Robert Redford

Charles Robert Redford Jr. (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025) was an American actor, director and producer, celebrated for his magnetic presence as a leading man during the American New Wave. Across a career spanning more than six decades, Redford earned widespread recognition and numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and five Golden Globe Awards, (including a Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994). He has also received various honors including the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and the Honorary César in 2019.

Redford began his career on television in the late 1950s, appearing in anthology series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. He made his Broadway debut in Neil Simon's comedy Barefoot in the Park (1963) before taking film roles in War Hunt (1962) and Inside Daisy Clover (1965). He then achieved Hollywood stardom with Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972) and The Sting (1973), with the last earning him an Academy Award nomination.

His stardom continued with films such as The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), All the President's Men (1976), The Electric Horseman (1979), The Natural (1984) and Out of Africa (1985). Later credits include Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), All Is Lost (2013), Truth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017) and The Old Man & the Gun (2018). He also played Alexander Pierce in the MCU films Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), the latter serving as his final on-screen role.

Redford made his directorial debut with the family drama Ordinary People (1980), which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. His later directing credits include The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). A major advocate for independent cinema, Redford co-founded the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival in 1978, helping to foster a new generation of filmmakers. Beyond his artistic career, he was noted for his environmental activism, his support of Native American and Indigenous rights and his advocacy for LGBTQ equality.

Early life and education

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, to Martha Woodruff Redford (née Hart; 1914–1955), who was from Austin, Texas, and Charles Robert Redford, Sr. (1914–1991), an accountant. He had a paternal half-brother, William. Redford was of Irish, Scottish and English ancestry. His patrilineal great-great-grandfather, a Protestant Englishman named Elisha Redford, married Mary Ann McCreery, of Irish Catholic descent, in Manchester, Lancashire. They emigrated to New York City in 1849, immediately settling next in Stonington, Connecticut. They had a son named Charles, the first in line to have been given the name. Regarding Redford's maternal lineage, the Harts were Irish from Galway and the Greens were Scotch-Irish who settled in the United States in the 18th century. Redford's family lived in Van Nuys while his father worked in El Segundo. As a child, he and his family often traveled to Austin to visit his maternal grandfather. Redford credited his environmentalism and love of nature to his childhood in Texas.

Redford attended Van Nuys High School, where he was classmates with the future professional baseball pitcher Don Drysdale. He described himself as having been a "bad" student, finding inspiration outside the classroom in art and sports. He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzalez at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to help Gonzalez warm up for matches. Redford had a mild case of polio when he was 11.

After graduating from high school in 1954, he attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for a year and a half, where he was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity. While there, he worked at a restaurant/bar called The Sink, where a painting of his likeness now figures prominently among the bar's murals. While at Colorado, Redford began drinking heavily and, as a result, lost his half-scholarship and was expelled from school. He went on to travel in Europe, living in France, Spain and Italy. He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Class of 1959) in Manhattan, New York.

Career

1959–1966: Early roles

Redford's acting career began in New York City, where he worked both on stage and in television. His Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story (1959), followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). His biggest success on Broadway was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in the original 1963 cast of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. Starting in 1960, Redford appeared as a guest star on numerous television drama programs, including Naked City, Maverick, The Untouchables, The Americans, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate, The Twilight Zone, The Virginian and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, among others.

Redford made his screen debut in the film adaptation of Tall Story (1960), reprising his Broadway role, although he was not credited. The film's stars were Anthony Perkins, Jane Fonda and Ray Walston. After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. In 1960, Redford was cast as Danny Tilford, a mentally disturbed young man trapped in the wreckage of his family garage, in "Breakdown", one of the last episodes of the syndicated adventure series Rescue 8, starring Jim Davis and Lang Jeffries. Redford earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962). One of his last television appearances until 2019 was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.

In 1962, Redford received his second film role in War Hunt, and was cast soon after alongside screen legend Alec Guinness in the war comedy Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious, in which he played a U.S. soldier falsely imprisoned by a German civilian even after the war had ended. In Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which won him a Golden Globe for best new star, he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood and rejoined her along with Charles Bronson for Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966)—again, as her lover, though this time in a film which achieved even greater success. The same year saw his first teaming (on equal footing) with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. The film marked the only time Redford starred with Marlon Brando.

1967–1979: Career stardom

Fonda and Redford were paired again in the popular big-screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967) and were again co-stars a dozen years later in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979), followed 38 years later with a Netflix feature, Our Souls at Night. After this initial success, Redford became concerned about his blond male stereotype image and refused roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the niche he was seeking in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman. The film was a huge success and made him a major bankable star, cementing his screen image as an intelligent, reliable, sometimes sardonic good guy.

While Redford did not receive an Academy Award or Golden Globe nomination for playing the Sundance Kid, he won a British Academy of Film and Television Award (BAFTA) for that role and his parts in Downhill Racer (1969) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). The latter two films and the subsequent Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970) and The Hot Rock (1972) were not commercially successful. Redford had long harbored ambitions to work on both sides of the camera. As early as 1969, Redford had served as the executive producer for Downhill Racer. The political satire The Candidate (1972) was a moderate box-office and critical success.