Robert Redford - Actor, director, skier

Robert Redford, the versatile actor, Oscar-winning director and passionate skier, died September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance Mountain Resort, Utah, of an unspecified cause, at age 89.

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1936, Charles Robert Redford grew up in Van Nuys, where some of his schoolmates had parents who worked in film production, contacts that proved valuable early in his acting career. A natural athlete, he enjoyed watersports, climbing and tennis. He also showed a talent for drawing. In 1955, when he was 18, his mother died of complications in childbirth—her twin daughters also died. Redford, profoundly depressed, dropped out of the University of Colorado at Boulder. He traveled to Paris and took painting classes at the École des Beaux Arts, but ended up sketching Parisians in sidewalk cafes.

By 1958 he was back in Los Angeles, working in an oil field, when he met a young Mormon missionary, Lola Van Wagenen. They soon married; their first son, Scott, died in infancy in September 1959. That year Redford made his debut on the Broadway stage.

When acting jobs took him back to California, Redford and Lola settled in Utah, where he bought a couple of acres at the Timp Haven ski area in Provo Canyon. This is where he learned to ski, taught in part by Jerry Warren and Junior Bounous. In 1975 he told SKI Magazine’s Dick Needham that water-skiing habits lingered, and he had to work hard to avoid leaning back. (See page 10.) By 1969, the year of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Downhill Racer, Redford had enough money to buy Timp Haven outright, turning it into Sundance Mountain Resort.

Redford helped to bring Downhill Racer out of budgetary limbo, and in his role as producer he recruited writer James Salter and director Michael Ritchie. He viewed the movie not as a film about skiing, but as an essay on the hypocrisy of world-class sports. With screenwriter Salter, Redford created a character so single-minded and self-absorbed as to exclude real human relationships.

The character David Chappellet was the opposite of the real Redford. Longtime friend John Lovett, founder of the Lovett Ski Company of Boulder, recalls that skiing gave Redford a regular-guy identity. “It became hard for him to circulate where he could be himself,” Lovett says. “He felt it was hard to be real in a Hollywood context that wasn’t real.”

In Utah, and in skiing, Redford found it easy to focus outward. “He was unbelievably interested in the people he encountered,” Lovett says. “He continually engaged with strangers, asking endless questions about themselves. He had a great sense of humor and was addicted to April Fools pranks on the people he loved.”

Redford was fascinated by Native American culture, especially Anasazi ruins. He and Lovett spent days flying a helicopter low over Utah and Colorado, searching out Anasazi sites. He was fiercely competitive as a sports-car driver and climber, often racing with friends like Paul Newman and director Sydney Pollack. “Bob was intensely curious about the technology of skiing, cars, movies,” Lovett says. “He originally reached out to me because he wanted to see how skis were made.”

Redford maintained a deep connection with his kids, Shauna, Jamie and Amy. He traveled often to Boulder, where Shauna and Jamie went to school. “He worried constantly about how the kids were, especially because of Jamie’s illness,” Lovett says. Shauna became a painter, while Jamie and Amy became documentary filmmakers. Jamie died of cancer in 2020, at age 58.