Legendary Actor, Director, Sundance Film Festival Founder, & Icon Robert Redford Dies Today at the Age of 89

“The Sting,” starring Redford and Newman as too-cool-for-school grifters in the 1930s, dominated the box office, scooped up the Oscar for best picture, and delivered Redford his first and only nomination for best actor at the 1974 ceremony. (He lost to Jack Lemmon for “Save the Tiger.”)

Redford scored more hits in the middle of the decade, playing the title character in a 1974 retelling of “The Great Gatsby,” a cocky aviator in “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975), and a CIA analyst swept into a high-stakes conspiracy in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975).

He next co-starred in one of the most celebrated movies of the 1970s: “All the President’s Men” (1976), an adaptation of a bestselling memoir of the same name by The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who doggedly investigated the Watergate scandal.

In a statement Tuesday, Woodward said Redford’s “impact and influence on my life cannot be overstated. I loved him, and admired him — for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others.”

“All the President’s Men,” a commercial and critical triumph, represented one of the peaks of Redford’s influence in the film industry. He orchestrated the project, including purchasing the film rights to the book and hiring “Butch Cassidy” scribe William Goldman to write the screenplay.

The film, a tense and fast-paced account of how Woodward (Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) unraveled the conspiracy that brought down President Richard Nixon, also reflected Redford’s political consciousness and sense of civic responsibility.

“Accuracy was the big, big objective in making the film,” Redford recalled in a 2006 interview. “We had to be accurate, otherwise we would fall under that perception that Hollywood was messing around with a very vital event.”

Redford closed out the 1970s with a relatively small part in the war epic “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and the role of a shambolic rodeo star in “The Electric Horseman” (1979), co-starring frequent collaborator Jane Fonda.

“It hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone. I can’t stop crying,” Fonda said in a statement Tuesday. He meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way. He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.”

The dawn of the 1980s marked the start of a crucial career chapter. He appeared in the 1980 prison flick “Brubaker,” but Redford’s more significant project that year was his wrenching directorial debut, “Ordinary People.”

“Ordinary People” chronicles an upper-middle-class family in the Chicago suburbs wracked by grief and dysfunction. The film, starring Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, examines the emotional fault lines underneath America’s clean-cut suburban ideal.

Oscar voters lavished the acclaimed drama with four awards, including best picture and a director trophy for Redford. (“Raging Bull” fans are still smarting from the knockout punch.)

Redford acted in only three more films in the 1980s — the baseball picture “The Natural” (1984), the best picture winner “Out of Africa” (1985) and the courtroom comedy “Legal Eagles” (1986) — and directed the largely forgotten dramedy “The Milagro Beanfield War,” released in 1987.

But in that same period, Redford helped form one of the signature institutions of modern film culture. He founded the Sundance Institute in 1981 with the goal of discovering talent from outside the Hollywood system, highlighting independent productions and supporting new artists.

The Sundance Film Festival, named for one of the actor’s most iconic characters, grew into a cornerstone of the film industry and eventually one of the most glitzy extravaganzas on the Hollywood social calendar, known as much for screenings as for executive deal-making and VIP parties.

The festival was a launching pad for some of the most well-known auteurs of the last quarter-century — Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Gina Prince-Bythewood — and continues to be an incubator for promising young writers, directors and other creative personalities.

It has likewise focused national attention on seminal independent films such as Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1989) and Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) as well as “Clerks” (1994), “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “Donnie Darko” (2001) and “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006).

“Bob’s vision of a space and a platform for independent voices launched a movement that, over four decades later, has inspired generations of artists and redefined cinema in the U.S. and around the world,” Sundance Institute spokeswoman Tiffany Duersch said in a statement. “Beyond his enormous contributions to culture at large, we will miss his generosity, clarity of purpose, curiosity, rebellious spirit, and his love for the creative process.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, as Sundance helped turn independent film into a lucrative business, Redford continued to act steadily. In those years, Redford starred in the heist comedy “Sneakers” (1992), the erotic potboiler “Indecent Proposal” (1993), and the back-to-back 2001 thrillers “The Last Castle” and “Spy Game.”

He was also an active director during that period, helming “A River Runs Through It” (1992), “Quiz Show” (1994), “The Horse Whisperer” (1998), “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), and “Lions for Lambs” (2007), and more recently “The Conspirator” (2010) and “The Company You Keep” (2012).

“A River Runs Through It” and “Quiz Show” drew praise, and the latter received Oscar nominations for best picture and best director. Redford’s subsequent directorial outings received mixed reviews, however, although “Lions” and “Company” allowed him to explore political themes.