The Sundance Kid has ridden into the sunset.
Robert Redford — movie star, director, producer and film champion, heartthrob, environmentalist, philanthropist, family man, political activist — died early Tuesday at his home in Utah. He was 89. Cindi Berger, his publicist, told the New York Times that he had died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.
One of Hollywood’s most admired and beloved figures during a career spanning more than 60 years before and behind the cameras, Redford stood out as one of only a handful of people to win an Academy Award for best director in a directorial debut, for Ordinary People in 1981. He was nominated for three other Oscars — for best director (Quiz Show, 1995), best picture (Quiz Show) and best leading actor (The Sting, 1974) — and won a total of 44 awards and 63 nominations in his career, a record reflecting the range of his talents.
Jane Fonda, 87, his close friend for decades who first costarred with him in The Chase in 1966, met him at Paramount Studios and remembered following him as they walked down a corridor in a studio building. As Redford passed offices, secretaries poked their heads out to catch a glimpse of the good-looking guy with strawberry blond hair. “I thought, Oh gosh, he’s going to be a big star,” Fonda told AARP The Magazine in 2011.
And so he was. But he will be remembered for other reasons, too. That includes what he did to encourage independent filmmaking and talent by founding the Sundance Institute in Utah in 1981, which eventually expanded to include the annual world-famous Sundance Film Festival in the ruggedly spectacular state Redford adopted as his home for much of his life. (While he mostly lived in Utah, where he had amassed thousands of acres of land, he also had a ranch home outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.) In 2002, Redford was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement as the actor, director, producer and creator of Sundance and an “inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”
Redford also was passionate about protecting the environment, a conviction forged early in his youth in Southern California, where he was born in 1936 in Santa Monica. While working at the Standard Oil refinery in El Segundo, driving a forklift and cleaning tanks in the shipping yard, he became an environmentalist. “I saw the oil seeping into the sand dunes. Now all that [oil] sits underneath the big buildings they’ve built there.”
He remained an articulate champion of environmental causes, speaking out publicly on occasion, as in 2012 when he wrote an opinion piece on Huffington Post demanding an end to public handouts to oil, gas and coal companies. “We should not be subsidizing the destruction of our planet,” he argued. Many of his large land purchases in Utah and New Mexico over the years were in part to protect open space from development. “Other people have analysis; I have Utah,” Redford once quipped.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aarp.org ’
