Late actor, filmmaker Robert Redford had long ties to Tiburon
- Francisco Martinez
- Sep 18
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 18
To his Tiburon friends and neighbors, late Hollywood legend Robert Redford was simply “Bob” — the friendly guy who loved dogs, jogged around town and would strike up conversations about where people were from, never mentioning his own storied career.
“That is how we always knew him,” said resident Jeff Turnbaugh, who met Redford during walks around town. “It never came up that he was Robert Redford, and I never, ever asked anything about it — and obviously I knew.”
Redford, who died at his Utah home Sept. 16 at age 89, had local ties dating back some six decades. Dad Charles Redford Sr., who retired as an accounting manager for Chevron’s oil refinery in Richmond, lived in Tiburon from the early 1970s until his death in 1991.
Redford himself lived on Ridge Road in the late 1990s and early 2000s before moving to Calistoga and St. Helena. With artist wife Sibylle Szaggars Redford, he returned to Mar East Street in 2020 before relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2024, where she has an art gallery and together they ran an arts nonprofit promoting global conservation efforts.
The actor and Academy Award-winning director became one of Hollywood’s leading men in the 1960s and 1970s with starring roles in films like “The Candidate,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Natural,” “The Sting,” and “All the President’s Men,” which is being screened Sept. 24-28 at Cinelounge in downtown Tiburon in honor of Redford.
He won an Oscar in 1981 for directing “Ordinary People,” which also won best picture that year, and received another nomination for “Quiz Show” in 1995. “The Sting” earned him a best-actor Academy Award nomination in 1974.
Redford’s impact extended beyond acting and directing. He founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute in 1981, which runs the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the U.S. Films like “American Psycho,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Whiplash” and “CODA,” which won the Oscar for best picture, have all premiered at Sundance.
Local connections span decades
Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born Aug. 18, 1936, in Santa Monica. Though he grew up in California, he became rooted in Utah after marrying historian and activist Lola Van Wagenen in 1958, later calling Los Angeles phony and superficial. They had four children — the eldest died of whom died at 2½ months — and divorced in 1985.
Redford’s most recent stay in Tiburon came during a difficult period for his family. He and Szaggars Redford, who married in 2009, bought their Mar East Street home in 2020, the same year his son, James Redford, died of bile duct cancer at age 58.
The younger Redford, a filmmaker and environmental activist like his father, lived in Fairfax and had co-founded The Redford Center with his father in 2005, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating environmental solutions through storytelling.
Turnbaugh, who moved to Tiburon in 2021, said he first met Szaggars Redford while walking along Mar East. On a later walk along Shoreline Park, Turnbaugh encountered Szaggars Redford again, and she introduced him to her husband.
Redford was a fan of Turnbaugh’s two dogs, Gracie and Baxter, and would always try to greet them. Even when Turnbaugh purposely tried to avoid interrupting Redford, “he would be like, ‘Baxter! Gracie!’” Turnbaugh said. “And it was very charming.”
Turnbaugh says he thinks he and Redford spoke with each other so often during Redford’s final years in town because the actor’s career never came up. He said Redford, in addition to his kindness, was interested in hearing about others’ stories, even though Redford never shared his own, as “he probably got enough” questions through his career.
“Maybe that was part of his history of telling stories and being an actor,” Turnbaugh said. “So, even when we were there, and other people came up, he would be curious where in the world they were from.”
Retired U.S. Postal Service worker Keith Martin, who spent 47 years at the Tiburon office, said he’d see Redford jogging around town occasionally, exchanging waves and the occasional greeting, but Redford was otherwise “one of the regular guys in the town.”
Many of Martin’s interactions with Redford were indirect through his father, who would come into the post office occasionally to mail autographed posters on behalf of his son.
On one occasion, Redford’s father entered the post office wearing Redford’s jacket from “The Natural,” which he had received as a gift from his son, leading to a conversation about the film.
“My thing with celebrities was just to treat them like regular people,” Martin said. “I just treated everybody, no matter who they were, basically the same.”
Belvedere resident George Gnoss, whose late wife, Barbara, was co-editor of The Ark from 1985 to 2009, said Redford stayed at his house for a few days around 1987, when the actor was visiting his father in Tiburon.
Late Belvedere resident Howard Backen, who designed Redford’s Sundance Institute, asked Gnoss if Redford could stay at his place, and they agreed.
The Gnosses gave Redford their house to-do list for his stay, which included feeding their cat. Several weeks later, he mailed the Gnosses a letter and a signed copy of his coffee-table book “The Outlaw Trail.”
Gnoss called Redford “a gracious house guest,” noting he even washed the bedsheets, a comfort to his wife.
Environmental interests
Tiburon resident Jerry Riessen was one of Redford’s neighbors when they both lived on Ridge Road.
Though Riessen said Redford was “not there every night, every day” and that conversations with were limited, he recalls seeing Redford around the neighborhood occasionally, such as when he was preparing to exercise.
When Riessen was president of the Hill Haven homeowners association, he recalls an event where he decided to introduce himself to Redford. With a list of association members’ names and phone numbers — “back then, people did that kind of thing,” he said — he walked to Redford’s home and rang his doorbell.
When Redford answered, Riessen introduced himself, the homeowners association and the neighborhood to Redford, “though he’d been there a while.” Riessen decided to tell Redford about his and others’ early efforts to preserve what’s now the 110-acre Easton Point annex to Old St. Hilary’s Open Space Preserve.
Redford “was very interested and said he would like to help when we get to the point of an actual purchase being possible,” Riessen said of that interaction.
Redford’s interest in land preservation aligned with his lifelong environmental activism, which began as a teenager working California oil fields and witnessing their impact on the landscape. As a Natural Resources Defense Council trustee for five decades, he became one of the environmental movement’s most prominent champions, using his celebrity status to spotlight conservation causes.
His first major environmental battle came in the mid-1970s when he opposed construction of a massive coal-fired power plant on Utah’s Kaiparowits plateau — now part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — and project supporters in one Utah town burned him in effigy. He also lobbied for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act that created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, testified before Congress in 2009 supporting America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act to protect Utah’s wild lands and, more recently, fought the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink Bears Ears National Monument and opposed coal mining near Bryce Canyon National Park.
But by the time the Martha Co. was ready to sell the Tiburon ridge property — which it did when it sold the land to Marin County in 2024 — Redford was “quite ill,” Riessen said, so he never reached out to Redford about it.
“He was certainly welcoming and friendly and wanted to participate when the time was right,” Riessen said.
Late Tiburon resident Marilyn Knight was another Ridge Road neighbor. Daughter Jocelyn Knight said she recalled Redford being a private person, though, like Riessen, she said he was also supportive of turning the Martha property into open space, seeing him coming down from the open space several times.
“We tried to just let him be, but it was fun to have him around,” Jocelyn Knight said.
Finding peace by the water
Turnbaugh said that beyond Redford’s family ties to the area, he enjoyed the area’s natural beauty and serenity, particularly “the peacefulness he could find just sitting along Shoreline Park.”
“I think he just wanted to be a normal person,” Turnbaugh said, adding that when Redford’s death was announced, he texted his wife to say “Bob passed away” and left the message at that.
“She knew exactly what we were talking about because that’s how we refer to him,” he said.
Local real-estate agent Steven Mavromihalis, who handled Redford’s more recent home purchase, said he knew Redford for decades. Mavromihalis’ son, Constantine, rode horses at Redford’s Utah ranch, and Redford called Constantine “the real horse whisperer.”
In addition to seeing Redford at local restaurants, Mavromihalis said the Redfords could often be seen walking along the waterfront.
“I think Bob would say the best way to honor his memory would be to celebrate life, to be kind to our Mother Earth, to form community, to stand by your personal convictions,” Mavromihalis said, “and, perhaps most of all, to live a life of integrity.”
Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.