In the summer of 1989, while Sondra Locke was on a film set directing her second feature, exhausted from long days of work, a moving crew was boxing up her belongings at the home she shared with Clint Eastwood in Burbank. She only discovered what had happened when she tried to walk through her own front door and found the locks had been changed. She was not even allowed to retrieve her pet parrot, which had been left behind. The rupture was the end of a thirteen-year relationship that had defined both their careers.
But to understand how it reached that point, it is necessary to go back nearly four decades earlier, to 1953, when a young actor still years away from stardom was set up on a blind date with a swimsuit model named Maggie Johnson. They hit it off quickly, became engaged within months, and were married in Pasadena by December of that year. He was twenty-three. At the time, he was scraping by on bit parts and small television roles, and Maggie had built a modest modeling career of her own.
The early years of their courtship were, by most accounts, genuinely sweet: a young couple figuring out a life together with very little money and very little pressure from the outside world. Within just a couple of years, however, the young actor began having affairs, and by most accounts, Maggie knew. She chose to tolerate it, at least for a while, in what several biographers have since described as something close to an open arrangement. Divorce carried a heavy stigma in the 1950s and 1960s, especially for a young couple trying to build a foothold in an industry that valued a clean public image above almost everything else.
Walking away would have carried real social and financial risk, particularly once children entered the picture. He would later be quoted describing this period of his life in blunt terms, essentially saying that he intended to do exactly as he pleased and that his wife would have to accept it if she wanted to stay married to him. The affairs did not stop, and one of them in particular became a permanent fixture in his life. A few years into the marriage, he landed a role on the western television series Rawhide.
On that set, he met a stuntwoman and dancer named Roxanne Tunis. What started as a casual attraction turned into a relationship that quietly ran in parallel to his marriage for the next fourteen years. In the summer of 1964, Roxanne gave birth to his child, a daughter they named Kimber. The birth was kept remarkably quiet.
Biographical accounts disagree on whether he knew about his daughter from the start or learned of her only years later. Either way, the child’s existence stayed out of public view for decades. Roxanne was not hiding on the sidelines of his career; she was actively part of it, appearing alongside him on set year after year. People working around them at the time have since said it was common knowledge on set that the two were involved.
Around the same general period, he is believed to have fathered another daughter, Lorie Murray, through a brief relationship with someone connected to a theater group. Lorie did not connect with him until she was an adult, and the public did not learn of her existence until 2018. By some later estimates, his affairs during the marriage to Maggie numbered as many as fifteen different women. Maggie absorbed it all quietly for a long time, until 1978, when she finally separated from her husband for good.
The formal divorce dragged out until November 1984. When the settlement was finally reached, Maggie walked away with a payout reported to be in the tens of millions of dollars, one of the larger divorce settlements of its era. She would go on to marry once more, to a man named Henry Wynnberg, though that marriage lasted only a few years. After that, she mostly stepped back from public life.
What is genuinely surprising is how the two of them behaved afterward. Rather than becoming permanent adversaries, Maggie and her ex-husband remained cordial, occasionally appearing together at family events decades later. His next major relationship began while he was still legally married. In the mid-1970s, while filming The Outlaw Josey Wales, he met a young co-star named Sondra Locke, who had earned an Academy Award nomination years earlier for her very first film role.
At the time the two became involved, both were still legally married to other people. Locke had been married since the late 1960s to a childhood friend, a sculptor, in an arrangement she would later describe as never having been physically consummated, closer to a lifelong friendship dressed up as a marriage. The two never bothered to divorce, a detail that would later matter a great deal. Locke and the actor moved in together, and their relationship would go on to define both of their careers for the next thirteen years.
She appeared alongside him in six films, several of which became among the highest-grossing releases of his career. One of his close associates later described the early period of the relationship as something close to complete devotion, recalling that the actor had even written her a private song about how she had made him monogamous for the first time in his life. But the same pattern that had defined his first marriage was quietly repeating itself. While he was still living with Locke, he began a separate private relationship with a flight attendant named Jacelyn Reeves.
In the 1980s, Reeves gave birth to two of his children, a son named Scott in 1986 and a daughter named Catherine two years later. Around 1989 and 1990, tabloid reporting finally exposed the existence of Reeves and the children. The revelation landed right in the middle of what was already becoming a painful unraveling between the actor and Locke. By the spring of 1989, their relationship had completely deteriorated, and he ended it with the changed locks and the storage of her belongings.
Locke responded by filing a palimony lawsuit. The case was considered legally significant because Locke was still technically married to someone else, raising the unusual question of whether a woman married to one man could claim these rights against a different partner. Both sides hired a private judge and had the proceedings sealed. In his deposition, the actor pushed back hard, reportedly describing her at one point as little more than an occasional roommate of ten years.
Locke’s filings alleged that during their years together, she had been pressured into ending two pregnancies and had later undergone a procedure that permanently ended her ability to have children. He denied these allegations firmly, insisting that whatever happened happened by her own choice. Locke also stated that she avoided confrontation with him because of what she described as a serious temper. Rather than let the case drag through a full public trial, the two sides reached a settlement about a year after the suit was filed.
Locke agreed to drop the case in exchange for a three-year development deal with Warner Brothers, reportedly worth around a million and a half dollars, along with a cash payment and the deed to a home. Locke has said that in the moment, she genuinely believed the deal represented a real second act for her directing career. Instead, she pitched roughly thirty different projects to Warner Brothers over the following years, and every single one was turned down. Not one film ever got made.
In the mid-1990s, she went back to court, suing both the studio and her former partner directly, alleging that the development deal had been a deliberate setup designed purely to get her to drop the palimony suit while quietly guaranteeing she would never make another movie. That second lawsuit finally reached a settlement in 1996, reportedly for an amount in the low millions of dollars, arriving just minutes before jury selection was set to begin. A year later, Locke published a memoir giving it a title that played on one of his most famous films. Even before the breakup with Locke was finalized, the actor had met another woman, a fellow actress named Frances Fisher, at a production party in the late 1980s.
By 1993, the two had welcomed a daughter, Francesca. For a while, Fisher has said, this looked like the version of him that finally wanted a real family life. She recalled him cooking meals for her and settling into a domestic rhythm. In 1995, after six years together, the relationship ended when footage surfaced showing him kissing a television news reporter who was not Fisher.
Fisher has spoken about the breakup with a surprising amount of grace, saying she holds no resentment. Compared to the drawn-out legal warfare with Locke, the Fisher relationship stands out as one of the rare chapters that ended without a courtroom. The reporter’s name was Dina Ruiz. She first met the actor in 1993 while interviewing him for a local news station.
In March 1996, the two were married in a private ceremony. Later that year, they welcomed a daughter, Morgan. On the surface, this marriage looked like the calm, settled chapter that decades of tabloid drama had been building toward. The couple stayed together for close to two decades, raising Morgan away from the cameras in Carmel, California.
But cracks eventually started showing. A short-lived reality television series the family filmed together reportedly strained the marriage rather than strengthened it. The show ran for a single season before it was quietly cancelled. By December 2012, the couple had quietly separated, and Dina filed for divorce in October 2013, citing irreconcilable differences.
The divorce was finalized in December 2014, closing the book on an eighteen-year marriage. Looking back across all of it, the pattern is hard to miss. Eight children came from six different women. Two actual marriages bookended nearly three decades of overlapping relationships, secret families, and legal disputes.
Maggie stayed cordial enough to appear at family events decades after their divorce. Frances Fisher described their breakup without a trace of bitterness. Sondra Locke gave her memoir a title that made her feelings clear and never fully softened her account before her death in 2018. Dina Ruiz walked away saying simply that it was time to move on amicably.
In the years since that final divorce, the actor settled into a far quieter chapter, spending roughly a decade in a private relationship with a woman named Christina Sandera. After her death in 2024, he described her simply as a lovely, caring woman he would miss deeply. It is almost fitting that the one relationship in this entire story that seemed to end in genuine peace was also the one the public knew the least about.