Charles Robert Redford Jr. (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025) was an American actor, director, and activist. Over the course of his career he received several film awards, including the Academy Award for Best Director for Ordinary People (1980). In 2002 he was also awarded an honorary Academy Award for his outstanding contributions to cinema and became the founder of the Sundance Film Festival. In 2014 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2016 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Performing on stage in the late 1950s, Redford began his television career in 1960, including an appearance on The Twilight Zone in 1962. He received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Voice of Charlie Pont (1962). His greatest Broadway success was as a prim young groom — the husband of Elizabeth Ashley's character in Neil Simon's play Barefoot in the Park (1963). Redford made his film debut in War Hunt (1962). His role in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) earned him a Golden Globe as Best New Star. He starred alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which was a huge success and made him a major star. Jeremiah Johnson (1972) brought him critical and commercial success, and in 1973 he achieved the greatest success of his career — the blockbuster crime caper The Sting, in which he reunited with Paul Newman and for which he was nominated for an Oscar; that same year he also starred with Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. The popular and critically acclaimed All the President's Men (1976) became a landmark for Redford.

In the 1980s Redford began his directing career with Ordinary People (1980), which became one of the most critically and popularly acclaimed films of the decade and won four Oscars, including Best Picture and the Academy Award for Best Director for Redford. He continued to act and appeared in Brubaker (1980), and also played the male lead in Out of Africa (1985), which was a huge box-office success and won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. In 1992 he released his third film as a director — A River Runs Through It. In 1995 he received nominations for Best Director and Best Picture for Quiz Show. In 2002 he received his second Oscar — for outstanding achievement. In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He also received awards from BAFTA, the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild.