At 86, Paul Hogan Finally Admits She Was the Love of His Life

Paul Hogan spent decades making the world laugh as the fearless Australian who seemed to have an answer for everything.

But behind the character was a very different, far more human story — one built around two women, two marriages, and a lifetime spent learning the difference between being famous and being known.

Long before international stardom, Hogan was simply a young man from Western Sydney, born in 1939, working as a rigger on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and taking odd jobs to get by.

In 1958, at 19, he met 18-year-old Noelene Edwards. There was nothing glamorous about how it began — just two young people who liked each other and got married that same year.

By his early twenties, Hogan was already a father of three sons, building an ordinary life defined by work, bills, and the everyday demands of a growing family.

Noelene knew him before any of it — before fame, before Hollywood, before there was any reason to believe the world would ever know his name.

That ordinary life held for years. Then, in 1971, Hogan appeared on the Australian talent show New Faces, not to prove himself as a traditional performer but to mock the judges and lean into his working-class persona — an attitude that resonated instantly with audiences and launched The Paul Hogan Show.

As his fame grew nationally, so did the demands on his time: travel, appearances, and an accelerating career that increasingly competed with the family life he and Noelene had built.

By 1981, after more than two decades together, the couple divorced. Remarkably, they reconciled less than a year later — a decision that speaks to just how much shared history bound them together, from raising children to surviving years with very little money.

Then came Crocodile Dundee. In 1985, Hogan traveled into the Australian Outback to make a film he’d helped create, and on that production he met Linda Kozlowski, an American actress trained at Juilliard with a background in serious theater.

As filming progressed under difficult conditions, the two grew close — a connection noted by people around the production, including the film’s director.

The complication was significant: Hogan was still married to Noelene. Crocodile Dundee was released in 1986 and became a global phenomenon, turning Hogan into an international star and Kozlowski into a household name almost overnight.

Soon after, his marriage to Noelene ended for good, playing out publicly as newspapers covered the fallout and the public took sides.

Noelene, who had known Hogan since he was a teenager, was thrust into a story she’d never sought.

Her response, when it came, was brief and unforgettable: she said she’d had the best years of his life.

By some accounts, the two remained estranged for roughly 17 years afterward — nearly a second lifetime of silence between two people who had once built a family together.

Noelene eventually remarried, to businessman Reg Stratton, and built a quieter life away from public attention.

Hogan married Kozlowski in 1990, and for a time the pairing looked like the natural conclusion to one of the decade’s most famous on-screen romances.

But tension developed beneath the surface. Kozlowski had trained seriously as an actress and didn’t want a career defined by playing the girlfriend of a famous comedian; after Crocodile Dundee, she reportedly turned down roles she felt were limiting, and her career gradually contracted.

Their son, Chance, was born in 1998, and while Kozlowski described herself as content in motherhood, reports over the years suggested she increasingly felt she was living inside her husband’s shadow — the star’s wife, rather than her own person.

In 2013, Kozlowski filed for divorce in Los Angeles after more than two decades of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences.

The settlement reportedly included a substantial one-time payment and allowed her to remain in their Los Angeles home for a period, while Hogan retained the rights connected to the Crocodile Dundee franchise.

Kozlowski went on to build an entirely different life, eventually meeting and marrying Moroccan tour guide Moulay Hafid Baba in 2017.

For Hogan, the years that followed were quieter, and by many accounts marked by real loneliness — though he’s long been known to shield his private emotions behind humor rather than direct discussion.

Around the same period, he faced a lengthy, high-profile tax dispute with Australian authorities, and as he moved into his 80s, the physical toll of aging became increasingly visible: reduced mobility, chronic pain, and far fewer public appearances than the rugged image audiences remembered.

In December 2024, Hogan and Kozlowski reunited publicly for a presentation tied to a restored version of Crocodile Dundee — two people standing together again, looking back at footage of themselves from nearly forty years earlier, young and famous and with no way of knowing what was still to come.

Hogan met the moment with his usual humor, but underneath it was an unmistakable acknowledgment of everything that had changed in between.

Looking back across his life, the question of who truly held Hogan’s heart doesn’t resolve neatly.

Kozlowski was there for the defining chapter of his international fame — the years the world was watching.

Noelene was there before any of it, when he was simply a young man with a working-class job and no guarantee of anything.

One woman knew the celebrity. The other knew the man before he became one. Perhaps, as his story suggests, both loves were real in their own way — belonging to entirely different chapters of a life that turned out to be far bigger, and far more complicated, than either of them could have imagined at the start.