Whatever Happened To Linda Kozlowski?

Linda Kozlowski was a struggling actress when she auditioned for a movie whose star and creator was an obscure Australian actor whose name elicited puzzled looks in Hollywood. She landed the part, not realizing that audition would forever shape her life when the low-budget comedy about a crocodile hunter from the Australian Outback turned out to be one of the biggest movies of 1986.

"Crocodile Dundee" went on to earn a staggering $328 million at the international box office — not too shabby for a movie that cost about $7 million to make (which reportedly included investments from a few wealthy cricket players and INXS singer Michael Hutchence), making star Paul Hogan a household name and a hot property in Hollywood.

Yet with all that success, Kozlowski pulled a vanishing act. She hasn't appeared onscreen since 2001, when she revived her "Crocodile Dundee" role for the ill-fated sequel "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles." For an actress who played the female lead in one of the biggest films of the 1980s, her career went surprisingly quiet in the years that followed. So what happened? Read on and discover the amazing secret behind Linda Kozlowski's exit from Hollywood.

In "Crocodile Dundee," Linda Kozlowski played street-smart NYC travel reporter Sue Charlton, who's out of her element when she finds herself in the middle of the Australian Outback. As she told People, her character's reaction to her new surroundings wasn't all that different from her actual experience. 

"My hut was literally right on the edge of a billabong [a crocodile-filled swamp]," she explained. "Now that they're protected, the crocs have all gotten huge and fat and cocky. Crocodiles are really bold, and they do come up on land. Late at night, when we were going to the mess hall, we'd be ... very careful."

However, Kozlowski proved to be a trouper. "We thought the bugs and the snakes and the danger of crocodiles would freak her right out," said actor Paul Hogan. "I mean, there have been three or four deaths up there from crocodiles since Christmas, and there were crocodiles in the water where we shot the movie. But she never complained. She was professional. She never said, 'I won't do these things.' Mind you, we had a guy with a loaded Magnum between her and the water."

While Paul Hogan and Linda Kozlowski were virtual unknowns before "Crocodile Dundee," that was certainly not the case after the movie became an international sensation. And when rumors began to emerge that the co-stars had taken their romance from the big screen to real life, the media couldn't get enough. This was especially true in Hogan's native Australia, where their every move was chronicled by the media.

For example, a 1988 report in the Sydney Morning Herald documented a "steamy" trans-Atlantic flight to London during which the pair couldn't keep their hands off each other. "They hardly left each other alone through the whole flight," an anonymous passenger claimed. 

"When I first fell in love with Paul, there was a big outcry because he was married and had five kids. It was hard because the classy, elegant thing to do is to not say anything," she said of that era in a 2001 interview with a reporter from Scripps Howard News Service. "It's your personal life, and so they would come out and print their version of the story, which had nothing to do with reality."

While working with Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski was also striking out on her own, determined to prove she could hold her own as an actress without her husband. That didn't quite work out as she hoped, appearing in a few forgettable direct-to-video duds throughout the 1990s. Anyone remember "Zorn"? "The Neighbor"? "Backstreet Justice"? After appearing in a 1996 made-for-TV western called "Shaughnessy," Kozlowski took a break from acting and focused on raising son Chance.

After a few years off, Kozlowski reprised the role of Sue Charlton one more time for 2001's "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles." Not only would it be her and Hogan's last time working together, but it would also mark the final acting role of Kozlowski's career. 

As she told the Los Angeles Times in 1988, the writing had been on the wall for a while, with the success of "Crocodile Dundee" turning out to be both a blessing and a curse as she found herself typecast in the eyes of Hollywood casting directors. "After 'Crocodile Dundee,' I turned down lots of stuff, most of it where I'd play the girlfriend of some funny man," she explained.

While Paul Hogan continued to star in movies — albeit increasingly less successful ones, such as 2004's "Strange Bedfellows" and 2009's "Charlie & Boots" — Linda Kozlowski focused her energies on motherhood. "I was about to turn 40 and just wanted to have a baby, and time was running out and I was miserable, really, in the last two jobs I'd done," she revealed in a 2001 interview with Scripps Howard News Service, explaining that she'd made the right choice. She added, "I'm 43 years old, I've got a baby, I'm happy and content. I've reached the point in my life where I'm happy and have gotten over the whole thing."

Yet this contentment didn't last as the couple gradually found themselves drifting apart. In 2013, People reported they had split, with Kozlowski, then 55, filing for divorce from her 74-year-old husband after 23 years of marriage. The divorce was finalized the following year. "Honestly, we just naturally grew apart," Kozlowski told Australian magazine New Idea (via the Sydney Morning Herald). "One of our problems was we really had nothing in common and, over time, that happens to a lot of people."

Years after her divorce, Linda Kozlowski had the surreal experience of watching her relationship with Paul Hogan play out in a made-for-television miniseries. Produced for Australia's Channel Seven in 2017, "Hoges" (Aussie fans' nickname for Hogan) featured Josh Lawson portraying Hogan, chronicling his rise from working-class rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge to international film stardom. Actress Laura Gordon was cast as Kozlowski. 

Reviews for the miniseries were decidedly mixed, with the Sydney Morning Herald offering five out of five stars for a "lovingly presented" biopic. Other reviewers were far less charitable. "The folly begins with Lawson bearing virtually no physical resemblance whatsoever to the person he was hired to play," said The Guardian, pointing to the "roadkill-looking hairpiece pasted to his scalp," while Australia's News.com.au quipped that "the bad wigs and hammy acting ... have caused viewers to cringe all over Australia."

Ratings were good but not great, with the Daily Mail reporting 1.32 million Australians viewed the first of the movie's two parts. "While it was among the most watched shows on the day," the Mail pointed out, "it was a long way behind similar telemovies from recent years."

In May 2018, New Idea reported Linda Kozlowski sold her L.A. home and moved full-time to Morocco after her wedding to Moulay Hafid Baba. And while her ex Paul Logan may have professed happiness about her marriage, the magazine cited an unnamed source who claimed that the actor was "devastated that Linda has sold her home and cut ties with America, and is moving so far away," noting, "He's going to be incredibly lonely now that they are moving to Morocco. Paul doesn't have a lot of friends in L.A. and finds it hard to get close to new people, so it's affecting him a lot knowing that they will be gone."

Meanwhile, Kozlowski is said to still worry about Hogan, who celebrated his 80th birthday in October 2019. She's particularly concerned about his smoking. "Paul's had an incredible life and she can't imagine the world without him in it," a source told Women's Day. "She's constantly badgering him to have regular health check-ups, and to give up the cigarettes, because she wants him around for a long while yet."

Speaking with Luxe Beat, Linda Kozlowski gushed about her new life in Morocco, which offered her a very different kind of lifestyle than she'd ever experienced before. "One thing I always hated about acting was that it got in the way of having an adventurous life," she explained. "You had to stick around [L.A.] and wait for work. Now I'm rejoicing in my freedom."

While Morocco is a world away from Hollywood, she admitted that's precisely what she's been enjoying about her new life. "I love luxury, but I love to rough it too," she added. "Baba and I once stayed three nights in the Sahara completely alone ... during the afternoon, we had just a tiny strip of shade from our tent. Time stood still and all we could do was lie in that strip of shade and talk and laugh."

Asked if she ever sees herself getting back in front of the cameras, Kozlowski admitted she doesn't miss her former career one bit. "I don't miss acting because my life is so full now," she declared. "Reality is better than make believe."