Redford, Robert (1937-…), is an American motion-picture actor and director. Redford has played a wide variety of characters. He is known for his good looks and his understated acting style. He won the 1980 Academy Award as best director for Ordinary People. Redford also directed the films A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), and The Conspirator (2011). He directed and starred in The Horse Whisperer (1998), Lions for Lambs (2007), and The Company You Keep (2012). In 1981, Redford founded the Sundance Institute , a nonprofit organization in Park City, Utah. The institute is dedicated to discovering, developing, and training new filmmakers, composers, and playwrights. The institute is best known for the Sundance Film Festival, an annual motion-picture exhibition and competition. The festival concentrates on independent filmmaking—that is, movies made outside the big-budget, commercially oriented Hollywood film industry.
Charles Robert Redford, Jr., was born on Aug. 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, California. He first won praise in 1963 in the Broadway comedy Barefoot in the Park. He also starred in the film version in 1967. Redford became a movie star as a Western outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and as a successful screenwriter in The Way We Were (1973).
Redford also has starred in political films, most notably The Candidate (1972), All the President’s Men (1976), and Truth (2015). In All the President’s Men, Redford played American journalist Bob Woodward as he investigated the 1972 Watergate scandal. In Truth (2015), he played television anchorman Dan Rather during a 2004 scandal in which he falsely accused President George W. Bush of avoiding being drafted during the Vietnam War (1957-1975).
Redford’s other films include Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Sting (1973), The Great Gatsby (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Electric Horseman (1979), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), Sneakers (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993), The Last Castle (2001), Spy Game (2001), The Clearing (2004), All Is Lost (2013), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), A Walk in the Woods (2015), Pete’s Dragon (2016), and The Old Man & the Gun (2018).
In 1996, Redford launched the Sundance Channel, a cable television network that airs independent films and original programs. In 2014, the network was rebranded as SundanceTV.
