Robert Redford, aged 89, passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home in Sundance, Utah, a place he cherished. He was surrounded by his family and will be profoundly missed, according to Berger. Redford was married twice and had four children. His first marriage was to Lola Van Wagenen in 1958, and they had four children: Scott, Shauna, James, and Amy. Tragically, their firstborn son Scott died in 1959 from SIDS, and their son James succumbed to cancer in 2020. The couple divorced in 1985, as reported by Smooth Radio. In 2009, Redford married his second wife, Sibylle Szaggars, a German-born environmental artist, with whom he had been in a relationship since 1996.
Beyond his film career, Robert Redford was instrumental in fostering a global community for independent filmmakers as the founder of the Sundance Institute and its renowned Sundance Film Festival. As a passionate environmentalist, Redford moved to Utah in 1961 and dedicated several decades to advocating for the conservation of the American West’s natural environment. In his later years, he continued to act, reuniting with Jane Fonda for Netflix’s “Our Souls at Night” in 2017 and starring in “The Old Man & The Gun” in 2018, which he hinted might be his final role. However, Redford was reluctant to retire. “To me, retirement means stopping something or quitting something,” he stated in a 2018 CBS Sunday Morning interview.
“There’s this life to lead — why not live it as fully as you can, for as long as you can?” In 2020, Redford issued a strong call for environmental action through an opinion piece for CNN, highlighting the dire consequences of climate change amid widespread wildfires in the western United States.