This Beloved TV Star Said Marriage Brought Too Much Pain — Then Two More Chapters Followed

The magazine page captured Lindsay Wagner at a moment when fame and private disappointment were colliding. By March 1980, the Emmy-winning star of The Bionic Woman had already experienced two marriages and two divorces. While discussing her Scruples character Billy Ikehorn, Wagner admitted they shared one striking similarity: both had married more often than expected. She suggested that walking down the aisle again would simply repeat a painful pattern. After years of balancing demanding television work with relationships under public scrutiny, she believed another marriage would be impractical. Yet her personal story was only halfway written.

Wagner’s first husband was music publisher Allan Rider, whom she married in 1971. Their relationship ended in divorce two years later. In 1976, she married actor Michael Brandon after the couple had reportedly lived together for about two years. That union ended in 1979 following a difficult separation, though Brandon denied reports that he had demanded alimony or shared real estate. He later described the divorce as painful and suggested that their timing had been wrong. Wagner then insisted that she would not marry again—but a man working beside her on television soon changed that decision.

Her third husband was stunt performer Henry Kingi, whom she met while working on The Bionic Woman. They married near Lake Tahoe in May 1981 and welcomed their first son, Dorian, in September 1982. Their marriage ended in 1984, but the former couple later welcomed a second son, Alex, in 1986. Celebrity divorces can involve an attorney, court filings, insurance questions, mortgage responsibilities, investment accounts, and negotiations over an estate, yet the lasting personal issue for Wagner was building a stable family after the marriage ended. In 1990, she tried once more, marrying television producer Lawrence Mortorff. It was Wagner’s fourth marriage and reportedly Mortorff’s second, but that relationship also ended in divorce in 1993. Public records and biographies consistently list Rider, Brandon, Kingi, and Mortorff as her four former spouses.

Wagner did not allow those four endings to define the rest of her life. Her connection with Kingi remained important through their sons, while her career continued across television, movies, writing, teaching, and wellness advocacy. The actress who became a household name as Jaime Sommers gradually built an identity beyond both The Bionic Woman and the relationships that once attracted headlines. Now 77, she is generally described as single and has not publicly entered a fifth marriage. Her earlier prediction was therefore both wrong and understandable: she did marry twice more, but each chapter taught her something different about partnership, independence, and family. The most meaningful outcome was not whether any marriage lasted forever. It was that Wagner continued moving forward after each one, protecting the relationships that mattered and refusing to let an uneven romantic history overshadow a career and life spanning more than five decades.

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