Actor, writer, producer, director, activist - sometimes it seemed like there was nothing Robert Redford couldn't do.
As a screen actor, he was unquestionaly charismatic and, like his good friend Paul Newman, beneath the good looks was an actor of considerable intelligence and skill.
Redford was also an Oscar winning director, often bringing hefty dramatic stories to the big screen.
But his greatest contribution to cinema was the helping hand he gave to other talent.
As one of the brains behind the Sundance Institute and its film festivals, he provided a launch pad for directors like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell, Kevin Smith, Damian Chazelle and Jordan Peele.
But he was also an ardent campaigner for environmental and LGBT causes.
Born in Santa Monica in 1936, Redford's family had English, Scotch Irish and Irish ancestry.
His father Charles was an accountant and was married before he met his mother Martha.
He also had a step brother, William.
Initially, the Redfords lived in Van Nuys in the San Fernando valley where he attended high school.
However he was bored with school, finding inspiration instead outside the classroom in art and playing sports like tennis.
Redford left high school in 1954 and managed to secure a place at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he joined a fraternity, drank heavily and worked part-time in the town's famous pizza restaurant, The Sink.
Kicked out of college, Redford spent some time travelling around Europe and ended up studying art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
He married Lola van Wagenen secretly in Las Vegas and again at a Mormon ceremony in Provo, Utah.
The couple had met in university and she quit with him.
Van Wagenen would build a career as an historian and become a respected executive producer of documentaries.
Their marriage would last 25 years and they would have four children - Scott in 1959 who tragically passed away at the age of two from sudden infant death syndrome, Shauna in 1960, Jamie in 1962 and Amy in 1970.
Shauna became a painter, Jamie a writer/producer and Amy an actor.
Jamie would pass away in October 2020 at the age of 58 after battling bile duct cancer and had been, like his father, an environmental activist and filmmaker, setting up The Redford Centre to support documentary filmmakers addressing climate issues.
After marrying van Wagenen, it was in New York where Redford would first become drawn into acting.
He took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts whose alumni included Kirk Douglas, Grace Kelly, Spencer Tracy, Anne Bancroft, Pat O'Brien, John Cassavetes, Agnes Morehead, Jason Robards, Charles Durning, Don Rickles and Cecil B De Mille.
Upon graduating in 1959, he began to ply his trade as an actor in theatre in New York, making his Broadway debut just months later in a minor role in 'A Tall Story'.
Other more substantial parts followed in 'The Highest Tree,' 'Sunday in New York' and as the husband in the original cast of Neil Simon's hit comedy 'Barefoot In The Park'.
There were also opportunities in TV to cut his teeth as a screen actor.
In 1960, he appeared in episodes of shows like ABC's Western series 'Maverick,' 'Naked City' and 'The Untouchables' CBS's 'Playhouse 90', 'Perry Mason,' 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents,' 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' and 'The Twilight Zone', NBC's 'Dr Kildare' and 'The Virginian' and a two-part National Telefilm Associates syndicated miniseries production of Eugene O'Neill's 'The Iceman Cometh' with Jason Robards.
In 1960, he got his first taste of working on a movie - appearing in an uncredited role as a baseball player in Joshua Logan's romantic comedy 'Tall Story' with Anthony Perkins and Jane Fonda who was also making her debut on a film that failed to connect with audiences or critics.
His next movie role in 1962 was much more meaty, playing a private in Denis Sanders' highly rated war movie 'War Hunt' with John Saxon, Tom Skerritt, Francis Coppola as a truck driver and Sydney Pollack.
Pollack would forge a friendship with Redford on the set - this would result in them working together when he started to direct movies.
Redford played a closeted gay man in Robert Mulligan's 1965 drama 'Inside Daisy Clover' with Natalie Wood and Christopher Plummer.
The part would land him a Golden Globe for Best New Star of the Year and while the film was well received by critics, it did not fare well on general release.
Nevertheless it firmly put Redford in the line of sight of Hollywood producers and casting directors.
In Gottfried Reinhardt's World War II comedy 'Situation Hopeless.. But Not Serious,' which was based on an acclaimed novel by the actor Robert Shaw, he and Mike Connors played air force pilots forced to bail out in Nazi Germany who are fortunate to come across Alec Guinness's German who hides them in his cellar.
But when the war ends, he is so enjoying their company he pretends it is still raging.
Filmed in Munich, the film was dismissed by the New York Times as a "mild, pat comedy" which was occasionally diverting.
Redford's first lead in a Sydney Pollack film was in the 1966 drama 'This Property Is Condemned,' which was based on a one-act play by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen by Francis Coppola, Fred Coe and Edith Sommer for Paramount Pictures.
Set during the Depression, Redford played an employee of the railroad company who attracts the attention of Natalie Wood's flirty local girl.
With a cast that included Charles Bronson and Dabney Coleman, Pollack's movie had a subdued box office performance but landed Wood a Golden Globe nomination for Best Lead Actress in a Drama.
Arthur Penn's neo noir drama 'The Chase' saw Redford cement his leading man status as a prison escapee on the run in Texas.
A critical hit, it also starred Marlon Brando as a Sheriff convinced of Redford's character's innocence of the murder he was convicted of and the cast also included Jane Fonda, James Fox, Angie Dickinson and Robert Duvall.
Redford scored one of his biggest box office successes of the 1960s with Gene Saks' 1967 adaptation of 'Barefoot In The Park' as the more reserved husband to Jane Fonda's free spirited woman in Neil Simon's comedy.
Critics and audiences revelled in it's romantic farce and the screen chemistry between Redford and Fonda.
George Roy Hill cast him as Sundance in the 1969 Western 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' with Paul Newman - a film that would quickly establish itself as a classic.
Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen had all been connected to the iconic part created by screenwriter William Goldman but when McQueen backed out, Redford was given his chance after Newman lobbied for him.
And while they would only appear in two movies together, Newman and Redford forged a friendship on set that planted itself in the public's mind as one of Hollywood's greatest double acts.
Redford would tell ABC News in September 2008: "It was just that connection of playing those characters and the fun of it that really began the relationship.
"And then once the film started, once we went forward, we then discovered other similarities that just multiplied over time, a common ground that we both had between us, interests and so forth, and differences."
With a box office gross in the US alone of over $100 million, the film, with its love triangle featuring Katharine Ross's schoolteacher Etta Place, tapped into shifting mores just like Arthur Penn's 'Bonnie and Clyde'.
But it also featured iconic moments like Butch and Sundance's cliff edge jump, the exploding baggage car, the bicycle sequence and the final freeze frame that have ensured it hasn't dated and which have continued to influence filmmakers to this day.
Songwriter Burt Bacharach later claimed Redford misjudged the impact the inclusion of 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' would have on the film, believing at the idea it was a dumb idea because there was no rain.
However it was a huge hit.
In Abraham Polonsky's Western 'Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,' Redford teamed up again with Katharine Ross as a Sheriff sent to pursue an Indian outlaw and his lover.
A minor hit, the film with Robert Blake would earn Redford and Ross Best Actor and Actress BAFTAs.
Michael Ritchie helped Redford cap a remarkable year with the acclaimed Winter Olympics sports drama 'Downhill Racer' in which he played a single minded and cocky skier whose coach is played by Gene Hackman.
A critical success, it was released a month after 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' which dwarfed it in box office takings but it was still a minor hit.
Redford ploughed his salaries for 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and 'Downhill Racer' into the purchase of a ski area in Utah in the eastern side of Mount Timpanogos, northeast of Provo.
The area would later become the base for the Sundance Institute and film festival.
The Canadian director Sidney J Furie directed Redford and Michael J Pollard in the 1970 counterculture dirt bike racing drama 'Little Fauss and Big Haisy' which was more notable for its soundtrack featuring Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.
In 1972, Redford once again took on the lead role in a Sydney Pollack film, starring in the hit revisionist Western 'Jeremiah Johnson' as a Mexican war veteran who becomes a trapper in Colorado's Rockies.
His performance earned a lot of critical adulation and he followed it up with a great role as a reluctant politician bidding for a Senate seat in California in Michael Ritchie's cynical Nixon era comedy drama 'The Candidate'.
Also starring Peter Boyle and Melvyn Douglas, its acerbic observations about US politics remain relevant to this day and earned an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Jeremy Larner, who had been a speechwriter for Senator Eugene McCarthy during his unsuccessful bid for the 1968 Democratic Party Presidential nomination.
There was disappointment, however, when audiences failed to turn out for Peter Yates' heist caper movie 'The Hot Rock' in which he played an ex-jailbird involved in the elaborate theft of an African gem from a Brooklyn museum along with his brother-in-law played by George Segal.
Reviewers were underwhelmed by the movie, which also featured Zero Mostel, despite its script by William Goldman.
Redford's rekindling of his onscreen partnership with Newman in George Roy Hill's Ragtime conman drama 'The Sting' generated a lot of excitement in 1973 and didn't disappoint.
The winner of seven Academy Awards, the film about an elaborate betting scam at the expense of Robert Shaw's Irish Mobster was another huge hit, earning Redford a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Redford also memorably teamed up with Barbara Streisand for Sydney Pollack's romantic drama 'The Way We Were,' which netted Oscars for its Marvin Hamlisch score and title song.
The film, about the attraction between a Marxist Jewish woman and an apolitical White Anglo Saxon Protestant, received mixed reviews but drew huge audiences -although many felt Redford's rather passive character was inevitably overshadowed by Streisand's more feisty role.
Redford took on the challenging part of the enigmatic Jay Gatsby in Jack Clayton's handsome 1974 adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic jazz age novel 'The Great Gatsby'.
Working from a screenplay by Francis Coppola, who replaced Truman Capote, Redford led a cast that included Mia Farrow as Daisy, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan, Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson and Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker.
Clayton's version got an ambivalent reaction from film critics who felt it lacked the fizz of Fitzgerald's novel and it remains the best adaptation of the book, picking up Academy Awards for Costume Design and Nelson Riddle's score.
His fourth collaboration as a lead in a Sydney Pollack film was in the gripping 1975 conspiracy thriller 'Three Days of the Condor' in which Redford played a CIA analyst who returns from a lunchtime trip to a deli to find his colleagues have all been assassinated.
Also starring Max Von Sydow and Faye Dunaway, it was a box office and critical success, raising timely questions about the activities of the intelligence community.
George Roy Hill directed him for a third time in the popular air drama 'The Great Waldo Pepper' with Margot Kidder and Susan Sarandon in which he portrayed a 1920s stunt pilot.
Redford was also cast as the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in Alan J Pakuka's compelling Watergate movie 'All The President's Men' about the role the newspaper played in uncovering the scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign.
With Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and a cast that included Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Martin Balsam, Jane Alexander and Ned Beatty, the film captured four Oscars but bizarrely lost out to 'Rocky' in the race for Best Picture.
Regarded as one of the best movies about journalism, it was a huge hit with audiences and remains a favourite to this day.
His next movie was Richard Attenborough's 1977 Second World War epic 'A Bridge Too Far' with an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, Ryan O'Neal, Anthony Hopkins, James Caan, Elliott Gould, Dirk Bogarde, Liv Ullmann, Laurence Olivier and Maximilian Schell.
Playing a US major involved in an Allied operation to take a series of bridges from the Nazis, Redford found his depiction fell foul if the real life figure he portrayed, Julian Cook.
Attenborough's film got a mixed reception from critics and was a modest success with audiences.
It would be two years until Redford's next appearance alongside Jane Fonda once again as a rodeo rider in the 1979 Sydney Pollack romantic drama 'The Electric Horseman'.
A hit with audiences and critics, it was the 11th highest grossing film at the box office in North America that year.
Stuart Rosenburg directed him as a reforming prison chief in the hard hitting 1980 drama 'Brubaker' with Yaphet Kotto, Jane Alexander, M Emmett Walsh, David Keith and Murray Hamilton.
Well received by audiences and critics, Roger Ebert complained there was too much polemic and not enough focus on character development, with many of Redford's speeches sounding like they were ripped straight from a newspaper editorial.
Having entertained thoughts for many years of becoming a director, Redford finally took the plunge in 1980 by bringing Judith Guest's 1976 novel 'Ordinary People' to the big screen.
Working from an adaptation by Alvin Sargent, Redford cast Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland as the patents of a middle class Illinois family that was falling apart following the death of one son and the attempted suicide of another, Timothy Hutton's Conrad.
With Elizabeth McGovern, Judd Hirsch and M Emmett Walsh also in the cast, the film earned considerable critical praise and was the big winner during awards season.
Redford picked up Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director - controversially beating Martin Scorsese's masterpiece 'Raging Bull' - and at the Golden Globes and the Director's Guild of America Awards.
Among an overall haul of four Oscars, Hutton won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, beating fellow cast member Judd Hirsch and Sargent won for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Tyler Moore won Best Actress in a Drama at the Golden Globes and was Oscar nominated.
In a 2019 interview with Collider at the Marrakech Film Festival, Redford explained his decision to direct films was motivated by a desire for more creative control.
"I'd been an actor and I'd worked with some good directors and some not so good directors," he admitted.
"But I felt there was a part of me I wasn't using.
"I wanted more of a voice on how this thing is shaped and the only way I could do that was to direct.
"I think directing for me became easier because I'd been an artist before I became an actor. My art form was just travelling around, sitting in bars and cafes with a sketchbook and watching people around me. These sketchbooks kept me company."
It would be four years before Redford would appear onscreen with Barry Levinson directing him in the elegant baseball drama 'The Natural' with Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger and Robert Prosky.
The drama, which followed the career of a talented player over the years, did well despite dividing critics.
Redford played a big game hunter who gets involved with Meryl Streep's Danish writer Karen Blixen in Sydney Pollack's Oscar laden 1985 romantic epic 'Out of Africa' with Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen, Michael Gough and Donal McCann.
Pollack's beautifully shot movie won seven Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress after attracting strong reviews and winning over audiences and a lot of critics.
He turned to comedy for his next project, playing an Assistant District Attorney in Ivan Reitman's 1986 box office hit 'Legal Eagles' with Daryl Hannah, Debra Winger, Brian Dennehy and Terence Stamp.
However 'Legal Eagles' was not a hit with critics.
Eight years after 'Ordinary People,' Redford returned to the director's chair to helm the rural New Mexico comedy drama 'The Milagro Beanfield War' with Ruben Blades, Sonja Braga, Melanie Griffith, John Heard, Christopher Walken and Daniel Stern.
The tale of a dispute over a corporate land buyout had a mixed critical response, with some reviewers quibbling with its tone and it flopped commercially.
In 1990, Redford turned out as the romantic lead in his final Sydney Pollack film, 'Havana' - an epic tale of a professional gambler set against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution.
With Lena Olin, Alan Arkin and Raul Julia, the $40 million movie struggled to make a quarter of its budget back on cinemas and was hammered by critics.
Redford's third directorial outing came in 1992 with another relationship drama 'A River Runs Thought It' with Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, Tom Skerritt, Emily Lloyd and Brenda Blethyn.
Set in Montana and adapted from a Norman MacLean's autobiographical novella, it focussed on the relationship between a Presbyterian minister and his sons - one who is studious and the other who is a rebel.
Critics adored the film and it performed well at the box.
However Pitt felt his performance in it was not good enough.
"Robert Redford made a quality movie but I don't think I was skilled enough," he told Entertainment Weekly in a 2011 interview.
"I think I could have done better. Maybe it was the pressure of the part and playing someone who was a real person - and the family was around occasionally - and not wanting to let Redford down."
That year Redford also joined Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn and Ben Kingsley for the hi-tech caper comedy 'Sneakers'.
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson, it proved popular with audiences and critics.
He narrated Michael Apted's acclaimed documentary 'Incident at Oglala' about the death of two FBI agents on the Pune Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota and the subsequent conviction of Leonard Peltier.
In 1993, Redford scored one of his biggest box office hits in Adrian Lyne's 'Indecent Proposal' in which he played a stranger who offers a married couple, played by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, $1 million if he can spend the night with the wife.
Critics hated the concept, slamming it as a male chauvinist fantasy but audiences were seduced by the film which also featured Seymour Cassel, Oliver Platt, Billy Bob Thornton and Billy Connolly.
Redford turned up alongside Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman as investigative reporters in the 1993 French TV movie 'La Classe Americaine' - a star studded tale which owed a lot to Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' but dubbed the voices of all three in a film which saw them star alongside French actors working from a spoof script.
Essentially a film fashioned out of clips of 'All the President's Men' and old Hollywood Warner Bros movies featuring Welles, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Lana Turner, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall and Spencer Tracy, it was directed by Dominique Mezerette and Michel Hazanavicius who would go on to create the Oscar winning 2011 silent movie 'The Artist'.
In 1994 Redford directed Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow, Paul Scofield, John Turturro, Christopher McDonald, David Paymer and Hank Azaria in arguably his best movie as a director, 'Quiz Show'.
Nominated for four Oscars, the film about a true scandal surrounding the popular NBC quiz 'Twenty-One,' also featured Martin Scorsese as a sponsor of the show called to testify on Capitol Hill about allegations it was rigged.
Up against Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' and Jonathan Demme's 'Philadelphia,' it went away empty handed at most awards ceremonies, with Redford and Scofield competing at the Oscars for Best Director and Best Supporting Actor respectively.
However critics lauded its smart direction, intelligent screenplay and strong performances - most notably Fiennes, Turturro and Scofield's - even if it didn't quite make its budget back on general release.
Jon Avnet directed Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1996 romantic drama 'Up Close and Personal' about a news director and his protege finding love.
The film with Stockard Channing, Joe Mantegna and Kate Nelligan, secured a decent box office profit but it was again panned by critics.
Redford was in front of and behind the camera for the commercially successful 1998 romantic drama 'The Horse Whisperer' - an adaptation of Nicholas Evans' best selling novel from three years earlier.
Handsomely shot by Robert Richardson, the film saw Redford play the Montana horse whisperer of the title, who is engaged by Kristin Scott Thomas' magazine editor Annie McLean to help her daughter's horse after its involvement in a tragedy which has also traumatised her daughter Grace, played by Scarlett Johansson.
Most of the reviews for the film were positive and the movie, which also starred Sam Neill, Diane Wiest and Chris Cooper, earned Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Director nods at the Golden Globes.
Golf was the subject of Redford's fifth film as a director, 'The Legend of Bagger Vance' in which Will Smith's caddie of the title helps Matt Damon's local Great Depression era professional, Ranuulph Junah in Georgia take on the great Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones in an exhibition match organised by Charlize Theron's Adele Invergordon.
Exquisitely shot this time by Michael Ballhaus and narrated by Jack Lemmon, the film stumbled at the box office on its release in 2000 and attracted derision from some critics and also filmmakers like Spike Lee over its depiction of Smith's character as a "magical Negro".
Not all critics were as unkind but the general consensus was that it wasn't a wise choice of material by Redford or his cast.
The following year, he turned up as a highly decorated Lieutenant General sent to a military jail run by James Gandolfini's Colonel with whom he has a battle of wills in Rod Lurie's drama 'The Last Castle'.
Also starring Mark Rufalo and Delroy Lindo, the film got mostly positive reviews but struggled to draw audiences, falling short of making half its $72 million budget back.
Tony Scott's slick espionage thriller 'Spy Game' in which he turned up alongside Brad Pitt, Catherine McCormick and Stephen Dillane did well at the box office and drew recent reviews.
The Dutch film producer turned director Pieter Jan Brugge cast Redford as a Pittsburgh man kidnapped by Willem Dafoe's disgruntled employee in the 2004 thriller 'The Clearing,' with Helen Mirren and Alessandro Nivola.
The movie divided critics and found only a niche audience.
Lasse Hallstrom's 2005 drama 'An Unfinished Life' with Jennifer Lopez, Morgan Freeman, Damian Lewis and Josh Lucas did little to arrest the suspicion that Redford's commercial clout as an actor was on the wane.
A dull drama about a gruff Wyoming rancher, it failed to connect with audiences.
Redford was among the vocal cast of Gary Winick's hit family movie 'Charlotte's Web,' providing the voice of Ike the Horse in the movie starring Dakota Fanning, Kevin Anderson and Beau Bridges and featuring the voices of John Cleese, Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi, Oprah Winfrey and Reba McEntire.
In 2007, Redford directed himself again alongside Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Andrew Garfield and Michael Pena in the contemporary Afghan war drama 'Lions for Lambs'.
A dialogue heavy film, some critics felt the movie about a college professor, a reporter and a US Congressman and their connections to a US Army platoon in Afghanistan was a bit too preachy and it underperformed spectacularly in cinemas.
In 2008, he co-founded Wildwood Enterprises, building on his previous experience as an executive producer on 'Downhill Racer' and helped greenlight Edward Burns' comedy, 'She's The One,' Walter Salles' 'Central Station' and 'The Motorcycle Diaries,' Tamara Jenkins' 'Slums of Beverly Hills' and Steven Zaillian's 'A Civil Action.'
Redford was back behind the camera for a 2009 historical drama 'The Conspirator' about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, centring on the only woman to be charged with involvement in the plot.
Robin Wright played Mary Surratt who was executed, with James McAvoy as the war hero who reluctantly defends her at her trial, Evan Rachel Wood as her daughter and Tom Wilkinson, Kevin Kline and Danny Huston among a cast that also included Toby Kebbell as the gunman, John Wilkes Booth.
The film got decent enough reviews but it struggled to gain any traction at the box office - barely making its budget back when its North American and international takings were combined.
In 2009, Redford married his long time partner, Sibylle Szaggars in Hamburg who had been living with him in Sundance since the 1990s.
Redford took on the dual roles of star and director one more time in the 2012 political thriller 'The Company You Keep' in which a reporter, played by Shia LaBeouf, tries to track down Redford's Weather Underground activist who is wanted for robbery and murder.
With a cast that included Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, Anna Kendrick, Nick Nolte, Brit Marling, Sam Elliott, Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins and Julie Christie, the film drew fairly decent reviews and it won two prizes at the Venice Film Festival where it received its premiere.
Despite a limited release in many territories, the film produced by Wildwood Enterprises made a handsome profit on a very modest, rumoured $2 million budget.
Wildwood also produced John Akomfrah's acclaimed BAFTA nominated documentary 'The March' on 2013 which focused on American civil right leader Martin Luther King's march on Washington and was narrated by Denzel Washington.
It also produced Sydney Freeland's well received low budget 2014 drama 'Drunktown's Finest'.
In 2013, Redford turned in one of his finest screen performances in JC Chandor's gripping nautical tale 'All is Lost' as a man struggling to keep alive in the Indian Ocean on a sinking boat.
Nominated for a Best Actor In A Drama at the Golden Globes, many people were shocked when Redford was snubbed with no Oscar nomination.
Critics adored the film which he carried onscreen on his own with little dialogue and it found an arthouse audience.
Redford waded into the Marvel universe in 2014, playing the villainous Secretary of Internal Security and senior S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce in Anthony and Joe Russo's 'Captain America: Winter Soldier' with Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Hayley Atwell, Anthony Mackie and Samuel L Jackson.
Unsurprisingly a huge success, Redford said he had decided to climb onboard the Avengers superhero juggernaut because he "wanted to experience this new form of filmmaking that has taken over where you have kind of cartoon characters brought to life through high technology."
Most critics enjoyed the film and Redford's underplaying of the role, interpreting his performance as a nod and a wink to the conspiracy theory movies of the 1970s like 'The Three Days of the Condor' and the kind of villains Redford would have been on the run from in his younger days.
Pierce would be revived briefly in the 2019 Russo Brothers' behemoth 'Avengers Endgame'.
A long harboured project of his finally made it to the big screen in 2015 in the form of Ken Kwapis' 'A Walk in the Woods' with Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson.
Redford had originally hoped to lure Paul Newman to the screen adaptation of travel writer Bill Bryson's memoir with Chris Columbus or Barry Levinson on board as director but temporarily abandoned the plan after his friend's death in 2008.
However he revived the project after being impressed by Nolte's work on 'The Company You Keep' but the final result was a dull yarn that was a minor box office success.
That year Redford returned to the world of journalism movies, playing the CBS News anchor Dan Rather in James Vanderbilt's 'Truth' about the '60 Minutes' investigation into claims during the 2004 Election that President George W Bush received preferential treatment while in the military.
With Cate Blanchett starring as his producer and a cast that also included Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood, Stacy Keach and William Devane, the film focussed on the veracity of the sources behind the story which cost Rather and Mapes their jobs.
The film was well received, with Redford and Blanchett both coming in for particular praise.
There was an avuncular grandad role in David Lowery's critically and commercially successful 2017 remake of the Disney classic 'Pete's Dragon' with Dona Laurence, Bryce Dallas Howard and Wes Bentley.
He rubbed shoulders onscreen one last time with Jane Fonda in Riteish Batra's 2017 Netflix movie 'Our Souls At Night' with Iain Armitage, Matthias Schoenaerts, Judy Greer and Bruce Dern about the relationship between a widow and widower and the impact that has on her family.
The relationship drama was well received, although its acquisition by Netflix only served to ram home the fact that such movies were often struggling to find a home in a studio system more obsessed with big budget blockbusters.
In 2018, Redford starred in his last lead role in David Lowery's charming, meditative drama 'The Old Man and the Gun' about an elderly bank robber who gets romantically involved with Sissy Spacek's character named Jewel.
Also starring Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Keith Carradine, John David Washington and Elisabeth Moss, the film riffed on Redford's history of playing handsome bad boys with a streak of goodness and it was a minor hit with audiences and critics, earning him another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.
Redford would lend his voice subsequently to Tim Janis' 2019 family fantasy digital release 'Buttons: A Christmas Tale' with Kate Winslet joining him as a narrator and a cast that comprised of Ioan Gruffudd, Roma Downey, Jane Seymour, Abigail Spencer, Angela Lansbury and Dick van Dyke.
He provided the voice of a dolphin monster in a Florida-set 2020 comedy anthology 'Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia' which had several directors and drew mixed reviews when it screened in Sundance just before the Coronavirus pandemic forced cinemas across the world to close because of lockdown.
Redford's life, though, was more than just about the movies he made as an actor and a director.
In 1981, keen to use his star power to help other filmmakers, Redford established the not for profit Sundance Institute aimed at developing independent artists.
Based in Park City in Utah, with offices in New York and LA, it sought to provide a financial and creative support program for directors, writers and musicians involved in film - offering fellowships and running labs around the world to help develop projects.
"The goal for me was very simple," he later told Collider.
"[It was] To celebrate people who don't get celebrated, who are ignored or undiscovered and who deserve to be discovered.
"When I stated there were a few independent films out there but they had no traction.
"There was no real category called independent film.
"Even if I'd been in the mainstream in my career, I was always interested in the alternative point of view, in the idea of independence, not to be obligated to this or that, to be free to be what you wanted to be.
"So I started the non-profit Sundance Institute to support independent filmmakers, to create a mechanism that would help develop their stories and skills.
"That led to the Sundance Film Festival, which is mostly focused in independent film."
Hot on the heels of the Oscar success of 'Ordinary People,' the institute ran its first ever lab in 1981 and over the years its trustees would include Sydney Pollack, Saul Bass, Karl Malden, producer Mike Medavoy and Victor Nunez as well as Redford.
The Institute has also run programs for documentary filmmakers, independent producers, composers, writers and Native American directors as well as running programs for theatre and episodic writing.
It acquired the fledgling United States Film Festival, transforming it into the Sundance Film Festival which has become a platform every January for edgy independent film around the world and an early indicator of possible awards season contenders.
Among the films to get a notable boost at Sundance were Steven Soderbergh's 'Sex, Lies and Videotape,' Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs,' Robert Rodriguez's 'El Mariachi,' Kevin Smith's 'Clerks,' Edward Burns' 'The Brothers McMullen,' David O Russell's 'Spanking the Monkey,' Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's 'The Blair Witch Project,' Richard Kelly's 'Donnie Darko,' Todd Field's 'In the Bedroom,' Zach Braff's 'Garden State,' James Wan's 'Saw,' Jared Hess' 'Napoleon Dynamite,' Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' 'Little Miss Sunshine,' Marc Webb's '500 Days of Summer,' Duncan Jones' 'Moon,' Damian Chazelle's 'Whiplash,' Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' and Rich Peppiatt's 'Kneecap'.
Spin-off Sundance Festivals have also taken place in London, Hong Kong and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Keen to build their reputation as a platform for emerging indie filmmaking talent, the Weinstein brothers' Miramax spotted the potential of the festival and acquired for distribution many movies screened there.
New Line Cinema also started to strike deals.
In later years, drawn to the awards pedigree of some of the films premiered there, streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and distributors like Universal and Lionsgate moved quickly to seal deals with the films attracting the biggest buzz.
In January 2019, Redford announced he was stepping back from his role as the public face of the festival.
"I think we are at the point where I can move on to a different place," the then 82-year-old declared.
"The thing I've missed over the years is being able to spend time with the films and the filmmakers.
"I've been spending a lot of time introducing things but I don't think that the festival needs a lot of introduction anymore."
He also used his celebrity judiciously to engage the public on social and political issues.
Politically, Redford supported politicians on both sides of the aisle while fervently campaigning for LGBT and environmental causes..
In 1990, he endorsed the Republican Brett Cornell Morris in his unsuccessful bid for a Congressional seat in Utah and Gary Hervey in his successful bid in 2004 to become a Republican Lieutenant Governor in the state.
However in 2012 he weighed in behind Barack Obama's bid to become the President of the United States and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from him in 2016 for his work in the arts.
Such was Redford's standing as a cultural icon that HBO's Emmy award winning series 'Watchmen' included references to Redford being President of the United States for 26 years, opening the door for a cameo.
In November 2019, Redford waded into the Presidential election, criticising Donald Trump's partisan approach to governing and accusing him of presiding over a "Divided States of America."
Four years earlier, when Trump originally ran for the White House, Redford claimed the media had misquoted him from an interview with Larry King where he appeared to welcome the New York businessman's candidacy on the grounds that it would shake-up US politics.
Redford was annoyed this was portrayed as an endorsement of Trump.
Angry at Trump's ripping up of United States' obligations under the Paris climate change accords, he endorsed the Democratic Party's Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential race.
A trustee of the Natural Resources Defence Council, he campaigned on a number of environmental issues including opposing the TransCanada Corporation's Keystone Pipeline from Western Canada to refineries in Illinois and Texas.
In 2014, Redford was instrumental in getting Pitzer College in California to get rid of all fossil fuel stocks from its endowment - the first US academic institution to make such a commitment.
Two years earlier, the college had established the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, enabling the studying of sustainable solutions to environmental challenges for future generations.
Redford will mostly be remembered, though, for his contribution to American cinema.
As an actor and director, that contribution is immense.
However his promotion of new filmmaking voices though Sundance may be his greatest legacy.
That willingness to provide a platform to up and coming filmmakers stands as a textbook example to other movie icons of how they can harness their star power for the greater good of the industry.
Let's see who picks up the baton.
(Robert Redford passed away at the age of 89 on September 16, 2025)
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