Robert Wagner Celebrates 96th Birthday Months After Late Wife Natalie Wood’s Death Anniversary

Robert Wagner’s 96th birthday is stirring up attention as it comes on the heels of the 44th anniversary of late wife’s Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning.

The actor’s stepdaughter Natasha Gregson Wagner — whose mother is the West Side Story star — shared a series of intimate images capturing the Hollywood veteran surrounded by loved ones to her Instagram Stories on Tuesday, February 10.

Per the Daily Mail, one photo showed Wagner blowing out candles on two birthday cakes and another placed him inside Aspen hotspot Cache Cache, seated beside his 19-year-old grandson, Riley.  Natasha, 55, also posted a nostalgic family snapshot featuring Wood, Wagner and the children at Heathrow Airport — a reminder of happier days before the tragedy that has followed the family for decades.

The celebration’s timing is impossible to ignore, of course. An investigation into Wood’s tragic death in 1981 at the age of 43 — later ruled a drowning with “undetermined factors” like mysterious bruises and lacerations found on her body, per a medical examiner report — was reopened in 2011 before Wagner was officially cleared as a person of interest in 2022.

Though speculation has persisted for decades, Natasha has remained steadfast, writing in her 2020 book, More Than Love, An Intimate Portrait of My Mother,  that her stepfather “would never have harmed” her mother, per the outlet.

Today, Wagner remains married to Jill St. John. The two wed in 1990, nine years after Woods drowned off the coast of Santa Catalina Island, California.