Robert Redford, the actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker who at his peak was simultaneously one of Hollywood’s most critically lauded directors and bankable leading men, has died at age 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,” his representative confirmed to ABC News. “The family requests privacy.”

In a career that spanned more than six decades, Redford was known as much for his memorable performances in movie classics including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Sting,” “The Way We Were,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Natural,” as he was as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, directing critically acclaimed works like “Ordinary People,” “A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show.” Redford also co-founded the annual Sundance Film Festival, in support of independent filmmakers, and was an outspoken supporter of progressive politics, civil rights and environmentalism.

Asked by Esquire UK in 2017 how he’d like to be remembered, Redford replied: “For the work. What really matters is the work. And what matters to me is doing the work. I’m not looking at the back end: ‘What am I going to get out of this? What’s going to be the reward?’ I’m just looking at the work, the pleasure of being able to do the work.”

“And that’s what the fun is: to climb up the mountain is the fun, not standing at the top,” Redford continued. “There’s nowhere to go. But climbing up, that struggle, that to me is where the fun is. That to me is the thrill.

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born Aug. 18, 1936 in Van Nuys, California. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Colorado on a partial baseball scholarship, but left during his sophomore year to travel Europe for a time, where he studied painting. Returning to the U.S., he switched vocations, enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City to study acting, graduating in 1959.

Aided by his striking blond-haired, blue-eyed good looks and athletic build, Redford had little difficulty finding work right out of college. He appeared in a number of popular TV shows in the early 1960s, including “Perry Mason,” “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone” and many others. He made his film debut in an uncredited role the 1960 romantic comedy “Tall Story,” starring Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda, the latter also making her big-screen debut and with whom Redford would share the screen four more times.

But Redford’s big break came when he was cast opposite Elizabeth Ashley in the 1963 Broadway debut of the Neil Simon comedy “Barefoot in the Park.” The play was a hit and led to Redford appearing in more and larger film roles, including the 1965 drama “Inside Daisy Clover,” opposite Natalie Wood, which earned Redford a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. His star rose further when, in 1967, he reprised his Broadway role on the big screen opposite Jane Fonda in the hit film adaptation of “Barefoot in the Park.”

What followed was a two-decade run of movies that were both commercial and, for the most part, critical successes, and which cemented Redford’s reputation as an A-list box office draw. He starred opposite Paul Newman in the 1969 Western action-comedy “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” the year’s top-grossing film. That success led to Redford and Newman re-teaming as Chicago con men for the 1973 Depression-era comedy “The Sting,” which was second only to “The Exorcist” as that year’s highest-grossing film, and which earned Redford an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

The hits kept coming, among them the 1972 political satire “The Candidate” and the existential Western drama “Jeremiah Johnson,” with Redford taking the latter role of a 19th-century mountain man to intentionally play against type. He starred in twelve films in all the 1970s, but the decade’s zenith arguably came with the 1976 Watergate-inspired drama “All the President’s Men.” Redford and Dustin Hoffman played real-life Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively, in the hit film based on their best-selling book of the same name, which told the story of their investigation into the Watergate scandal and White House cover-up.