Inside Robert Redford and Wife Sibylle Szaggars’ Love Story

So when Redford invited her and a group of friends to dinner, Szaggars recalled, she found herself thinking, “‘Oh my god. I don’t know any of his films.'” However, a pal came up with a solution and noted she could rent some of Redford’s movies from reception at Sundance.

“Two nights before the dinner, I rented about six or eight videos,” Szaggars continued. And because she didn’t have time to watch all of his classics in their entirety, she “watched 15 minutes randomly out of the show.”

“I thought, ‘What if he wants to talk about his movies? I have no idea. It would be so embarrassing,'” the 68-year-old added. “I probably would have mixed everything up. Of course, he did not talk about his films.”

And, honestly, Redford would have been fine if she couldn’t recall a single scene.

“That’s one of the things that attracted me to her—she didn’t know much about me,” the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid star noted during the National YoungArts Foundation panel. “So we started from a more even playing field. I didn’t have to worry about any agenda. I’d been through that before. And so 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 rather than being colored by success or whatever.”

As their relationship progressed in the early aughts, Szaggars joined Redford at his film premieres, Sundance Film Festival and New York Fashion Week. She was also by his side for major milestones, like when he was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2002 and when he was named a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2005. 

Despite these public appearances, the couple kept much of their romance private, not even sharing details of his 2008 proposal.

“We are engaged and very happy with that,” Redford told German magazine Bunte at the time, per The Telegraph. “She is my fiancée and that says everything, doesn’t it?”

They tied the knot in Hamburg, Germany, the following year, with Szaggars becoming stepmom to his daughters Shauna Redford and Amy Redford as well as to son James Redford (who passed away in 2020) from his first marriage to Lola Van Wagenen (Van Wagenen and Redford had another son Scott Redford, who died as a baby).

“She’s a very special person,” the Ordinary People director noted to AARP in 2011 about Szaggars. More than two decades his junior, “She’s younger than I am,” he added, “and European, which I like, so that’s a whole new life.”

The world they built together included their shared love of the arts and a passion for environmentalism. While Redford and Szaggars still made a few joint public appearances over the years—one of the most recent was at The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation’s award ceremony in 2021—they kept much of their personal life out of the spotlight. 

And when Redford passed, his publicist noted, he was “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah—the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved.”

To look back at his life in photos, keep reading.