cowan PMK chief executive Cindi Berger told the news outlet that he died in his sleep.

A ’70s Hollywood heartthrob, Redford was more than his good looks. He earned a best actor Oscar nomination for 1973’s The Sting, best director award for 1980’s Ordinary People and another best director nomination for 1994’s Quiz Show.

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

Redford started out a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, making his Broadway debut in 1959’s Tall Story. He later played the lead in 1963’s Barefoot in the Park, a role he reprised later that decade for the film adaptation with Jane Fonda.

He joined the world of television in the early ’60s as well, with roles on shows like Tate, Route 66, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and The Untouchables.

In 1969 he landed the role of outlaw the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid alongside Paul Newman. He told Collider in 2019 that he was initially put up for the role of Butch Cassidy, though “that part didn’t interest me.”

“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. 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.”

Redford’s decades-long career spanned memorable roles in films such as: The Way We Were (1973), The Sting (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). As a director he is most famous for Ordinary People (1980), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), and Lions for Lambs (2007).

He retired in 2018 after making The Old Man & the Gun, in which he starred alongside Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter and Tom Waits. He quickly regretted his retirement decision, telling PEOPLE at the premiere of that film that he was not sure what the future held. “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,” he said at the time.

He returned to the screen in 2025 for a cameo in Dark Winds.

Although Redford’s professional life was full of success and accolades, his personal life was marred by tragedy. In 2020, his son James Redford died from bile-duct cancer in his liver at the age of 58. He called the grief “immeasurable.”

“Jamie was a loving son, husband and father. His legacy lives on through his children, art, filmmaking and devoted passion to conservation and the environment,” he said at the time.

Redford and ex-wife Lola Van Wagenen had four children together: Scott — who died just 2 months after his birth in 1959 — Shauna, James and Amy. Redford’s mother also died after a difficult pregnancy when he was a teen.

Redford married Sibylle Szaggars Redford in 2009, having first met at his Sundance Mountain Resort. They co-founded The Redford Center nonprofit in 2005.

Redford is survived by his wife, daughters Shauna and Amy and grandchildren.