Robert Redford’s Forgotten First Wife Lived In His Building Before He Was A Star

Long before the world knew Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, a young Mormon woman from Provo, Utah, knew him as the struggling painter who lived in her apartment building. Her name was Lola Van Wagenen, and she married him in 1958, when he had no money, no famous films and no clear plan beyond a sketchbook and a restless streak.

Their marriage lasted through Redford’s rise from Broadway hopeful to Hollywood’s golden boy, through a loss that never left either of them, and through four children. When Redford died at his home in Sundance, Utah, on September 16, 2025, at 89, Lola was barely a footnote in the coverage. Her story deserves more than that, and so does what Redford said about her long after they parted.

How Did Robert Redford Meet Lola Van Wagenen?

They met in Los Angeles in 1957. “I met him in California, where we happened to live in the same apartment building,” Lola told the Vermont paper Seven Days in 2002, in one of the few interviews she gave about him. “He was an unknown, struggling young visual artist then.”

Redford was in a dark place at the time. His mother, Martha, had died young, and he had already flamed out of the University of Colorado. He married Lola in Las Vegas on August 9, 1958, when he was 21. “I was just 19 when we married,” she told Seven Days. Years later he was blunt about why he had wed so young. “Obviously, I don’t want to denigrate the person I married, there were a lot of good reasons,” he said in an interview quoted by Fox News. “But I have to say it was to save my life. That’s what it felt like at the time.”

According to People, the newlyweds had about $300 between them and had to borrow a car to get home from the ceremony. Lola had been a college student, and she left school behind to follow her husband to New York. There, Redford studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. “He went from real obscurity, but it didn’t happen overnight and we always kept a low profile,” Lola recalled.

What Happened to Their First Son?

In 1959 the couple welcomed a baby boy, Scott. He died of sudden infant death syndrome when he was about two and a half months old. Redford rarely spoke about it, but he opened up to AARP The Magazine in 2011. “It was really hard,” he said. “We were very young.” He had just landed his first theater job, which barely paid. “We didn’t know anything about SIDS, so the only thing you think is that you’ve done something wrong,” he said. Then he added, “As a parent, you tend to blame yourself. That creates a scar that probably never completely heals.”

The family grew again. Shauna was born in 1960 and David James, known as Jamie, followed in 1962. Redford’s career finally caught fire on Broadway, where he starred in the original 1963 production of Barefoot in the Park before making the 1967 film opposite Jane Fonda. Daughter Amy arrived in 1970, just after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turned her father into one of the biggest stars in the world.

Utah was always part of the plan, and it was Lola’s home before it was his. Early in the marriage the couple bought a two acre lot in Provo Canyon near a small ski area called Timp Haven, a short drive from where she grew up. Redford later bought the whole mountain and renamed it Sundance. “We spent a lot of time in Utah, always lived in New York, never in California,” Lola said.

Who Was Lola Van Wagenen Outside of Hollywood?

Lola was never content to be only a movie star’s wife. In 1970 she co-founded Consumer Action Now, a New York nonprofit that she co-chaired for about a decade. “It was aimed at housewives,” she told Seven Days. “The idea was to teach people how their buying habits affect the environment.”

When the older children left home, she went back to school herself. “My son and daughter both went off to college, and I thought, I really want that,” she said. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Vermont College in 1982 and a master’s in public history from New York University in 1984, and she completed her Ph.D. in American history at NYU in 1994. Her dissertation on Mormon women became the 2003 book Sister-Wives and Suffragists, and the subject was close to home. “All of my ancestors were polygamists,” she said, “but the wives were also very independent-thinking women.”

The marriage, meanwhile, had quietly come apart. The Redfords never announced a separation, and in 1982 columnist Shirley Eder reported that they had been “very much apart for a number of years.” Most accounts date the divorce to 1985, after more than 25 years together. Lola later co-founded Clio Visualizing History and served as executive producer of Miss America, a documentary that screened at Sundance in 2002. That same year she married George Burrill, founder of the development firm ARD, in Vermont. Redford married German artist Sibylle Szaggars in Hamburg in July 2009.

What Did Redford Say About Lola After the Divorce?

Hollywood divorces tend to end in lawyers and headlines, and Redford was determined that his would not. “I never wanted to be one of those divorced showbusiness casualties, so predictable!” he told The Telegraph in 2001. “It was mutual and it was right to move on.” Then he said the thing that mattered most. “We still have great love, great affection, great friendship,” he said, according to People, and the kids “came through it OK.”

That bond was tested again in October 2020, when Jamie died of bile duct cancer at 58. He had lived with liver disease for more than 30 years, survived transplants and built an institute to raise awareness of organ donation. He had also co-founded The Redford Center with his father in 2005, a nonprofit that backs environmental films, and he was still making documentaries when he died.

Their daughter Amy, a filmmaker herself, paid tribute to her father at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, which carries the name of the Utah mountain her parents first reached as a young couple with a two acre lot. “I’ve tried to be a very private person with a very private life,” Lola once said, and she kept to it. Redford, for his part, put his feelings on the record decades ago, in six words about the girl from his apartment building who married him before he was anybody: great love, great affection, great friendship.