Iconic 70s actress sparks strong reactions after walking her dogs

For decades, Dyan Cannon was one of Hollywood’s brightest sparks — a woman with quick wit, a megawatt smile, and the kind of on-screen presence you simply couldn’t ignore. She became a star in the late ’60s and ’70s, bouncing between comedy, drama, and mystery with an ease that made critics pay attention. She earned three Oscar nominations, a Golden Globe win, a Saturn Award, and eventually her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. From Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Heaven Can Wait and Deathtrap, she stood out because she wasn’t just beautiful — she was real, expressive, and magnetic.

But the most defining chapter of her life didn’t happen under studio lights. It happened behind closed doors, inside a marriage people once called glamorous, but that she later described as suffocating.

In the early ’60s, Cary Grant — one of the most iconic actors in film history — was flipping through TV channels late one night in his Beverly Hills home when he saw a young woman with honey-blond hair and a disarming charm appear on his screen. That woman was Dyan Cannon. He reportedly became intrigued instantly. Grant started making calls until he found her name, then spent months trying to win her over. Cannon kept him at a distance at first, but he was persistent. Eventually she said yes.

She was 28 when she married him. He was 61.

“I loved him deeply,” she would later say. “I was committed to him.”

But love didn’t erase the imbalance built into the relationship. Grant, she said, had very specific ideas about how his wife should look, behave, and even think. He wanted her to quit acting — so she did. He wanted her to dress a certain way, do her hair a certain way, even walk a certain way. She found herself adjusting the smallest habits, like how she closed a cupboard or how she held a steering wheel, just to avoid upsetting him.

These weren’t dramatic, explosive moments. They were slow, quiet erosions of self.

“If you go against your deepest feelings,” she said years later, “you’re screwed.”

Their marriage lasted only three years. When she filed for divorce in 1968, she cited emotional cruelty, pressure to take LSD, and even physical abuse. Court records noted the scale of Grant’s fortune at the time, but she insisted money wasn’t what she was after. What she needed was oxygen — and the space to reclaim her own identity.

“I couldn’t breathe in that atmosphere anymore,” she admitted.

Despite everything, she refused to villainize him. She said she didn’t enter the marriage wanting anything from him except love. And when it ended, she didn’t walk away carrying bitterness.

“There were happy memories,” she said. “I’m grateful for the experience. It brought me to be the woman I am today.”

From that painful ending came her greatest gift: their daughter, Jennifer, born in 1966 — Grant’s only child. Loving her became the priority that anchored Cannon for the rest of her life. Even after their divorce, parenting kept the former couple connected, though always at a distance.

When Cary Grant died in 1986, Cannon was approached almost immediately with lucrative offers to write a tell-all memoir. She turned them down. She had no interest in cashing in on secrets or pain, not even when Hollywood’s most powerful literary agent called her personally a week after Grant’s death.

Years later, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — then working as an editor in publishing — asked her to consider writing a book. But not a gossip piece. A real memoir. A story about love, identity, and what people sacrifice when they try too hard to please someone else. Cannon didn’t write it until she felt ready. And when she did, she said it wasn’t about settling scores — it was about understanding.

Her life after Grant wasn’t defined by scandal or retreat. She kept working, kept evolving, and kept showing up in the world with the same spark that made audiences fall for her decades earlier. Even in her eighties, she was spotted courtside at basketball games, signing autographs, greeting fans, and laughing with the same lively energy she had in her twenties.

But aging in public comes with a price. More recent photos of her — at 88, out walking her dogs in Los Angeles in a casual white blouse, flared black leggings, a fedora, and sandals — sparked strong reactions online. Some people praised her, cheering her vitality and independence. Others, predictably cruel, criticized her looks.

She never responded to any of it.

She didn’t need to.

Because somewhere along the way, Dyan Cannon stopped living for other people’s expectations.

What grounded her wasn’t Hollywood, or nostalgia, or public approval. It was something simpler and steadier: her faith.

“Praying — that’s what keeps me straight,” she has said. She calls herself a “big God girl,” not as a performance but as a declaration of what carried her through heartbreak, pressure, and reinvention. She found meaning in service, too. She hosts a monthly Bible study in her home and volunteers with people recovering from addiction, offering the encouragement she once needed herself.

After surviving the intensity of fame, the weight of a controlling marriage, the noise of public judgment, and the confusion of losing herself, Cannon ultimately rebuilt her life with quiet strength. Not dramatic reinventions. Not Hollywood comebacks. Just steady, honest healing.

Looking back on everything — the love, the mistakes, the pressure, the rediscovery — she sums it up simply:

“It took me a while to find happiness, but I’m a happy puppy now.”

Her life isn’t a Hollywood fairy tale. It’s something better: the story of a woman who learned, eventually, that her worth didn’t depend on who she loved, who loved her, or how the world saw her — only on how fully she chose to stand in her own skin.

And after nearly nine decades, Dyan Cannon is doing exactly that.