The death has been announced of the American actor, director, and activist Robert Redford at the age of 89.
The screen icon's passing was first reported by the New York Times.
Redford died in his sleep, and a specific cause was not given, according to a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, reported the newspaper.
A Life in Pictures: Robert Redford
Redford's screen career spanned over 60 years and included a Best Director Oscar for 1980's Ordinary People and an Honorary Academy Award in 2002.
Among his most celebrated films were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting - starring opposite his friend Paul Newman, who died in 2008.
His other best-known works as an actor included The Candidate, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, The Natural, and Out of Africa.
As a producer and director, his films included The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, and The Horse Whisperer.
Redford used the millions he made to launch the Sundance Institute and Festival in the 1970s, promoting independent filmmaking long before small and quirky were fashionable.
He never won the Best Actor Oscar, but his first outing as a director - the 1980 family drama Ordinary People - won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
Butch Cassidy made Redford an overnight star, but he never felt comfortable with celebrity or the male starlet image that persisted late into his 60s.
"People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm. It's not easy being Robert Redford," he once told New York magazine.
Intensely private, he bought land in remote Utah in the early 1970s for his family retreat and enjoyed a level of privacy unknown to most superstars.
He was married for more than 25 years to his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, before their divorce in 1985.
In 2009, he married for a second time, to German artist and longtime partner Sibylle Szaggars.
Redford used his star status to seek out challenging film projects and to quietly champion environmental causes such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Wildlife Federation.
"Some people have analysis. I have Utah," he once remarked.
Although he never showed an interest in entering politics, he often espoused a liberal viewpoint.
In a 2017 interview, during the presidency of Donald Trump, he told Esquire magazine that "politics is in a very dark place right now" and that President Trump should "quit for our benefit".
Dreams of being a painter
Born in the Los Angeles beach city of Santa Monica on 18 August 1937, to what he described as a "lower-working-class family", Redford landed a college baseball scholarship but lost it after spending too much time partying.
Deciding he wanted to be an artist, he moved to Italy and later New York to study painting. He enrolled in drama school to try his hand at theatrical set design - "Acting seemed ludicrous to me," he recalled - but was persuaded to take to the stage.
By 1959, he was a full-time performer on Broadway and later found work on television.
He made his film debut in 1962 in a low-budget film called Warhunt and first won attention in Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda.
He turned down the role taken by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and held out for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The 1970s brought The Way We Were and The Great Gatsby, among other films.
From the 1980s, he devoted more time to producing films and to the establishment of the Sundance Institute - a year-round workshop for aspiring filmmakers - and the Sundance Festival, which has become one of the most influential independent film showcases in the world.
Redford remained active in films as an actor and producer right up to the end of his life.
In 2017, he reunited with Fonda for the Netflix drama Our Souls at Night, a romance between a widow and a widower.
Redford said at the time that it would be one of his last films as an actor and that he was planning to focus more on directing and his first love - art.
Source: AFP, Reuters
