The Full Biography
Robert Redford. Actor. Director. The Santa Monica kid who made a golden face into a serious American career, then built a mountain where independent pictures could live.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is two outlaws on a cliff, grinning as the bullets come, or a reporter in a newsroom that is about to take down a president, or a blond man on an African ridge beside Meryl Streep. The years are 1969, 1976, 1985. What the still cannot show is Charles Robert Redford Jr. of Santa Monica and Van Nuys, a boy who had polio at eleven, a Colorado student who drank away a scholarship, a painter who went to Europe and came home to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and a man who died on September 16, 2025, at his place in Sundance, Utah, at eighty-nine, having already announced he was done acting and then, characteristically, not quite meant it.
He was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, to Martha Woodruff Hart, from Austin, and Charles Robert Redford Sr., an accountant. A paternal half-brother, William, was in the file. The family lived in Van Nuys while the father worked in El Segundo. They traveled to Austin to see the grandfather. Redford would credit Texas light and Texas land for the environmentalism that became a second career. He attended Van Nuys High with the future pitcher Don Drysdale. He called himself a bad student. He found art and sports instead. He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzalez at the Los Angeles Tennis Club so Gonzalez could warm up. Polio, mild, arrived at eleven. After graduation in 1954 he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, joined Kappa Sigma, worked at The Sink, and drank until the half-scholarship and the school both ended. He traveled in France, Spain, and Italy. He studied painting at Pratt in Brooklyn and acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, class of 1959.
The door was New York, not a studio office.
Broadway first: a small part in Tall Story (1959), then The Highest Tree, then Sunday in New York. The part that counted was Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (1963), as Elizabeth Ashley’s stuffy newlywed husband. Television paid the rent: Naked City, Maverick, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Virginian. An Emmy nomination came for The Voice of Charlie Pont (1962). The first credited film work included War Hunt (1962). Inside Daisy Clover (1965) opposite Natalie Wood brought a Golden Globe as a new star. Sydney Pollack’s This Property Is Condemned (1966) put him with Wood again. Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966) put him in a picture with Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda — the only time he shared a frame with Brando. He refused Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate because he did not want the blond stereotype to harden. The film of Barefoot in the Park (1967), with Fonda, made the stage success a movie success. Then George Roy Hill and William Goldman gave him the part the culture would not return.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) paired him with Paul Newman. He was the Kid. Newman was Butch. They jumped. The picture made him a bankable star and named a Utah property he already loved. He did not receive an Oscar nomination for it. He did receive a BAFTA that also covered Downhill Racer (1969), which he executive-produced, and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). The Candidate (1972) let him play a Senate race as a man who wins and then asks what he is supposed to do. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) put him in the mountains for Sydney Pollack and kept earning for years. Then the four-year run exhibitors would vote him the country’s top box-office star to explain: The Way We Were (1973) with Barbra Streisand; The Sting (1973) with Newman again, the top-grossing film of 1974, his only nomination for Best Actor; The Great Gatsby (1974) with Mia Farrow; The Great Waldo Pepper (1975); Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) with Faye Dunaway. In 1974 he became the first performer since Bing Crosby in 1946 to place three films in a year’s top ten.
All the President’s Men (1976) is the civic object. He played Bob Woodward. Dustin Hoffman played Carl Bernstein. He was also the executive producer. William Goldman wrote it. Alan J. Pakula directed it. The picture treated journalism as work — phones, notes, a parking garage — and treated Watergate as a plot the country already knew and still needed to watch. Eight Oscar nominations. Best Picture did not go to it. The culture kept it anyway. After a stretch away he came back in Pollack’s The Electric Horseman (1979) with Fonda again, then Brubaker (1980) as a warden, then, the same year, the chair.
Ordinary People (1980) was his first film as director: an upper-middle-class family after a son’s death, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton. Four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Hutton won Supporting Actor. Roger Ebert called it intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving. The blond star had become a director the Academy trusted with grief. He kept acting. The Natural (1984) gave baseball a mythic close-up. Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985) opposite Streep was the decade’s large success for both of them — Best Picture, seven Oscars, his face in a landscape that did not require him to wink. Legal Eagles (1986) was smaller. He directed The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), then A River Runs Through It (1992), which brought Brad Pitt forward, then Quiz Show (1994), the 1950s television scandal, which many critics called his best work in the chair since Ordinary People.
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?Robert Redford
He married Lola Van Wagenen in 1958. They had four children. Their first son, Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959 at two and a half months. Shauna, James, and Amy followed. The marriage ended in 1985. In 2009 he married the German painter Sibylle Szaggars, who had been his companion for years and who shared the environmental work. James became a filmmaker and died in 2020. The private life was not a column he performed. The mountain was. In 1978 he founded the Sundance Institute, taking the name from the Kid and from the Utah land he had bought when a leading man’s money could still buy a canyon and then refuse to sell it for condominiums. The institute and the festival that grew from it became the proving ground for American independent film. That is not a publicity sentence. It is the second monument, and for many filmmakers it is the first.
The turn is the decision to spend the fame on other people’s pictures. He could have remained a face. He built a lab, a festival, and a conservation argument, and he kept directing as if the Oscar had been a license to keep asking institutions what they were for.
Six things most people never knew
- He had polio as a child. Mild, at eleven. The golden body the cameras used was a body that had already been frightened.
- Colorado threw him out. He lost a half-scholarship and was expelled after heavy drinking. Europe and painting came next, not a clean college-to-stardom line.
- He turned down The Graduate. Also Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He did not want the blond type to harden before he had chosen the work.
- He never won a competitive acting Oscar. The only competitive statue is Best Director, for Ordinary People. The Honorary Award arrived in 2002.
- Sundance is named for the outlaw, not the other way around. The Utah property and then the institute took the Kid’s name. The festival made the name mean independent film.
- A first son died in 1959. Scott, two and a half months old, sudden infant death. The young marriage began with a death the fan magazines did not keep in the lobby.
He left the grind of being only the face. The mountain and the chair became the job.
The later years
Home was Sundance — the resort, the institute, the canyon he had refused to let become a second Aspen — and, with Szaggars, a life that treated conservation as a calendar, not a hobby. He directed The Horse Whisperer (1998), starring in it opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and a young Scarlett Johansson. He directed Matt Damon and Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). He acted in The Last Castle (2001) and reteamed with Pitt for Spy Game (2001). He produced Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). He narrated the IMAX film Sacred Planet. Lasse Hallström’s An Unfinished Life (2005) gave him a rancher’s silence. Lions for Lambs (2007), which he directed and starred in with Streep and Tom Cruise, was a civic argument the box office did not want. He directed The Conspirator (2010) and The Company You Keep (2012), the second of those putting him on the run as a former Weather Underground man.
J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) is the late performance that counts as a last first time: a man alone on a damaged boat, almost no dialogue, a face the camera is not allowed to leave. Critics who had taken the golden years for granted wrote as if they had discovered an actor. He played Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and returned, briefly, in Avengers: Endgame (2019). He played Dan Rather in Truth (2015), walked the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods (2015) — a project he had once hoped to do with Newman — and made Our Souls at Night (2017) with Fonda for Netflix, their fifth pairing, a quiet picture about two older neighbors in a small town. The Old Man & the Gun (2018) put him back in a bank-robber’s courtesy. He announced his retirement from acting, then said he regretted the announcement because you never know. A voice cameo as Woodward in the 2023 miniseries White House Plumbers and a 2025 cameo on Dark Winds, a series he executive-produced, were the last times the instrument showed up. The Dark Winds appearance, playing chess as a detainee beside George R. R. Martin, aired in March 2025. It was the final performance.
The honors stacked because the country had decided he was an institution: National Medal of Arts from Clinton in 1996; Kennedy Center Honors in 2005; an Academy Honorary Award in 2002; the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama in 2016; a Golden Lion in Venice in 2017; an Honorary César in 2019. He kept the environmental work in the same years — Natural Resources Defense Council, the Redford Center with James, Native land and water fights, a public argument that a landscape is not a backdrop. James’s death in 2020 took a collaborator and a son. Szaggars remained. The festival continued, larger than the man, which was the point of founding it.
He died on September 16, 2025, at his home in Sundance, Utah. He was eighty-nine. The death was not a surprise in the way a young death is a surprise. It was the end of a long, used life. The obituaries led with Butch and Sundance and then, if they were doing the job, with the institute, the chair, and the land. Shauna and Amy survived him. The canyon did not need a new owner to keep meaning what he had asked it to mean.
After he was gone
The Sundance Institute and the festival did not close. That was the design. Independent filmmakers who never met him still walk through a door he cut in a mountain. Ordinary People still teaches a certain American grief. All the President’s Men still teaches a certain American job. Butch Cassidy still teaches how little two men have to say if the chemistry is true. The environmental record is in statutes, lawsuits, and a generation of donors who learned the word Sundance before they learned the Kid. He did not have the longest list of competitive acting statues. He had a face the 1970s trusted, a director’s Oscar the Academy could not take back, and a festival that outlived the face. If you only remember the jump from the cliff, you have the still. If you remember the lab in the canyon, you have him.
Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately, connect us.Robert Redford
The still of the Kid will last. It should. But the life behind it was a polio scare, a lost scholarship, a dead infant son, a decade of hits, a chair, a mountain, and a death in the place he had named for a character. He came out of Van Nuys, found the one kind of light the camera would take, and then, when the camera had had enough of the light, he spent the fame on other people’s films and on land that could not speak for itself. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Ken Dare, Los Angeles Times · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons