At eighty-eight, in the winter of his life, Robert Redford sat with close friends and said the words that would stun Hollywood. When asked about the great loves of his life, he paused, then spoke slowly. “You know, when I think about love, real love, the kind that shapes you, I always come back to those early years. Lola and I, we grew up together, really.
We were kids figuring out life together. There’s something about that first love that stays with you. ” Pressed further, he made the admission that has since echoed through the industry: “She was the love of my life. We didn’t make it, and that’s on me in a lot of ways.
But when you ask about real love, that was it. Everything after has been different. ”
The woman he meant was not his wife of more than two decades, Sibylle Szaggars. It was Lola Van Wagenen, the Mormon girl from Utah who had been his first wife, the mother of his children, and the partner who knew him before fame existed.
Nearly forty years after their divorce, Redford had finally named the person who truly held his heart. To understand why that confession matters, it is necessary to go back to where it all began, long before the fame, the fortune, and the accolades. In 1957, in Los Angeles, a twenty-year-old college dropout with dreams of becoming an artist first laid eyes on seventeen-year-old Lola Van Wagenen. Redford was far from the Hollywood icon he would become.
He had recently returned from Europe, where he had studied art in Paris, a struggling young man with artistic ambitions but no clear path forward. Lola, young as she was, saw something in him that many others missed at the time: a determination and creativity that would eventually change the landscape of American cinema. Their connection was immediate and profound. Within a year of meeting, they eloped to Las Vegas, followed by a formal Mormon ceremony at Lola’s grandmother’s home in Utah.
This was not just another young romance. For Redford, still finding his footing, Lola represented something genuine and grounding in a world he was desperate to break into, a world known for its superficiality and fleeting connections. As Redford began pursuing acting more seriously, studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, Lola supported his dreams. In 1959, they welcomed their first son, Scott Anthony.
Tragedy struck almost immediately when the infant died of sudden infant death syndrome just two months later. A young couple barely into their twenties faced a devastating loss that would have torn most couples apart, but somehow they persevered. They went on to have three more children together: Shauna in 1960, James, known as Jamie, in 1962, and Amy in 1970. For twenty-seven years, they built a life together, weathering the storms of Redford’s rising fame and the challenges it brought to their family life.
As his star began to rise in the late 1960s with hits like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the foundation of their relationship started to crack under the pressure. What followed was a painful unraveling of what had once seemed like the perfect Hollywood marriage. After nearly three decades together, Redford and Van Wagenen divorced in 1985, when he was at the height of his fame and creative power. But the financial cost of the divorce paled in comparison to the emotional toll.
“It was mutual and it was right to move on,” Redford told the Telegraph in 2001, confirming that his growing success in Hollywood had put a strain on the marriage over the years. “We still have great love, great affection, great friendship. ” Despite those diplomatic words, those close to the actor revealed that the end of this marriage created a wound that never fully healed, one that would shape his approach to love and relationships for decades to come. Following the divorce, Redford entered what many consider his wilderness years.
Not professionally, as his career continued to flourish both in front of and behind the camera, but personally. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw him focus intensely on his work, particularly the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, which he had founded in 1981 and which was growing into a cultural force. During this period, Redford seemed reluctant to commit to another serious relationship, perhaps scarred by the end of his long marriage. Friends noted that despite his status as one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, he kept his romantic life intensely private, rarely bringing dates to public events and never discussing his personal life in interviews.
“I never wanted to be one of those divorced show business casualties. So predictable,” he once remarked. “I wanted to prove that a marriage could last and prove the business wrong, but I couldn’t. ” This sense of failure, despite the amicable nature of his divorce, weighed heavily on him throughout this period.
Those closest to Redford noted that he often spoke of his first marriage with a mixture of regret and nostalgia. Despite the painful ending, there was something about those early years with Lola, the simplicity, the authenticity, the shared struggle, that he could not seem to recapture in his subsequent relationships. Just when it seemed Redford might never find a deep connection again, he met Sibylle Szaggars, a German-born multimedia environmental artist twenty years his junior. They met in 1996 at his beloved Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, where she had come to ski with friends.
Intriguingly, Szaggars did not know much about the famous actor when they first met. In a panel for the Young Arts Salon in 2014, she revealed that Redford had invited her and a group of friends to dinner, and she thought, “Oh my god, I don’t know any of his films. ” She rented several of his movies before their meeting but only watched about fifteen minutes of each one, just enough to fake familiarity if needed. Rather than being put off by this, Redford was charmed by her lack of knowledge about his celebrity status.
“It was a wonderful beginning of a relationship because it began as two human beings meeting each other and finding a connection as two human beings,” he reportedly said of their first encounter. What started as a chance meeting blossomed into a deep connection. Unlike his whirlwind romance and early marriage to Lola, this relationship developed slowly and organically. Szaggars moved in with Redford in 1996, and they shared his home in Sundance, Utah, for over a decade before formalizing their union.
It was not just a physical attraction that drew them together; it was shared values and passions. Both are committed environmentalists, with Szaggars creating art that speaks to environmental consciousness and Redford long being an advocate for conservation causes. Their relationship was built on mutual respect, shared purpose, and genuine affection. After thirteen years together, Redford and Szaggars married in July 2009 in Hamburg, Germany.
It was a private ceremony reflective of Redford’s desire to keep his personal life out of the spotlight. No paparazzi, no elaborate celebrity affair, just two people in love making a commitment to each other. In the years that followed, Redford spoke warmly of his relationship with Szaggars in the few interviews where he touched on his personal life. “She’s a very special person,” he told AP the Magazine in 2011.
“She’s younger than I am and European, which I like. So that’s a whole new life. ” The sentiment that Szaggars represented a whole new life for him seemed significant. After the pain of his divorce and the challenging years that followed, Redford had found someone who brought fresh perspective and energy into his world.
Their relationship has endured for over twenty-five years now, a testament to their compatibility and mutual respect. Now at eighty-eight, having lived a life most can only dream of, Redford has stepped back from public life and acting, his last major role being 2018’s The Old Man and the Gun. This period of reflection has coincided with significant milestones in his personal life. In October 2020, he experienced the devastating loss of his son James to liver cancer at age fifty-eight.
It was a loss that connected back to the first profound tragedy he and Lola had experienced together, the death of their infant son Scott fifty years earlier. These bookend losses, the deaths of his first and third children, created a poignant symmetry in Redford’s life, one that friends say has made him reflect deeply on his past. Then, in early 2025, he made a surprise return to acting with a brief cameo in the AMC series Dark Winds, which he executive produces alongside Game of Thrones author George R. R.
Martin. These moments, one of profound loss, one of unexpected return to his craft, have bookended a period of deep introspection. And it is during this time that he reportedly made the emotional confession that has shocked many. Despite his twenty-five-year relationship with Szaggars, it was Lola Van Wagenen, his first wife, who was the love of his life.
According to sources close to the actor, Redford has been increasingly reflective about his first marriage in recent years, especially following the death of their son James. The shared grief has reportedly brought Redford and Van Wagenen closer together again, not romantically, but as two people united by decades of history, shared children, and now grandchildren. “Robert and Lola have stayed close friends,” one source revealed. “She has been there for him through some of his darkest moments, including the loss of their son.
There’s a bond there that time and circumstances couldn’t break. ” This renewed connection, coming at a time when Redford is contemplating his legacy both as an artist and as a man, has naturally led him to reassess his life’s relationships. In doing so, he has apparently arrived at a truth that has surprised many: that Van Wagenen, his partner during those formative years before fame, remains the most significant love of his life. But this revelation raises an obvious question.
What about his current wife, Sibylle Szaggars? Sources close to Redford insist that his confession does not diminish his feelings for Szaggars, whom he deeply respects and cares for. Rather, it reflects the complex reality of the human heart, that we can love deeply more than once in a lifetime, but in different ways. “Robert and Sibylle have a profound connection based on shared values and mutual respect,” one friend explained.
“It’s a mature love that came to him later in life, but there’s something about first love, especially when it’s tangled up with youth, with becoming who you are, with having children together, that leaves an indelible mark. ”
This nuanced perspective suggests a man who, after nearly nine decades of life, has come to understand that love is not a zero-sum game, that acknowledging the significance of his first marriage does not negate the value of his current one. When asked to elaborate on why he considers Van Wagenen the love of his life despite his subsequent relationship with Szaggars, Redford offered a perspective that resonates far beyond his personal story. “There’s something pure about that first love,” he explained, “before fame, before money, before all the complications.
We loved each other for ourselves, not for anything else. And maybe you only get that once. I’m not diminishing what came after. I’ve loved deeply more than once.
But there’s a foundation that gets laid with that first person who really sees you, who knows you before you even fully know yourself. And when that foundation cracks, everything you build afterward sits on something slightly less stable. ”
His acknowledgement of Van Wagenen as his greatest love after all these years reveals something rarely seen from celebrities: genuine reflection and emotional honesty. Not a carefully crafted PR statement, but the raw admission of a man looking back on his life and recognizing what was most authentic.
“We didn’t make it, and that’s on me in a lot of ways,” he said, a statement that suggests he has had decades to reflect on what went wrong and his own role in the dissolution of that foundational relationship. Whether or not Redford and Van Wagenen have rekindled any romantic feelings, and sources close to both adamantly deny this, emphasizing that they remain simply good friends and co-grandparents, his public acknowledgement of her as the love of his life represents a kind of emotional honesty that has been rare in his public persona. It is a vulnerability that contradicts the stoic characters he often portrays, revealing the complex, feeling man behind the Hollywood icon. As one friend put it, “Robert is finally being honest with himself about what has always mattered most to him.
The authentic connections he’s made throughout his life. Whether with Lola, with his children, with Sibylle, or with the artists he’s mentored through Sundance, at 88, there’s no reason not to speak your truth. ”
The timing of this confession, coming as he approaches his nineties and after the shared grief of losing their son, speaks to a man trying to make peace with the unfinished emotional business of his life. There is a poignancy to Redford at eighty-eight, still wrestling with the ghost of a love that ended almost forty years ago, still trying to understand what it means for all that came after.
His story offers a universal truth: time does not necessarily heal all wounds. Sometimes it just gives us the perspective to understand them better. The young Redford who rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s was consumed with ambition, with crafting an image, with seizing every opportunity that Hollywood offered him. The older Redford seems more concerned with authenticity, with honest connection, with coming to terms with the choices he has made.
Despite the heartbreak and the public scrutiny, Redford has managed to maintain meaningful connections with both the women who have shared his life. His continued friendship with Van Wagenen, especially as they navigated the tragic loss of their son together, speaks to a man who values the depth of history over the bitterness of breakups. His enduring partnership with Szaggars demonstrates that second acts in life can be rich and fulfilling, even if they are different from what came before. By naming what has perhaps always been true for him, he has freed himself from the weight of an unspoken regret.
And in doing so, he has perhaps finally become ready to embrace all chapters of his life with complete honesty, the triumphs and the failures, the loves found and the loves lost.
