09/18/2026
September 16 marks the first anniversary of Robert Redford’s death at his Sundance, Utah, home. He was 89. For more than six decades, audiences knew the actor and director on screen. His family knew someone very different. They saw the private father and husband who carried old grief quietly. Friends remembered his dry humor and fierce loyalty. His children knew the habits he rarely discussed publicly. Taken together, their memories reveal the Robert Redford fame had mostly hidden.
His daughter Amy remembered him as playful, curious, and kind, but one choice mattered especially when she looked back at childhood. “The best thing I think he did for my family was raise us between New York City and the mountains of Sundance.” That sentence explains more than geography. New York gave the children one world. Utah gave them another, with snow, horses, open land, and a father who wanted nature to feel real rather than decorative. Amy said he taught them stewardship and encouraged them to find what they cared about deeply.
Shauna carried that place differently. “As a child, I always found this landscape magical. As an adult, I have an even greater appreciation for this place.” On October 4, 1998, the family helped protect about 900 acres around Sundance through a conservation easement. James Redford was there too, saying his pride came not from his father’s fame or accomplishments, but from the values behind what he was giving away. The children had grown up inside that landscape. Their father was trying to make sure it remained after him.
Sibylle Szaggars entered his life at Sundance in 1996 with one unusual advantage. She barely knew his screen career. “I hadn’t been a film person. I was more interested in musicals, opera and painting and artists and Salvador Dalí and Picasso.” Before a dinner with him, she became nervous enough to rent several of his movies and watch pieces of them. She feared he might ask what she thought. He never brought them up. The movie star, apparently, had no interest in spending dinner discussing the movie star.
For Redford, that was precisely the attraction. “It began as two human beings meeting each other and finding a connection as two human beings, rather than being colored by success.” Fame usually entered the room before he did. With Sibylle, it did not. She met the man before she fully absorbed the mythology around him. They married in Hamburg in July 2009 before about 30 guests, and she remained beside him through his final years.
But family life had taught Redford much earlier that happiness could disappear without warning. He and first wife Lola Van Wagenen lost their infant son Scott in 1959, when Redford was only 21. Decades later, the memory still resisted any tidy explanation. “I was just starting my career in New York. Of course it was traumatic, and how that plays out over time, I don’t know.” He said people move forward because they must, while admitting a loss like that never completely leaves. In October 2020, his son James died at 58 after years of serious health problems. Another empty place had opened in the family.
That private history makes Jane Fonda’s reaction feel less like a celebrity tribute and more like someone suddenly realizing an old friend cannot be called again. “It hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone. I can’t stop crying. He meant a lot to me.” They had known each other for more than six decades. Her words did not try to explain him. They simply showed the hole.
Barbra Streisand remembered something even smaller. “The last time I saw him, when he came to lunch, we discussed art and decided to send each other our first drawings.” No red carpet. No farewell speech. Just lunch, art, and two old friends making a plan that assumed there would be another day.
That unfinished exchange feels painfully like Redford himself, private until the end.
