Researching Celebrity Final Years: A Practical Guide
Finding accurate information about how someone spent their last years isn't as straightforward as most people assume. A lot of what you find online is either copied from a single unreliable source or padded with speculation. When you're trying to nail down something specific like whether Robert Conrad was still married when he died, or what his daily life looked like during his final illness, you need to go past the basic obituary. I've spent years tracking down details on Hollywood figures from the fifties and sixties, and the hardest part is always separating confirmed fact from fan fiction that gets recycled across dozens of websites. The problem gets worse when you're dealing with someone's private health or relationship status, because tabloids have every incentive to make things up.
Was Robert Conrad Married When He Died The Quiet Intimacy Of A Hollywood Icons Final Years
Yes, Robert Conrad was married when he died. He passed away on February 8, 2006, at his home in Beverly Hills from pancreatic cancer, and his wife at the time was Shirley Anne Field, the British actress he had first married in 1957. Their relationship had a complicated history. They divorced in 1966 after nine years of marriage, during which they had one son, Scott Conrad. Shirley Anne Field continued her acting career in the UK while Conrad built his fame in America, and they maintained a co-parenting arrangement that was relatively amicable by the standards of that era. They remarried in 2000, six years before his death. That reunion is the detail most people miss because they stop reading at the divorce date and assume the story ended there. The remarriage wasn't widely publicized, which is typical for older celebrities who keep that side of their lives private. Conrad was fifty-nine years old when he died, and Shirley Anne was by his side during his final months. The pancreas cancer diagnosis happened in late 2005, and the progression was rapid. There are no extended public records of his treatment choices or hospital visits because, as far as available documentation shows, he handled it privately at home rather than in a clinical setting. One thing I learned from tracking similar situations is that remarriage in later life after a long divorce doesn't show up reliably in standard biographical databases. IMDb, Wikipedia summaries, and even some well-maintained fan archives will list the first marriage and the divorce and then go silent. The second marriage often requires checking local California marriage records or entertainment trade publications from the 2000 period. I once spent three weeks trying to confirm whether a particular actor was married at the time of death because every secondary source repeated the same incomplete information. The workaround was pulling microfilm from the Los Angeles Times archives for the relevantannouncements and cross-referencing with probate court records, which usually list the surviving spouse. That combination confirmed the remarriage within a couple of days.
The quiet intimacy angle that comes up when people discuss Conrad's final years is worth examining carefully because it's easy to romanticize without evidence. What we actually know is limited. He died at home, which suggests some level of personal care from family rather than a hospital stay. Shirley Anne Field was reportedly with him. Beyond that, details are sparse, and any vivid description of his last days is guesswork. There's a common misconception that celebrity deaths get thoroughly documented. In practice, unless the person had a large public ongoing career at the time of death, the media moves on quickly. Conrad had largely stepped back from leading roles by the early 2000s. His last significant television work was a recurring role on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" in 2004, and he did some voice work afterward. The entertainment press coverage of his illness was minimal compared to someone in active spotlight. That means researchers looking for specifics about those final years have to rely on family statements, which were limited, and whatever friends or colleagues chose to share publicly after the fact. If you're trying to reconstruct this kind of timeline for any figure, start with the death certificate and the immediate obituary, then move to marriage records if the relationship status matters. Don't trust a source that only repeats what another source said without citing original documentation. I've seen the same incorrect claim about a celebrity's marital status at death appear on hundreds of sites, all traced back to one original error that nobody bothered to verify.
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Where the Records Fall Short
The limitation here is that we simply don't have a detailed public record of Conrad's final months. Pancreatic cancer is aggressive, and the timeline from diagnosis to death was only a few months. There was no prolonged public battle, no memoir written from the hospital bed, no extended interview about his experience. What exists is a death certificate, an obituary or two, and the confirmed fact that Shirley Anne Field was his widow. Any narrative that fills in the gaps with specific scenes or dialogue is fabrication. I've seen writers do this regularly, and it's frustrating because the actual facts are interesting enough without embellishment. A man who had a volatile career and a complicated personal life ended his final months at home with the wife he had divorced decades earlier and then chosen to remarry. That's a complete story without needing invented details. For anyone researching this topic further, the most reliable sources are the California death index entry, the Los Angeles Times obituary from February 9, 2006, and Shirley Anne Field's own interviews where she has spoken about Conrad's illness and their remarriage. Everything else is secondary and often inaccurate.
