Robert Redford

Robert Redford — Charles Robert Redford Jr. — actor, director, producer, and founder of the Sundance Institute that reshaped American independent film, died at his home in Sundance, Utah, on September 16, 2025. He was eighty-nine. Santa Monica birth, New Wave leading-man years, and a second act as Oscar-winning director and festival patriarch had already made the sunlit face and the mountain compound into twin American brands: Hollywood glamour that insisted the next generation get a screening room. Born August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, Redford became a defining star of the 1970s — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Candidate, The Way We Were, All the President’s Men, The Natural — then won the Academy Award for directing Ordinary People (1980). Quiz Show and A River Runs Through It extended the filmmaker résumé. Sundance’s labs and festival turned Utah into a pipeline for voices studios ignored, even as Redford’s own stardom remained bankable nostalgia. Environmental advocacy and a late-career preference for craft over gossip marked the long twilight. Dying at Sundance closed the circle between the outlaw nickname audiences loved and the institute that outgrew any single movie. He died in Sundance on September 16, 2025. The films and the festival keep the louder memorial. Redford’s gift was using star power as infrastructure — beauty that built a farm system for other people’s stories. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 16 remembers the actor-director who made Utah synonymous with American indie hope.