Robert Redford And His Second Wife Had An Uncomfortable Age Gap

Robert Redford was married twice — the first time, when he was very young, and the second, later in life. The second time around, Redford, who died in September 2025 at 89, married a woman more than two decades his junior. Born in April 1957, Redford's second wife, German artist Sibylle Szaggars, is nearly 21 years younger than the Hollywood icon, who was born in August 1936. The age gap was considerable, but Redford liked it that way. "She's younger than I am, and European, which I like, so that's a whole new life," he told AARP in 2011.

Szaggars inspired Redford to keep an active lifestyle that he credited with helping him stay sharp. "I ride horses, ski, play pretty hard tennis," he said. "I still have energy." Redford and Szaggars tied the knot in her native Germany in July 2009, when he was about to turn 73 and she was 52. However, the two had been in a relationship for 13 years by then, having met in 1996 while she was skiing at his Sundance Mountain Resort. Redford's relationship to Szaggars contrasted his first marriage.

He married historian Lola Van Wagenen in 1958, when he was 21 and she was 19. Their marriage seemingly ended acrimoniously in the mid-80s, with Redford telling The Guardian in 2004, "It was to save my life. That's what it felt like at the time." Although Redford and Van Wagenen had a small age gap, their marriage did not work out. In contrast, he was married to Szaggars until the end, proving that sometimes a seemingly uncomfortable age gap isn't all that bad.  

As his 2011 interview with AARP demonstrated, Robert Redford was all about aging with quality of life in mind. It was the realization that age made his body more limited in what it could do that he struggled with as he aged. "You suddenly realize you have to start being careful, and I find that hard to deal with," he said at the Venice Film Festival in 2017. On the other hand, he couldn't care less about the effects of time on his face.

Even though he was once a sex symbol, he embraced old age. "So what if my face is falling apart? I don't give a damn," he said at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002 (via the Independent). Redford also vowed to never go under the knife. "I'm not jumping on the Hollywood bandwagon and turning the clock back with a facelift," Redford said. And he didn't hide his thoughts about the excessive plastic surgeries he saw around him. "Some come out of Beverly Hills surgeries looking scary," he added.

Indeed, it was Sibylle Szaggars' ability to see beyond his looks and celebrity status that attracted him. Being from a different culture and generation, Szaggars wasn't super familiar with his work. "It began as two human beings meeting each other and finding a connection as two human beings," he said during a National YoungArts Foundation panel (via E! News). Just like he did, his wife embraced him exactly for who he was, and not who he had been or what he had done.