Robert Redford

Charles Robert Redford Jr. (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025) was an American actor, director, and producer. He received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, five Golden Globe Awards (including the 1994 Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award), the 1996 Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, a 2002 Academy Honorary Award, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2019 Honorary César. He was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014.

Redford started his career in television, acting in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone before making his Broadway debut playing a newlywed husband in Neil Simon's comedic play Barefoot in the Park (1963). Redford made his film debut in War Hunt (1962) before finding leading man stardom acting in Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Candidate (1972), and The Sting (1973), the last of which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Redford's stardom continued in films such as The Way We Were (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976), The Electric Horseman (1979), Brubaker (1980), The Natural (1984), and Out of Africa (1985). He later acted in Sneakers (1992), All Is Lost (2013), Truth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017), and The Old Man & the Gun (2018). Redford portrayed Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Avengers: Endgame (2019); the latter was his last on-screen film appearance. His final work was as executive producer on the television series Dark Winds (2022–present); he made a cameo in a 2025 episode of the series, which was his last on-screen appearance.

Redford's directorial film debut was the family drama Ordinary People (1980), which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. He directed seven other feature films, including the drama The Milagro Beanfield War (1984), the period drama A River Runs Through It (1992), the historical drama Quiz Show (1994), the neo-western The Horse Whisperer (1998), and the sports fantasy The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). Redford founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, which hosts the annual Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States. He was known for his political activism for environmentalism, Native American and indigenous people's rights, and LGBT rights.