In April 1979, a rock singer with a run of platinum albums was riding through Africa with the governor of California while photographers chased them from hotel to hotel. Half the country wondered if Linda Ronstadt was about to become a first lady. She never did. In fact, Ronstadt, who turned 80 on July 15, 2026, never married anyone at all, even though Linda Ronstadt’s dating history reads like the guest list for the most interesting dinner party of the 1970s and ’80s.
She was always honest about why the wedding never came. “I don’t think I have any talent for a relationship,” she told Us magazine in 2000, and there was a second half to that sentence that we’ll come back to. Along the way came a songwriter who helped build the Eagles, a young comedian who became one of the biggest movie stars on earth, and the man who made Star Wars. There is also one rock star whose name still turns up on gossip lists, and that rumor has a clear answer.
Who Shared Her Laurel Canyon Years?
When Ronstadt came to Los Angeles from Tucson in the mid-1960s, love and work were rarely separate. Her early boyfriends were often her producers and managers too, starting with producer John Boylan, who helped her assemble the backing band that would become the Eagles. The man who really shaped that era, though, was J.D. Souther, the Texas-raised songwriter who moved in with her in the early 1970s.
Souther co-produced her 1973 album Don’t Cry Now and wrote songs she sang for years, including “Prisoner in Disguise,” which they recorded as a duet. Their house became a kind of clubhouse. Ronstadt later recalled that the Eagles rehearsed in her living room because it was bigger than theirs, as the Associated Press noted when Souther died at his New Mexico home on September 17, 2024, at age 78. The romance ended, but the music never did. The two sang “Hearts Against the Wind” together in Urban Cowboy in 1980, long after they had split.
Next came Albert Brooks, the comedian and filmmaker. When Rolling Stone put Ronstadt on its cover in March 1975 for Ben Fong-Torres’s profile “Heartbreak on Wheels,” she was living at Brooks’s home in the Hollywood Hills and missing him badly on the road. She described him as “just like a human teddy bear.” They parted around 1976 and stayed friends. Her next romance would play out on magazine covers and the evening news.
How Did A Rock Singer End Up With A Governor?
Jerry Brown was governor of California from 1975 to 1983, a bachelor who had once studied to be a Jesuit priest and who drove a plain Plymouth instead of a state limousine. He and Ronstadt were linked through the second half of the 1970s, and in April 1979 the pair appeared together on the cover of Newsweek. That same month they flew to Africa together. Time reported that reporters camped outside their hotel rooms and mobbed them whenever they appeared, and a friend of the singer told the magazine, “The press really freaks her out, and she feels terrible that she’s ruining Jerry’s trip.”
Ronstadt wrote about Brown with real affection in her 2013 memoir, Simple Dreams. As KQED reported when the book came out, she remembered him as “smart and funny, not interested in drinking or drugs,” a man who “lived his life carefully, with a great deal of discipline.” What drew her most was that he worked on the causes she cared about, from nuclear safety to farm workers’ rights. She was just as clear that the romance was never headed for the altar. “Neither of us ever shared the illusion that we would like to share each other’s lives,” she wrote.
Brown went on to a long political career and married Anne Gust in 2005. Ronstadt, meanwhile, was about to surprise everyone by trading rock arenas for a Victorian operetta.
Why Did Jim Carrey Turn Down Her Tour?
In the summer of 1980, Ronstadt played Mabel opposite Kevin Kline’s Pirate King in Joseph Papp’s free production of The Pirates of Penzance in Central Park. A rock singer tackling Gilbert and Sullivan sounded like a gamble, but the production was a hit, and the show moved to Broadway’s Uris Theatre in January 1981. That spring she earned a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. She lost to Lauren Bacall, who won for Woman of the Year, according to the Tony Awards’ official records and the Internet Broadway Database. The 1983 film version brought her a Golden Globe nomination as well.
It was around then that she walked into a Los Angeles comedy club and saw a skinny Canadian kid named Jim Carrey. Carrey told the story to Howard Stern in 2020, as Entertainment Tonight reported. “She came up and she said, ‘Wow, you’re really good. Would you like to come on the road with me?’ And I said, ‘No, but I’ll go out with you,'” he recalled. He was giving up a gig he badly needed, he admitted, because “I had no money.” She “kind of screwed up her face,” he said, and answered, “OK.”
He was 21 and she was more than 15 years older, and Carrey knew how it looked. “It may have seemed like some boy-toy kind of situation to somebody looking at it from the outside, but she treated me with incredible respect,” he said. He called their 1983 romance “a beautiful eight months” and added, “We both knew it wasn’t going to be forever.” Something more serious was waiting for her on the other side.
Was She Really Engaged To George Lucas?
She was, ring and all. Late in 1983, Ronstadt began dating George Lucas, who had just finished the original Star Wars trilogy and was building his filmmaking world at Skywalker Ranch in Northern California. The relationship lasted until 1988, and when Us profiled her in 2000, it described the two as engaged, “ring on the finger and all.”
Those were also some of the most adventurous years of her career. She made three albums of pop standards with the great arranger Nelson Riddle, a turn toward old-school musicianship we explored in our story on the musician Linda Ronstadt said was better than any rock star. In 1987 came Canciones de Mi Padre, her album of Mexican songs she grew up hearing in Tucson. By the end of the decade she had left Southern California for San Francisco, saying she had never felt at home in Los Angeles. The engagement ended without a wedding, and Lucas married businesswoman Mellody Hobson in 2013.
Which leaves the name that sends most readers to this story in the first place.
So Did She Really Date Mick Jagger?
The honest answer is that there is no evidence she did. Neither Ronstadt nor Jagger has ever said they were a couple. The romance does not appear in her memoir, and no major outlet has reported it as fact. The claim lives almost entirely on unsourced celebrity lists that pin a “brief affair” on 1977 and 1978, which happens to be exactly when the two were seen together in public.
What really happened is a good music story. Jagger encouraged Ronstadt to cover the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” and she cut it for her 1977 album Simple Dreams, the same record that gave us her version of “Blue Bayou,” a song that started with Roy Orbison. Her band had been playing it at sound checks without knowing all the lyrics. “But I made him write down the words to that song for me so we could do it,” she told a reporter in 1977, as Far Out Magazine recounted.
Then, on July 21, 1978, the Stones played the Community Center in Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson, and she walked out to sing “Tumbling Dice” with Jagger in front of a roaring crowd. The duet was electric, and that chemistry is what fueled the whispers. So the verdict is rumor, not romance: a friendship, a lyric sheet and one great night on stage.
Why Linda Ronstadt Never Married
Ronstadt never pretended to want a traditional marriage. What she did want was a family, and she built one on her own terms. In December 1990 she adopted an infant daughter, Mary, and in 1994 she adopted a son, Carlos. In 1997 she moved back to Tucson so they could grow up where she had, surrounded by her large family and the Mexican music of her childhood.
Her voice, the thing that carried her through all of it, slowly slipped away. She gave her last concert in 2009 and could not understand why singing had become so hard. In August 2013 she told AARP she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and could no longer sing a note. “No one can sing with Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “No matter how hard you try.” In 2019 her doctors revised the diagnosis to progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare brain disorder often mistaken for Parkinson’s, as she explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that December.
The governor, the comedian, the filmmaker and the songwriter all passed through her life and mostly stayed friends. The love that stuck was the one she chose last. That 2000 interview with Us did not end with “I don’t think I have any talent for a relationship.” It went on, with the two children she had adopted at the center of her life. “I have some talent for motherhood,” Linda Ronstadt said, “and also for music.”