Died at 89
male
Charles Robert Redford Jr. (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025) was an American actor, director and activist. Throughout his career, he won several film awards, including the Academy Award for Best Director for his 1980 film Ordinary People. He also received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2002 and was also 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 honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Appearing on stage in the late 1950s, Redford's television career began in 1960, including an appearance on The Twilight Zone in 1962. He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (1962). His greatest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of co-star Elizabeth Ashley's character in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963). Redford made his film debut in War Hunt (1962). His role in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) won him a Golden Globe for the 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. He had a critical and box office hit with Jeremiah Johnson (1972), and in 1973 he had the greatest hit of his career, the blockbuster crime caper The Sting, a re-union with Paul Newman, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award; that same year, he also starred opposite Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. The popular and acclaimed All the President's Men (1976) was a landmark film for Redford. In the 1980s, Redford began his career as a director with Ordinary People (1980), which was one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed films of the decade, winning four Oscars including Best Picture and the Academy Award for Best Director for Redford. He continued acting and starred in Brubaker (1980), as well as playing the male lead in Out of Africa (1985), which was an enormous box office success and won seven Oscars including Best Picture. He released his third film as a director, A River Runs Through It, in 1992. He went on to receive Best Director and Best Picture nominations in 1995 for Quiz Show. He received a second Academy Award—for Lifetime Achievement—in 2002. In 2010, he was made a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. He additionally won BAFTA, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild awards.
The film revolves around a special team of trained secret agent animals, equipped with advanced tools that allow the mammalian members to talk to humans. The primary field team consists of guinea pigs Darwin, Blaster, and Juarez, star-nosed mole Speckles (cyber intelligence), and housefly Mooch (Reconnaissance). The unit's leader Ben, orders an unauthorized infiltration of the residence of home electronics and appliances magnate, Leonard Saber, the owner of Saberling Industries, who has been under FBI investigation and is working for an unseen mastermind named Mr. Yanshu. The team is able to retrieve sensitive information about a sinister scheme that is set to occur in 48 hours. However, when Ben's superior Kip Killian arrives for his evaluation, his astonishment at the team's capabilities and technology is overcome by his indignation at Ben's unauthorized mission and the fact that the downloaded intelligence appears to be useless information about Saber's coffeemakers. As a result, the government agent orders the unit shut down, the equipment seized and the animals to be used as experimental subjects to be killed. With the help of their human compatriots, Darwin, Juarez, Blaster, Mooch and Speckles escape with hopes of stopping Saber's scheme, but find themselves in a pet carrying case bound for a pet shop.
