A key aspect of James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown is the relationships the musician has had with women. The movie focuses on the two romantic relationships that arguably had the biggest impact on the development of Dylan’s music, but it could easily have covered several more which took place during the time period of the events it depicts. By his own admission in numerous songs and interviews, Bob Dylan hasn’t always made life easy for his romantic partners.
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During the course of his adult life, Dylan has had at least 14 relationships that have been confirmed outright, many of which have overlapped. One of the most notable cases of his apparent two-timing involves both of the characters in A Complete Unknown who get together with the singer-songwriter in the movie. It’s perfectly true that Dylan had an affair with Joan Baez while he was still living with Suze Rotolo, whose big-screen counterpart is named Sylvie Russo. However, A Complete Unknown also makes changes to Dylan’s true story by leaving other romantic interests out of its plot.
You are watching: All Of Bob Dylan’s Known Girlfriends & Romantic Relationships
Echo Helstrom
1958–1959
One girlfriend that A Complete Unknown couldn’t have portrayed onscreen was Bob Dylan’s first, Echo Helstrom. The singer’s high school sweetheart dated him for around a year when they were seniors, in their hometown, Hibbing, Minnesota, during the late 1950s, before they went their separate ways.
Helstrom’s relationship with Dylan predates his arrival in New York, depicted at the beginning of A Complete Unknown, by almost two years. Nevertheless, she was the first girl that the young Robert Zimmerman ever got serious about, and may well have been the inspiration for his early song “The Girl from North Country” (via The Minnesota Star Tribune), although her high-school haircut suggests otherwise.
Bonnie Beecher
1959–1961
Actor Bonnie Beecher is a better fit for the north-country girl whose “hair hangs long” in Bob Dylan’s classic ballad. The pair dated for around a year when they were both enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, before Dylan dropped out to pursue his music career in the Big Apple.
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Still, they kept in touch and met up when Dylan returned to Minnesota for Christmas in 1961. It was at Bonnie Beecher’s house that he undertook one of his earliest recording sessions, a demo featuring blues, folk and gospel standards in May 1961, that has been widely bootlegged in the decades since it was made (via Woman’s World).
Suze Rotolo
1961–1964
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Suze Rotolo was the first great love of Bob Dylan’s life. In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan describes how his attraction to her was immediate, the moment he met her. “She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen,” he writes. The musician apparently still harbors some powerful feelings for his first love to this day, as he requested that Rotolo’s real name be changed for A Complete Unknown as a mark of respect for her memory.
It was Suze Rotolo who introduced Bob Dylan to the 1960s protest movement through her works as a full-time political activist in the causes of civil rights and peace. What’s more the depiction of her encouraging him to write his own music in A Complete Unknown has at least some basis in reality.
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It’s not true that Rotolo accompanied Dylan for his 1965 Newport Festival performances, though, as the couple had already ended their relationship once and for all the previous year. On the other hand, Rotolo definitely did shed many a tear over Dylan’s trysts with entanglement with Joaz Baez, just as Sylvie Russo cries in A Complete Unknown on seeing the two singers perform together.
Joan Baez
1963–1965
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Although Suze Rotolo was certainly Dylan’s first love, he’d actually met Joan Baez three months before he was introduced to Rotolo, as is shown in A Complete Unknown. Yet much of what we see of Dylan and Baez’s relationship in A Complete Unknown isn’t factual, but a telegraphed version of their story. It took two years of Dylan and Baez playing music and socializing in the same circles for Baez to warm to Dylan, and their affair almost certainly began around the time of their first performance together, at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival.
The song that Joan Baez and Bob Dylan first performed together was Dylan’s original composition “With God on Our Side”, although his own version of the song wouldn’t be released until the following January on his album The Times They Are A-Changin’.
By then, Bob Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind” had already become an iconic anthem of the civil rights movement, so he didn’t premiere it to Baez the morning after a romantic rendezvous as the movie suggests. It was the case, however, that Baez’s joint tour of Europe with Dylan in 1965 was a miserable one for her. Dylan didn’t openly refuse to play a song that Baez had already started playing on stage, but he did refuse to perform with her altogether. He effectively ended their relationship during the tour, and Baez went home with a broken heart.
Mavis Staples
1964
Gospel singer Mavis Staples, primarily known as the lead soprano of the family singing group The Staples Singers, first met Bob Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan was immediately enamored with her, and even asked her to marry him.
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While Staples declined, believing he was joking, the event began a decades-long friendship between the pair. What’s more, Staples has admitted that they had a “smooch” during their days together at Newport, which perhaps wasn’t their last romantic dalliance either (via The Guardian).
Sara Dylan (née Shirley Noznisky)
1964–1977
By 1964, Bob Dylan’s love life was already getting very messy, but he was about to throw another complication into the mix by moving in with Sara Lownds at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. It’s this hotel that we see Joan Baez living in when Dylan visits her at night in A Complete Unknown. This scene was likely a deliberate composite of Dylan’s relationships with Sara Lownds and Baez, which were going on at the same time during that period.
Sara and Bob Dylan had five children together, and are now allegedly on good terms despite how their marriage ended.
Lownds was the name Sara had taken from her first husband, to whom she was still married when she met Dylan. It’s not clear exactly when she and Dylan became involved, as much of their relationship is still a secret closely guarded by both parties. In any case, Sara Dylan is a major person for the makers of A Complete Unknown to have left out of their movie, as she became Bob Dylan’s first wife in November 1965, when she was already pregnant with their first child.
Dylan still professed that she was the only woman he loved as late as his Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, as captured in Martin Scorsese’s documentary about the tour on Netflix. By that point, though, their marriage was already on the rocks, and would end in acrimony in 1977, despite Dylan’s best efforts to win his wife back with the swooning ballad “Sara” on his album Desire. Sara and Bob Dylan had five children together, and are now allegedly on good terms despite how their marriage ended.
Dana Gillespie
1965
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Blues singer Dana Gillespie is just one of the women Bob Dylan is rumored to have been seeing during the early days of his relationship with Sara Lownds, with Andy Warhol superstar being the most famous, but Gillespie is the only one to have confirmed the stories. “I can say he was a bit of a boyfriend.” she told the Independent in a recent interview.
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Dylan first encountered Gillespie at a press conference during his 1965 tour of the UK, and promptly took her back to his hotel room. She was just 16 at the time, and Bob Dylan wouldn’t be the last celebrity she’d be romantically linked to, although she insists her relationship with David Bowie was strictly professional. Dylan wasn’t the first, either, as Roman Polanski had already had his way with her the year before she met the American musician.
Sally Kirkland
1975–1976
The truth about Bob Dylan’s love life following the disintegration of his marriage to Sara Dylan is particularly murky, but Sally Kirkland is one person who definitely had a fling with the singer during the mid-1970s. Kirkland has confirmed that she first got together with Dylan when a mutual friend brought her along on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour (via Closer). The flame has apparently been rekindled on multiple occasions since their one-year relationship, but it was only at that time that Kirkland could be considered Dylan’s girlfriend of sorts.
Faridi McFree
1977–1978
Once Sara and Bob Dylan had finalized their divorce, he began another year-long relationship with his children’s art therapist, Faridi McFree, who was an exponent of healing by artistic practice. Much of McFree’s own artwork from the period includes images of Dylan, some of which were exhibited in Belgium, Wisconsin in 2021 (via Shepherd Express).
Mary Alice Artes
1978–1980
Mary Alice Artes is the first of four different backing singers to have had a relationship with Dylan during the late 1970s and 1980s. She’s the only one to have been openly described in romantic terms by Dylan himself, however. “She could look really sexy,” he once wrote, “but at the same time be one of those competent mothers who would shower you with love and affection.” (via The Times). It was actually Artes who introduced Dylan to evangelical Christianity, precipitating his radical musical shift to gospel music at the start of the 1980s.
Helena Springs
1978–1979
Helena Springs was the second of Dylan’s backing singers to become involved with him at the end of the 1970s, according to Dead Straight Guides’ book Bob Dylan. She was around 17 years old at the time she entered a relationship with Dylan, and apparently served as the inspiration for his 1978 song “New Pony”. A year later, she began dating actor Robert De Niro, who was making Raging Bull at the time.
Clydie King
1980–1985
Described by various sources as the second love of Bob Dylan’s life, Clydie King was the first backing singer that the musician entered into a serious long-term relationship with. A copy of his 1985 box-set album Biograph that he gifted King is inscribed with the message, “For Clydie, My Greatest Love (that surpasses even my understanding), Forever & Always, Bob.”
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When King died in 2019, Dylan released a statement that read, “She was my ultimate singing partner. No one ever came close. We were two soulmates.” Beyond being a singing partner, Clydie King was apparently the woman in Bob Dylan’s wife throughout the early 1980s.
Carolyn Dennis
1985–1992
Howard Sounes’ authorized biography Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan shocked the world when it was published in 2001, by revealing that Dylan had married another of his backing singers, Carolyn Dennis, in 1986. The marriage had been kept secret until that moment, as had the existence of Dylan’s child with Dennis, born the year of their marriage. The couple divorced in 1992 but remained on amicable terms, with Dennis publishing a statement in response to Sounes’ book which described Dylan as a “wonderful, active father.”
Carole Childs
1986
Carole Childs is the last confirmed romantic partner of Bob Dylan, since a book by another alleged girlfriend, Susan Ross, hasn’t held up to scrutiny. Childs was an A&R executive at Geffen Records when she and Dylan first met in 1974, due to the release of his latest album at that time on one of Geffen’s subsidiary labels. The relationship between Childs and Dylan has been confirmed by Carole Bayer Sager, who recalled meeting the pair as boyfriend and girlfriend as she undertook a writing session with Dylan in the spring of 1986 (via Vulture).
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It’s not entirely clear how long Childs was with Dylan, given that he married Carolyn Dennis two months after this writing session. We can assume that Childs wasn’t his main romantic focus from that point on, but she may have been involved with him during the previous decade. Bob Dylan’s romantic complications certainly didn’t end with the events of A Complete Unknown.
Sources: The Minnesota Star Tribune; Woman’s World; The Guardian; The Independent; Closer; Shepherd Express; The Times; Dead Straight Guides; Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan; Vulture
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A Complete Unknown
Biography
Drama
Music
6/10
173
9.2/10
Release Date
December 25, 2024
Runtime
140 minutes
Director
James Mangold
Writers
Jay Cocks, James Mangold
Cast
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Timothée Chalamet
Bob Dylan
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Edward Norton
Pete Seeger
A Complete Unknown is a biographical movie that follows a young Bob Dylan as he integrates with New York and catches the eye of the folk singers in the area, eventually propelling him into stardom.
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Category: Entertainment