Robert Redford, Oscar-winning icon of Hollywood, dies at 89

US acting legend Robert Redford, Oscar-winning actor turned director and godfather of independent films through his Sundance Institute, died on Tuesday at the age of 89. Hollywood figures paid tribute to his remarkable career, with “Out of Africa” co-star Meryl Streep hailing “one of the lions” of film.

Actor, director and producer Robert Redford, who was both the quintessential handsome Hollywood leading man and an influential supporter of independent films through his Sundance Institute, had died at the age of 89, The New York Times reported, citing his publicist.

Once dismissed as “just another California blond”, Redford’s charm and craggy good looks made him one of the industry’s most bankable leading men for half a century, and one of the world’s most recognisable and best-loved movie stars.

Redford made hearts beat faster in romantic roles such as “Out of Africa,” got political in “The Candidate” and “All the President’s Men” and skewered his golden-boy image in roles like the alcoholic ex-rodeo champ in “The Electric Horseman” and middle-aged millionaire who offers to buy sex in “Indecent Proposal”.

He used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.

He never won the best actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director – the 1980 family drama “Ordinary People” – won Oscars for best picture and best director.

Yet he remained best known for the two early movies he made with Paul Newman – the 1969 western caper “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and “The Sting” (1973), both of which became classics.

Despite their chemistry and long personal friendship, Redford was never to team up again with Newman, who died in 2008.

‘One of the lions has passed’

“Butch Cassidy” made blue-eyed Redford an overnight star but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.

“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It’s not easy being Robert Redford,” he once told New York magazine.

Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars. He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, before their divorce in 1985. In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist and longtime partner Sibylle Szaggars.

Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.

“Some people have analysis. I have Utah,” he once remarked.

Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint. In a 2017 interview, during the presidency of Donald Trump, he told Esquire magazine that “politics is in a very dark place right now” and that Trump should “quit for our benefit”.

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Tributes began to pour in Tuesday for the screen great. “One of the lions has passed. Rest in peace my lovely friend,” said Meryl Streep, in a brief emailed statement.

Jane Fonda mourned Redford, a fellow activist, as “a beautiful person in every way”.

“It hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone. I can’t stop crying. He meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way. He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for,” she said.

Dreams of being a painter

Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on Aug. 18, 1937, to what he described as a “lower working class family”, Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.

Deciding he wanted to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to study painting. He enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design (“Acting seemed ludicrous to me,” he recalled) but was persuaded to take to the stage and by 1959 he was a full time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.

His made his movie debut in 1962 in a low budget film called “Warhunt”, but first won attention in “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.

He turned down the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” (“I never did look like a 21-year-old college student who’d never been laid,” he said later) and held out for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. The 1970s brought “The Way We Were” and “The Great Gatsby”.

From the 1980s he devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute – a year-round workshop for aspiring filmmakers – and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.

In 2001, he won an honorary, or lifetime achievement, Oscar.

Redford remained active in films as an actor and producer right up to the end of his life. In 2017, he reunited with Fonda for the Netflix drama “Our Souls at Night,” a romance between a widow and widower.

“I live for sex scenes with him,” Fonda told journalists when the film premiered in Venice. “He’s a great kisser so it was fun to kiss him in my 20s and to kiss him again in my almost 80s.”

Redford said at the time that it would be one of his last films as an actor and that he was planning to focus more on directing and his first love – art.

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)