Dinah Shore’s Secret Trick to Keeping Burt Reynolds Happy

When it comes to Hollywood love stories, there’s one that, more often than not, gets overlooked: the story of Burt Reynolds and Dinah Shore, and it isn’t a story that ends with cheating or heartbreak. Instead, it’s a story of kindness and a real sense that these two people cared about each other deeply until the very end of their lives.

Burt first met the singer and actress-turned-TV-host when he appeared on her talk show, Dinah’s Place, in 1970. Despite a 19-year age gap, he was instantly smitten and spontaneously invited her to spend the weekend with him in Palm Springs. Dinah, then 53 and twice divorced, declined, but Burt was quite persistent. A little while later, they finally met up in Chicago, and the rest, as they say, was Hollywood history.

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Burt and Dinah shared a love for the game of tennis, and before you knew it, their mornings were often filled with a mix of competitive spirit and playful affection. From time to time, Dinah, the clearly better player, would fake it and let Burt win. It was a silly little trick, one that was painfully obvious to Burt, but he loved it because he recognized it for what it was: a gesture of love that only deepened their bond.

In a 2022 retrospective, Closer Weekly recalled Burt saying, “Dinah was a much better tennis player than me, but she would fake not being good and let me win sometimes. She was incredibly important to me.”

From the beginning, it was their goal to keep their romance a quiet one, far away from the public eye. These two A-list celebrities found joy in the simple pleasures of life, from cozy nights at home snuggling by a fireplace to countless days on the golf course. Because of Dinah’s affinity for both tennis and golf, Burt often joked that he loved being in a relationship with a “jock.”

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As the years passed, Burt made it clear to Dinah that he wanted to marry her. He really did, but Dinah resisted the idea because she knew that Burt also wanted a family, and in her mind, she had already been there and done that. Dinah also bristled at the idea of growing older with a man almost two decades her junior. She felt like as time went on, she would become more and more of a burden to him, and that was something that she never wanted to be.

When their romantic relationship ended in the mid-seventies, their friendship endured. Throughout the remainder of her life, Burt and Dinah remained close, and they looked for opportunities to spend time together sharing laughter, tears, and perhaps most importantly, unwavering support for each other.

When Dinah died of cancer in 1994, Burt told The Los Angeles Times, “Hollywood has lost its greatest and only real angel. Dinah is what God meant when He strived to make perfection.”