Robert Redford, film's quintessential leading man and activist, dies at 89

Robert Redford, the quintessentially handsome leading man and Oscar-winning director whose career spanned six decades, died early on Sept 16 at his home in Utah. He was 89.

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His death, in the mountains outside Provo, was announced in a statement by chief executive Cindi Berger of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, The New York Times reported. She said Redford died in his sleep but did not provide a specific cause.

Redford’s megawatt smile, blue eyes and mop of strawberry-blonde hair made him one of Hollywood’s most bankable leading men for half a century.

But he also undeniably had real talent, both as an actor and as a director.

As an actor, his biggest films included Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969), with its loving look at rogues in a dying old west, and All The President’s Men (1976), about the journalistic pursuit of president Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate era.

In Three Days Of The Condor (1975), he was an introverted CIA code-breaker caught in a murderous cat-and-mouse game.

The Sting (1973), about Depression-era grifters, gave Redford his first and only Oscar nomination as an actor.

Studios often sold him as a sex symbol. His body of work as a romantic leading man owed a great deal to the commanding actresses who were paired with him: Jane Fonda in Barefoot In The Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973), and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa (1985).

He took to directing in his 40s and won an Academy Award as director for Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family’s disintegration after a son’s death. The movie won three other Oscars, including for Best Picture.