Robert Redford

One of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood history, Robert Redford had a screen career that spanned six decades — from his early days playing bit parts in TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents to his final major role as an aging outlaw in The Old Man and the Gun (2018). He was also an early advocate for environmental causes, an Oscar-winning director and the co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute.

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1936, Redford ended up studying acting in New York and eventually caught attention for his work in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon’s hit play Barefoot in the Park in 1965. He reprised the role in the 1967 movie adaptation, and several years later would co-star with his friend Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Redford would become one of the major box-office draws of the 1970s — films like The Sting (1972), The Way We Were (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) are considered some of the best of that decade. Other works such as The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Indecent Proposal (1992), and The Horse Whisperer (1998) were huge popular and critical hits.

Though Redford would continue to act until his retirement in 2017, he began balancing movie performances with directing gigs, starting with Ordinary People, which took home the Best Picture Oscar in 1980, and including films such as A River Runs Through It (1992) and Quiz Show (1994). His transformation of a modest, regional film festival in Park City, Utah, into the Sundance Film Festival helped kick-start the modern American independent film movement and gave generations of filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Ryan Coogler their first big breaks. —David Fear