The Sunday Kid: Robert Redford dead at age 89

Robert Redford, an icon of the entertainment industry founded by the Sunday Institute and helped shape the independent film industry, died at 89, the New York Times reported for the first time.

“Robert Redford died on September 16, 2025, at his home in Sunday in the Utah mountains, the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” said Cindi Berger, executive director of the public relations firm Rogers & Cowan PMK. “It will be surprised a lot. The family requests privacy.”

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Redford served as the protagonist at the beginning of his career before making a name as director, winning an Oscar for the movie “Ordinary People” in 1981. He won an Achievement Award for the Life of the Academy of Arts and Motion Film Sciences in 2002.

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Among his iconic acting papers were John “Kelly” Hooker in “The Sting”, Bob Woodward in “All the men of the president”, Roy Hobbs in “The Natural”, Hubbell Gardiner in “The Way We Fui” and The Sunday Kid in “Butch Cassidy and The Sunday Kid”.

In 1969, he opened the Mountain Resort Sunday in Utah, “Butch Cassidy” was launched. Initially he doubted the name of the resort, a wink to his character in that movie, because he worried that the movie was “a disaster” and felt that using the term would be too “selfish.” The group he was working with convinced him to use “Sunday”.

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Redford helped found the Utah/EE Film Festival. UU. In 1978, and created the Sunday Institute, an organization aimed at promoting independent narration talent, in 1981. Finally, the Film Festival changed its name and became the largest independent film festival in the United States.

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Redford told Democracy Now in 2015 that the festival was the result of changes in the film industry, which deviated from making box office successes for the youngest audience in the 1980s.

“You can have the big box office hits. You may have done it, with the technology that advances, creating more special effects, you knew they were going to use that, and that is great,” he said. “But I felt that it was going to be at the expense of giving up those other types of films, so that is what led to Sundance.”

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Redford also became a leader in environmental activism, working to protect desert spaces since the early 1970s and raise awareness about global warming since the 1980s. In 2005, he founded El Redford Center with his children, an organization that makes films that advocate several environmental causes.

“We have a planet, and as far as we know, that is the only one we have,” said Redford in 2014 while accepting the global environmental leadership prize of the Walden Woods project. “We are, or we should be, guardians of that planet.”

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Redford was born on August 18, 1936 in Santa Monica, California. He graduated from high school in 1954, attended a year and a half of the University at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and finally ended in New York, attending classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He made his debut on Broadway as an actor in 1959 in the work “Tall Story”, which became a film next year, giving Redford his film debut. In 1960, Redford made appearances in several television programs, and as soon as 1963, he obtained a nomination for the best Emmy actor for an anthology drama in ABC.

In the mid -1960s, Redford had turned to focus on movies. In 1966, he won a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, a category that no longer exists.

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Redford became an extremely prolific actor in more than half a century in this business, with almost 100 credits.

“When you get older, you learn certain life lessons,” Redford told AARP the magazine in 2011. “You apply that wisdom, and suddenly say: ‘Hey, I have a new opportunity about this. So let’s go.”

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Redford is survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars; His two daughters, Amy and Shauna; and his mother, his previous wife, Lola Van Wagenen. His children preceded him in death: Scott Anthony Redford, who died at 2 months in 1959, and James, who died of cancer in 2020 at 58 years.

Carly Ledbetter and Todd Van Luling contributed to this report.