Robert Redford, the legendary leading man with boyish good looks and charm who used his star power to advocate for independent filmmaking, environmentalism and LGBTQ rights, has died at age 89.

Redford died Tuesday, Sept. 16, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah, “the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly,” his rep Cindi Berger told USA TODAY in a statement. “The family requests privacy.”

During an acting career lasting more than 60 years, Redford became a Hollywood icon with an uncanny knack for finding the perfect scene partner.

He saddled up with Paul Newman in the 1969 Western buddy adventure “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and 1973 hit con-man caper “The Sting” (which snagged Redford a best actor Oscar nomination), starred with Barbra Streisand in the 1973 romance “The Way We Were,” and teamed with Dustin Hoffman for 1976’s journalism thriller “All the President’s Men.”

Redford also found great success off screen and behind the scenes: In 1981, he won a best director Academy Award for the family drama “Ordinary People,” and that same year Redford founded the Sundance Institute to foster the works of indie directors, theater artists and composers. Out of that organization came the popular Sundance Film Festival, an event held annually in Park City, Utah, that gave filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson and many others their first big breaks in the movie industry.

“You know, you get to a point where you live a career, you live a life where you’re constantly moving forward and you don’t think about looking back,” Redford told USA TODAY in 2018 for his crime drama “The Old Man & the Gun.”

“And you get to be a certain age where you become more philosophical – that’s when you start to look back and go, ‘Boy, that was a mistake’ and ‘Well, that was OK.’ And I think that’s probably where I am.”

Robert Redford (left) and Paul Newman co-starred as buddy outlaws in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

Born Charles Robert Redford Jr. in Santa Monica, California, the future actor was more into art and sports growing up in Van Nuys.

He went to the University of Colorado Boulder to play baseball in 1955 but was kicked out for excessive partying.

After traveling through Europe, Redford settled in New York in the late ’50s where he studied painting at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and acting at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He made his Broadway debut in “Tall Story” in 1959 and also had stage roles in “Sunday in New York” (1961) and Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” (1963).

In the early 1960s, Redford guest-starred in TV shows including “Perry Mason,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Maverick,” Fred Astaire’s “Alcoa Premiere” anthology series (which earned Redford an Emmy nomination) and “The Twilight Zone” (where he played Death in a 1962 episode).

His first big-screen role came in a 1960 Hollywood production of “Tall Story” and Redford received a Golden Globe nomination for playing a bisexual movie star opposite Natalie Wood in 1965’s “Inside Daisy Clover.”

Robert Redford movies included ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ ‘All the President’s Men’

Redford found an early frequent partner in Jane Fonda, costarring in the 1966 Marlon Brando picture “The Chase” and a cinematic version of “Barefoot in the Park” a year later.

(They’d pair up two more times over the years, for “The Electric Horseman” in 1979 and the Netflix romance “Our Souls at Night” in 2017.)

Redford’s biggest splash came in another teamup, the box-office success “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which cast Redford as the brusque Sundance against Newman’s personable Butch.

The movie won four Oscars in 1970, including original song for Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s whimsical “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

Initially, the tune was DOA for the sharp-shooting Sundance Kid.

“When the film was released, I was highly critical – how did the song fit with the film? There was no rain,” Redford told USA TODAY in 2019.

“At the time, it seemed like a dumb idea. How wrong I was, as it turned out to be a giant hit.”

Dustin Hoffman (left) as Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward in the 1976 journalism drama “All The President’s Men.” WARNER BROS. PICTURES

A string of cinematic smashes followed, many of them becoming a staple of iconic 1970s cinema, from the 1972 Western “Jeremiah Johnson” and 1974’s “The Great Gatsby” to aviation drama “The Great Waldo Pepper” and spy thriller “Three Days of the Condor,” both in ’75.

“All the President’s Men” a year later tapped into the real-life Watergate scandal of the time and also let Redford pay back a kindness to Jason Robards, his costar in a 1960 TV production of “The Iceman Cometh” who had trouble finding work in Hollywood following a near-fatal 1972 car crash.

“So when ‘All the President’s Men’ came around and I had control over that project, I felt he should be Ben Bradlee,” Redford said in 2018.

The studio balked but Redford didn’t take no for an answer.

“Finally, I said ‘Look, either you let me work with him or I won’t do it.’ Then he won an Academy Award.”

Robert Redford and Chris Evans in a scene from the motion picture “Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier credit: Zade Rosenthal [Via Merlin FTP Drop) Zade Rosenthal

In the 1980s, Redford knocked a home run with the baseball drama “The Natural” and starred opposite Meryl Streep in the romance “Out of Africa,” which won best picture in 1986. And in the next decade, Redford shared screen time and, as director, cast talented up-and-comers like Brad Pitt (1992’s “A River Runs Through It”) and Scarlett Johansson (1998’s “The Horse Whisperer”).

In his later years, Redford earned his first best actor Golden Globe nomination for 2013’s “All Is Lost” and also dipping his toes in the wildly popular Marvel movie universe, playing a villainous government leader in 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and reprising the role in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.”

The character was a welcome departure for Redford, who felt stuck in certain kinds of roles after “Sundance Kid” and “The Way We Were.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to work through that, because you get either labeled or pigeonholed,” Redford told USA TODAY in 2014.

“I’ve always appreciated the flexibility of doing different roles.”

Redford was never afraid of showing his political stripe. He involved himself in climate-change efforts, working to oppose the Keystone oil pipeline in Canada and the United States, and was an outspoken critic of the Bush and Trump presidential administrations.

In 2018, he published “A Brief Statement About Big Things” to the Sundance Institute’s website where he explained how he felt “out of place in the country I was born into” and that for the first time in his life he “watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us,” according to the Deseret News.

His advocacy also helped fuel the Sundance Film Festival, founded to identify and support new artistic voices.

Robert Redford’s first publicity shot from 1962. COURTESY OF ROBERT REDFORD

“If we focused on independent films, the smaller films that were more diverse, then we would in a way keep something alive.

It was not an insurgency against Hollywood. It was just to keep something alive that I thought was shrinking to death,” Redford said at a 2015 Sundance press conference.

In the earliest days of the event, “we were only going on hope.

It grew way beyond my imagination.”

Redford is survived by his second wife Sibylle and two children who took up their dad’s artistic pursuits: daughter Shauna, a painter, and daughter Amy, a filmmaker. Son Jamie Redford died in 2020.