Robert Redford, the golden boy of Sixties and Seventies Hollywood and star of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men, and countless other box office hits that became cultural touchstones, has died at the age of 89. The big screen charmer, who refused to be defined by his matinee idol looks and drew upon his celebrity to espouse environmental causes, liberal activism, and independent filmmaking, died in his sleep in the early hours of Tuesday morning (September 16) at his Utah ranch.

His publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement: "Robert Redford passed away on September 16 at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah – the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly." His cause of death has not yet been publicly announced, but the performer had a number of health battles throughout his life. Despite being one of Tinseltown's go-to leading men for decades, his vast body of work – more than 70 films all told – never typecast him, and he remained a sometimes reluctant star.

Romantic roles saw him paired with some of Hollywood’s most admired leading ladies of the era, including Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967), Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973), and Meryl Streep in 1985’s Out of Africa.

Streep said in a statement last night: “One of the lions has passed. Rest in peace my lovely friend.” Author Stephen King described Redford as "part of a new and exciting Hollywood in the 70s and 80s". “Hard to believe he was 89," he added.

Yet while the studios sold him as a sex symbol with his tousled blonde hair and boyish smile – “This glamour image can be a real handicap,” he wryly complained in 1974 – his career encompassed drama, thrillers, and comedy. And frequently, he was cast as one half of some of the most enduring and beloved Hollywood double-acts.

He played the Sundance Kid opposite Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy in the 1969 film about a pair of loveable rogues in the dying West that made them both stars. Their warm on-screen chemistry was revived in 1973’s Oscar-winning Depression-era caper The Sting – for which Redford received his only Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Later, he was cast as real-life Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward alongside Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in the iconic 1976 movie about the journalists who brought down corrupt US President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal.

But even as his fame and stature grew, he was ever mindful of the potential pitfalls. In one 2004 interview, he admitted writing a list of “danger points”. "Number 1. In the beginning, you will be treated like an object. But they don't know who you are. All they know is the image up there on the screen.

"Number 2. If you are not careful, you will begin to act like an object." Then came: "The third, and final, and death stage. You become that object."

As a result of such caution, he shunned many aspects of celebrity, living an intensely private life off-camera. Even Paul Newman admitted: "I have known the man for over 40 years and I don't know him, not really." While William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay to All The President’s Men, said of Redford: "He refused to give me his home phone number. I had to get him through his secretary. He's that secretive."

Recent years saw him win a new generation of fans playing corrupt Shield boss Alexander Pierce in Marvel’s Captain America and Avengers franchises. Superheroes aside, 1993’s erotic drama Indecent Proposal, co-starring Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, in which Redford’s amoral businessman John Gage offered a million dollars to a couple if the wife would spend the night with him, was his biggest box office hit.

He announced his retirement in 2018, having previously admitted he was "tired of acting,” but, in truth, years of horse riding and sport had shattered his frame. In later life, he liked to suggest his Hollywood career had been incidental and his real concerns – and victories – were environmental.

He campaigned against major highway projects and at least one coal-fired power station and, for three decades, was a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Despite being encouraged to leverage his fame to enter politics, it didn't attract him.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his acclaimed filmography, Redford never won an acting Oscar but received the prestigious Academy Award in his 40s for best director for his debut feature, the haunting family breakdown drama Ordinary People starring Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, in 1980.

A year later, he founded the Sundance Institute, a non-profit organisation dedicated to cultivating fresh cinematic voices and named after his most famous role. He took over a struggling film festival in Utah, his adopted state, in 1984 – renaming it after the institute a few years later and championing independent movie-making.

The Sundance Film Festival became a global showcase for movies made outside the Hollywood system. "For me, the word to be underscored is 'independence'," Redford said in 2018. "I've always believed in that word. That's what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren't given a chance to be heard.”

The early careers of directors as varied as Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Ava DuVernay enjoyed the support of Sundance but, latterly, Redford complained bitterly of the “commercial whirlwind” as the festival grew to more than 85,000 attendees from a few hundred in its early days.

Never a fan of Hollywood’s dumb-it-down approach, Redford often demanded that his films carry cultural weight and feature serious topics like grief and political corruption. His immense star power undoubtedly helped find audiences.

In 1992, he directed and produced A River Runs Through It, about Montana fly fishermen pondering existential questions. 1994’s Quiz Show—nominated for four Oscars, though it won none—featured a notorious 1950s TV scandal.

Fittingly for an actor who, for many, encompassed the Hollywood dream, Charles Rober Redford Jr was born on August 18, 1936, in Santa Monica, California, three months before his parents, Charles Redford and Martha Hart, married.

Publicists for one of his film studios in the early stages of his career intentionally claimed he had been born in 1937 to avoid any controversy. Redford’s father was a milkman who became an accountant, eventually working for Standard Oil of California.

His mother died in 1955 when Redford was just 18 of a blood disorder associated with the birth of twin girls, who had lived only a short while, leaving him an only child.

In retelling the story of growing up in California, Redford liked to cast himself as something of a tearaway, involved in gang fights and other anti-social behaviour. “There was great fear I was going to end up a bum,” he said in 2002.

The rather more prosaic truth was that early showbusiness connections, at school with the children of Hollywood titans including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Dore Schary, helped guarantee a foot in the door of the film industry.

After school, Redford attended the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship before dropping out soon after. He spent a year in Europe, studying art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and selling pavement sketches to make ends meet.

Back in LA, he worked in the oil fields before appearing on stage in the late 1950s. He made his Broadway debut in 1959 with a one-line part in Tall Story, making his big screen debut uncredited in the film adaptation a year later.

His most successful Broadway appearance was in Barefoot in the Park – the 1963 Neil Simon hit comedy about newlyweds – co-starring Elizabeth Ashley. Again, he reprised the role on screen, playing Paul Bratter four years later opposite Jane Fonda.

His first credited film appearance was in 1962’s War Hunt, a Korean War movie, where he played Private Roy Loomis. He married his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, in 1958. They had four children: Shauna, Amy, David James (known as Jamie), and Scott, who died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was only two and a half months old.

Jamie, also a filmmaker, died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 58. He is survived by his wife and daughters, artist Shauna Schlosser Redford and director Amy Redford, and seven grandchildren. The marriage ended in divorce in 1985, and in 2009, Redford married Sibylle Szaggars, a German artist he had met at the Sundance Institute.

While by any accounts Redfors enjoyed a glittering career, it didn’t all go his way. His 1974 performance as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby was slated by the critics, with one suggesting his performance had all “the emotions of a telephone recording”.

In 2013, then aged 75, he appeared alone in All Is Lost about a sailor struggling to survive at sea. The film, which had almost no dialogue, was snubbed by Oscar voters and struggled at the box office.

Redford’s final acting roles included Our Souls at Night in 2017, a twilight-years romance co-starring Jane Fonda, and The Old Man and the Gun a year later, based on a true story, about a septuagenarian bank robber.