The car pulled up outside a Los Angeles hotel, and her staff came out to meet it. They helped Ann-Margret into a wheelchair and wheeled her inside to an event. She was smiling the whole way, in a green blazer over black. Fox News Digital ran the photos on November 8, and the woman who once danced Elvis Presley off his feet is now 85 and still showing up.
Fox could not say why she was using the chair, and her representatives have not explained it. What is on the record is Ann-Margret’s broken elbow from a fall at home this spring, and the way she has talked about it since. It also turns out this is not the first time she has had to pick herself up off the floor, and the first time was far worse.
What Happened To Ann-Margret’s Elbow?
She broke the news herself, in a phone interview with Parade that was published on April 11. “I fell the other day and so now my right elbow is broken,” she said. Then she waved it off. “That’s okay … I have fallen so many times. I don’t intend to, but I do!” The injury forced her to cancel an autograph signing, and TMZ reported that it was serious enough to send her to the hospital, although Parade’s own story did not describe a hospital stay. We covered the accident when the news first broke in April.
Asked by Parade whether she was on the mend, she answered, “Yes, I am. I sure am!” She promised to try to “be really really careful and not flop down, not fall again, but one never knows.”
She did not stay home for long. On April 29, the day after her 85th birthday, she was in Beverly Hills to accept a USO Challenge Coin for her decades of entertaining American troops. On May 18 she was in New York at NYU’s Skirball Center, where Leslie Uggams handed her the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Chita Rivera Awards. So how does a woman with a broken elbow keep that kind of calendar?
Why Ann-Margret Won’t Slow Down At 85
She explained it to Fox News Digital in June, while talking about her beloved Harley-Davidsons. Asked whether she has ever been scared on a motorcycle, she said, “nope.” Then she added, “I’m joyful when I get on that bike. I don’t get scared. That’s the problem!”
She told the same interviewer that her energy “doesn’t come in a bottle” and that she learned early not to complain. “You don’t whine about things. You just go out and do the things that you love,” she said. “It’s not work to me. It’s joy.”
The Career Behind The Comeback Kid
She was born Ann-Margret Olsson in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 28, 1941, and came to America in 1946 to join her father. Frank Capra cast her as Bette Davis’s daughter in Pocketful of Miracles in 1961, and two years later Bye Bye Birdie made her a star. Then came Viva Las Vegas with Elvis. She rarely discusses what happened off camera, but she told AARP The Magazine in 2023 that “when I made Viva Las Vegas with him in ’63, we recorded three duets and it was electrifying.”
If you only remember her dancing, the 1970s probably surprised you. Mike Nichols cast her as the lonely Bobbie in Carnal Knowledge opposite Jack Nicholson, and she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She got a second nomination, for Best Actress, playing the mother in Ken Russell’s film of The Who’s Tommy in 1975. A whole new generation found her in 1993 as the widow Ariel who drove Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau crazy in Grumpy Old Men.
The Emmy that eluded her for decades finally came in 2010, for a guest role as Rita Wills in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She later played June in two episodes of Ray Donovan. And in 2023, at 81, she released a rock album called Born to Be Wild with Pete Townshend, Paul Shaffer and the Oak Ridge Boys, and it became her first record to reach a Billboard chart since 1964.
All of that came after a night in 1972 when it looked like there might not be a second act at all.
The 22-Foot Fall She Survived In 1972
On Sunday, September 10, 1972, Ann-Margret was performing at the Sahara Tahoe when she fell from an elevated platform to the stage below. “I fell off a stage, 22 feet, in Tahoe in 1972,” she told AARP. “I smashed my face and broke my jaw and arm.” Her cheekbone was broken too, and her jaw was wired shut for a time while she lived on a liquid diet.
Her husband, Roger Smith, the former star of 77 Sunset Strip who had become her manager, gave a friend a pair of wire cutters in case she had an emergency with her mouth sealed. “I think we only had to use them once,” she said. She was back onstage in less than three months, and she told AARP why she pushed so hard. Her father was seriously ill with cancer, “and the only way that I could show him that I was fine was to get on that stage.”
Smith stood beside her through that recovery, and decades later she returned the favor. They married on May 8, 1967, and stayed married until his death on June 4, 2017, at 84. “Then he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis. The last five years were rough,” she told AARP. “I always tried to listen and to be the best partner I could be.” “I loved Roger with all my heart. And we had 50 great years together.”
So when she shrugged off a broken elbow this spring, she was drawing on more than half a century of practice. As she put it to Parade, “I have always learned from my parents that you just get up.”
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