By KEILE CAMPBELL 

and BOB THOMAS

OSCAR-winning director and environmental advocate Robert Redford — whose survival drama All Is Lost shot marine scenes off Nassau and Lyford Cay — died on Tuesday at his home in Sundance, Utah. He was 89.

Redford, hailed as a champion of independent film, rose to prominence in the 1960s and became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1970s. He later won the Academy Award for Best Director for Ordinary People (1980), which also took Best Picture, and in 1981 founded the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival, a global launchpad for independent filmmakers.

His Bahamian link is strongest through All Is Lost, in which he played a shipwrecked sailor, the film’s only on-screen performer. Stuart Cove’s Dive Bahamas assisted with staging open-ocean sequences in local waters. According to Travis Cove, Redford himself filmed on location in New Providence, with his parents photographed with the actor on the island.

Redford also collaborated with Bahamian legend Sir Sidney Poitier in the 1992 caper Sneakers.

Beyond the screen, Redford spent decades backing environmental causes. He served as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which named its Santa Monica office in his honour, and co-founded the Redford Center with his late son, James, to support storytelling that drives climate and conservation action. Addressing the United Nations in 2015 ahead of the Paris climate summit, he warned that climate change threatened “everybody’s backyard” and urged a shift away from fossil fuels.

Redford died “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement. No cause of death was provided.

Redford was one of the biggest stars of the ‘70s with such films as “The Candidate,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Way We Were,” capping that decade with the best director Oscar for 1980’s best picture winner, “Ordinary People.”

His roles ranged from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward to a double agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. But his most famous screen partner was his old friend Paul Newman, their films a variation of their warm, teasing off-screen relationship. Redford played the wily outlaw opposite Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and festival got its name.

He also teamed with Newman on 1973’s best picture Oscar winner, “The Sting,” which earned Redford a best actor nomination as a young con artist in 1930s Chicago.

Film roles after the ‘70s became more sporadic as Redford concentrated on directing and producing and his new role as patriarch of the independent-film movement.

He starred in 1985’s best picture champion “Out of Africa” and in 2013 received some of the best reviews of his career as a shipwrecked sailor in “All is Lost,” in which he was the film’s only performer. In 2018, he was praised again in what he called his farewell movie, “The Old Man and the Gun.”

Redford had watched Hollywood grow more cautious and controlling during the 1970s and wanted to recapture the creative spirit of the early part of the decade. Sundance was created to nurture new talent away from the pressures of Hollywood. The institute and festival based in Park City, Utah, became a place of discovery for such previously unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.

“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford told the AP in 2018. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard.”

Redford’s affinity for the outdoors was well captured in “A River Runs Through It” and other films and through his decades of advocacy for the environment, inspired in part by witnessing the transformation of Los Angeles into a city of smog and freeways. His activities ranged from lobbying for the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to serving on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Born in Aug. 18, 1936 in Santa Monica, California, Redford attended college on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s “The Natural,” the adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s novel. He had an early interest in drawing and painting and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He debuted on Broadway in the late 1950s before moving into television on such shows as “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Untouchables.”