Charles Robert Redford Jr. (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025) was an American actor, producer and director.

He received numerous accolades such as an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Honorary César in 2019. He was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014.

Appearing onstage in the late 1950s, Redford's television career began in 1960, with appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961 and The Twilight Zone in 1962. His greatest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963). Redford made his film debut in War Hunt (1962). He gained success as a leading man in films such as Barefoot in the Park (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), and The Candidate (1972). He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the crime caper The Sting (1973). He continued to star in such films as The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976), and The Electric Horseman (1979).

Redford made his directorial film debut with Ordinary People (1980), which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. During this time, he starred in films such as Brubaker (1980), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985) and Sneakers (1992). He released his third film as a director, A River Runs Through It, in 1992. He went on to receive Best Director and Best Picture nominations in 1995 for Quiz Show. In 1981, Redford cofounded the Sundance Resort and Film Institute. His later film roles include 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); although he had been mostly retired from acting since the latter, having only performed supporting voice roles, he was an executive producer on the television series Dark Winds.

Early life and education

Robert Redford was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, to Martha Woodruff Redford (née Hart; 1914–1955), who was from Austin, Texas, and Charles Robert Redford Sr. (1914–1991), an accountant. He has a paternal half-brother, William. Redford was of Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry. His patrilineal great-great-grandfather, a Protestant Englishman named Elisha Redford, married Mary Ann McCreery, of Irish Catholic descent, in Manchester, Lancashire. They emigrated to New York City in America in 1849, immediately settling next in Stonington, Connecticut. They had a son named Charles, the first in line to have been given the name. Regarding Redford's maternal lineage, the Harts were Irish from Galway and the Greens were Scotch-Irish who settled in the United States in the 18th century. Redford's family lived in Van Nuys while his father worked in El Segundo. As a child, he and his family would often travel to Austin, Texas, to visit his maternal grandfather. Redford credited his environmentalism and love of nature to his childhood in Texas.

Robert attended Van Nuys High School, where he was classmates with baseball pitcher Don Drysdale. He has described himself as having been a "bad" student, finding inspiration outside the classroom in art and sports. He hit tennis balls with Pancho Gonzalez at the Los Angeles Tennis Club to help Gonzalez warm up for matches. Redford had a mild case of polio when he was 11.

After graduating from high school in 1954, he attended the University of Colorado in Boulder for a year and a half, where he was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity. While there, he worked at a restaurant/bar called The Sink, where a painting of his likeness now figures prominently among the bar's murals. While at Colorado, Redford began drinking heavily and, as a result, lost his half-scholarship and was kicked out of school. He went on to travel in Europe, living in France, Spain, and Italy. He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Class of 1959) in New York City.

Personal life and death

On August 9, 1958, Redford married Lola Van Wagenen in Las Vegas. A second reception was held at Lola's grandmother's home on September 12. 
They had four children:

• Scott Anthony Redford (September 1, 1959 – November 17, 1959),
• Shauna Jean Redford (b. November 15, 1960), 
• David James Redford (May 5, 1962 – October 16, 2020),
• Amy Hart Redford (b. October 22, 1970).

Scott died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 2+1⁄2 months and is buried at Provo City Cemetery in Provo, Utah. Shauna is a painter and married to journalist Eric Schlosser. James was a writer and producer, while Amy is an actress, director, and producer. Redford has seven grandchildren.

Redford and Van Wagenen never publicly announced a separation or divorce, but in 1982, entertainment columnist Shirley Eder reported that the pair "have been very much apart for a number of years." In 1991, Parade magazine stated, "it is unclear whether the divorce has been finalized."

On July 11, 2009, Redford married his longtime girlfriend, Sibylle Szaggars, at the Louis C. Jacob Hotel in Hamburg, Germany. She had moved in with Redford in 1996 and shared his home in Sundance, Utah.

In May 2011, Robert Redford: The Biography was published by Alfred A. Knopf, written by Michael Feeney Callan over fifteen years with Redford's input and drawn from his personal papers and diaries.

Redford died in his sleep at his home in Provo, Utah at the age of 89 on September 16, 2025.