Tim Robbins Age, Height, Partner, Net Worth & Biography

Tim Robbins is an American actor, director and theatre founder whose steady, thoughtful screen work has made him one of the most respected figures in modern film. Born on October 16, 1958, in West Covina, California, Robbins, 68, is best known as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, as the Oscar-winning Dave Boyle in Mystic River, and as the director of Dead Man Walking.

Quick Facts

Full Name	Timothy Francis Robbins
Age	68 years old
Date of Birth	October 16, 1958
Birthplace	West Covina, California, USA
Height	6 ft 5 in (196 cm)
Partner	Not publicly in a relationship (as of 2026); previously in a long-term relationship with Susan Sarandon (1988-2009)
Net Worth	Approx. $60 million (Celebrity Net Worth, 2025)
Known For	The Shawshank Redemption, Mystic River, Bull Durham, The Player, Dead Man Walking

Who Is Tim Robbins?

Tim Robbins is an American actor and director who has built a career on intelligence, patience and an interest in characters who are often quieter than the world around them. He first reached a wide audience in the late 1980s, then became a defining film presence of the 1990s with a run of roles that mixed comedy, satire, thriller and deeply human drama. His most famous performance remains Andy Dufresne, the banker wrongly imprisoned in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), a film that grew from a modest cinema release into one of the most loved films of its generation. Robbins plays Andy with restraint: hope is expressed in small choices, in patience, in work done over years, rather than in speeches. That approach is typical of his acting. He listens on screen, lets a scene breathe, and allows the audience to come to the character instead of pushing the character toward the audience.

Beyond acting, Robbins is a director with a clear social conscience. Dead Man Walking (1995), which he directed and which starred his then-partner Susan Sarandon, took a difficult subject, the death penalty, and treated it as a human story about guilt, forgiveness and the people left behind. Sarandon won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film, and Robbins was nominated for Best Director. He is also the founder of The Actors’ Gang, a Los Angeles theatre company that has been central to his working life for more than four decades. In recent years, a new audience has found him on television, including in the Apple TV+ series Silo, where he plays Bernard Holland, a senior figure in a vast underground community.

Early Life & Background

Timothy Francis Robbins was born in West Covina, California, and grew up in a household shaped by music, performance and politics. His father, Gil Robbins, was a folk singer and a member of the group The Highwaymen, best known for the song “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and his mother, Mary, was an actress. The family moved to New York City, where Robbins was raised in Greenwich Village, an environment full of theatres, musicians and debate. That early exposure to live performance stayed with him: as a teenager he was already drawn to acting, and he attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan before moving back west to study drama at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At UCLA, Robbins began to develop the collaborative, ensemble approach that would define The Actors’ Gang. He founded the company in 1981 with fellow students, creating a space where actors could work on classic texts with a physical, inventive style and where new work could be tested without the pressures of commercial film. The company staged productions in Los Angeles and toured widely, and Robbins has directed many of its shows over the years. That theatre grounding explains much of his screen style. He treats rehearsal, listening and the ensemble as seriously as the leading role, and he has often returned to the stage between films, even as his film career grew.

Career

Robbins worked in small film and television roles through the early 1980s before his breakthrough as the entertaining, overconfident pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh in Bull Durham (1988), opposite Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. The film was a critical and commercial success and established Robbins as a leading man with comic timing. He followed it with a strikingly different turn in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player (1992), playing studio executive Griffin Mill, a performance that won him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. In the same period he directed his first feature, the political satire Bob Roberts (1992), in which he played a folk-singing right-wing candidate for the United States Senate, a film that showed his interest in politics, media and performance as a form of power.

The mid-1990s brought his most enduring work. The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont and co-starring Morgan Freeman, was nominated for seven Academy Awards and later became a television and home-video favourite around the world. Robbins then directed Dead Man Walking, a film that remains one of the most thoughtful American dramas about capital punishment. He continued to choose varied roles, including in Arlington Road, High Fidelity and Human Nature, and in 2003 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood, in which he played Dave Boyle, a man whose childhood trauma shapes his adult life. The performance is quiet and unsettling, and it is often cited as one of the finest supporting performances of its decade.

In later years Robbins has balanced film, television and theatre, appearing in War of the Worlds, Catch a Fire, Green Lantern and the HBO drama The Brink, and working as a director and artistic director with The Actors’ Gang. His role in Silo has introduced him to viewers who may not have seen his earlier films, and it uses his familiar strengths: authority, stillness and a sense that his character knows more than he is saying. He has also recorded music, releasing an album with his band in 2010, and he remains a vocal campaigner on social and political issues, a thread that runs through both his directing and his choice of roles.

Facts About Tim Robbins

• He stands 6 ft 5 in tall, making him one of the tallest leading men in modern Hollywood.
• He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River in 2004.
• He founded The Actors’ Gang theatre company in Los Angeles in 1981.
• He directed Dead Man Walking, which earned Susan Sarandon the Academy Award for Best Actress.
• He has two sons, Jack Henry and Miles, from his long-term relationship with Susan Sarandon.

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