’80s Action Star Dolph Lundgren Recalls Knowing He Was ‘In Trouble’ After Meeting His 22-Year-Old Wife at 61

Dolph Lundgren is looking back at his age-gap romance and marriage to his wife, Emma Krokdal, in his new memoir. The action star reveals how they first met when she was in her early 20s.

The He-Man star acknowledges that his age-gap marriage may not be a relationship everyone understands or supports. In his memoir, Fights Worth Fighting, he details how he and Krokdal met, describes her as an “angel” sent into his life, and opens up about how she stood by his side during his battle with cancer.

“Despite the difference in our ages, which I was always aware of, I sometimes felt as though Emma was an angel who had been sent down from heaven to help me,” Lundgren wrote. “She’s a very strong and special person.”

Krokdal, only a few months younger than the actor’s daughter Ida, had met the action star when she was 22 and working as a personal trainer in West Hollywood. Lundgren even explains that his wife and daughter had become friends when Krokdal began working with the actor.

While his wife is 39 years older than the actor, the two have something in common. Lundgren was married to designer Anette Qviberg from 1994 until they divorced in 2011, and Krokdal also went through her own divorce.

“She was recently divorced and single again at the time,” he wrote. “She had been married and gone through a difficult divorce, as well as a lot of other stuff that people her age usually don’t have to deal with. She was quite mature.”

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Despite Lundgren being known as one of the biggest action stars of the ’80s alongside Sylvester Stallone, the actor admits his wife had no idea who he was. He called it one of the “really great things” about his wife.

Lundgren remembers once having been at Stallone’s house with his wife, when he pointed to a man sitting at the bar. He asked his wife if she knew who he was, and “she said no. I said, ‘That’s Al Pacino,’ and she said, ‘Al who?’”

The couple got engaged in 2020 and later married at a villa in Mykonos in July 2023. A few months before their wedding, Lundgren announced that he had been battling kidney cancer since 2015. He recalls in his memoir having felt sorry for Krokdal for having to deal with the illness, but that “she still had to help me get through all the horrible side effects of the drugs they were using to treat me.”

“To this day, I really don’t know how she managed to get through it all without ever losing it herself,” said the actor.