Robert Redford, the dashing actor and Oscar-winning director who eschewed his status as a Hollywood leading man to champion causes close to his heart, has died, according to his publicist Cindi Berger, Chairman and CEO of Rogers and Cowan PMK.
He was 89.
“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah–the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,” Berger said in a statement to CNN. “The family requests privacy.”
Known for his starring roles in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” Redford also directed award-winning films such as “Ordinary People” and “A River Runs Through It.”
His passion for the art of filmmaking led to his creation of the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit that supports independent film and theater and is known for its annual Sundance Film Festival.
Redford was also a dedicated environmentalist, moving to Utah in 1961 and leading efforts to preserve the natural landscape of the state and the American West.
Redford acted well into his later years, reuniting with Jane Fonda in the 2017 Netflix film “Our Souls at Night.” The following year, he starred in “The Old Man & the Gun” at age 82, a film he said would be his last – although he said he would not consider retiring.
“To me, retirement means stopping something or quitting something,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2018. “There’s this life to lead, why not live it as much as you can as long as you can?”
In October 2020, Redford voiced his concern about the lack of focus on climate change in the midst of devastating wildfires in the western United States, in an opinion piece he wrote for CNN.
That same month, Redford’s 58-year-old son died from cancer.
David James Redford – the third of four children born to Robert Redford and former wife Lola Van Wagenen – had followed in his father’s footsteps as an activist, filmmaker and philanthropist.
Born in Santa Monica, California, near Los Angeles, in 1936, Redford’s father worked long hours as a milkman and an accountant, later moving the family to a larger home in nearby Van Nuys.
“I didn’t see him much,” Redford recalled of his father, on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” in 2005.
Because his family couldn’t afford a babysitter, Redford spent hours in the children’s section at the local library where he became fascinated with books on Greek and Roman mythology.
Yet Redford was hardly a model student.
“I had no patience … I was not inspired,” Redford recalled. “It was more interesting to me to mess around and to adventure beyond the parameters that I was growing up in.”
Drawn to arts and sports – and a life outside of sprawling Los Angeles – Redford earned a scholarship to play baseball at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1955. That same year, his mother died.
“She was very young, she wasn’t even 40,” he said.
Redford said his mother was “always very supportive (of my career)” — more so than his dad.
“My father came of age during the Depression and he was afraid to take chances … so he wanted the straight and narrow path for me, which I was just not meant to be on,” he said. “My mother, no matter what I did, she was always forgiving and supportive and felt that I could do anything.
“When I left and went to Colorado and she died, I realized I never had a chance to thank her.”
Redford soon turned to drinking, lost his scholarship and eventually was asked to leave the university. He worked as a “roustabout” for the Standard Oil Company and saved his earnings to continue his art studies in Europe.
“(I) lived hand to mouth, but that was fine,” Redford said of his time in Europe. “I wanted that adventure. I wanted the experience of seeing what other cultures were like.”
This story is developing and will be updated.
