Daryl Hannah: A Complete Life Story — The Mermaid, the Activist, and the Woman Hollywood Couldn’t Contain
Born December 3, 1960, Chicago, Illinois
There are actresses who are famous for what they play. There are activists who are famous for what they fight. And then there is Daryl Hannah — a woman who has spent 45 years being both simultaneously, and who has never quite let Hollywood, the tabloids, or anyone else decide which one she really is.
She is the mermaid from Splash, the replicant from Blade Runner, the sword-wielding Elle Driver from Kill Bill. She is the woman who was arrested protesting a tar sands pipeline, chained herself to a tree to save an urban farm in South Central Los Angeles, and delivered a keynote address at the United Nations Climate Change Summit. She is a woman who was diagnosed with autism as a child and told she might need to be institutionalized — who became one of the most recognizable blonde faces in the history of American cinema. She is a woman who turned down the lead in Pretty Woman and was allegedly blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein and spent a significant portion of the prime years of her career fighting battles that were not her fault to fight.
She is also the woman who eventually stopped waiting for Hollywood to give her a life worth living, built one herself on solar power and biodiesel and a Wyoming ranch, and married Neil Young in 2018.
She is 64 years old as of February 2026, and she is still making films. This is her complete story.
Daryl Hannah Early Life: Chicago, Autism, Jamaica, and the Girl Who Watched Movies All Night
Daryl Christine Hannah was born on December 3, 1960, in Chicago, Illinois — the daughter of Donald Christian Hannah, who owned a tugboat and barge company, and Susan Jeanne Metzger, who was a schoolteacher and later became a film and television producer. She grew up in the Chicago suburb of Long Grove, Illinois alongside her brother Don and sister Page Hannah — who would later become an actress herself — and her maternal half-sister Tanya Wexler, who would go on to become a film director.
Her parents divorced when Daryl was young. Her mother subsequently remarried Jerrold Wexler, a businessman who was the brother of distinguished Hollywood cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) — making Daryl the step-niece of one of the most respected camera operators in cinema history. That familial proximity to film, combined with the childhood insomnia that sent her to the television set in the middle of the night to watch whatever was on, planted the seed of her vocation earlier than most people realize.
Daryl has spoken candidly about her early childhood as a time of profound difficulty. She was deeply shy — not in the ordinary, manageable way, but in a way that was isolating and sometimes overwhelming. She struggled in school. She was emotionally disconnected from the social world around her. She was, as she later put it, someone who preferred sitting in a corner observing people to participating in what they were doing.
Medical professionals who evaluated her recommended something that now seems almost unfathomable: they urged her parents to have her institutionalized and medicated. The diagnosis was autism — a condition that was far less understood in the early 1960s than it is today, and for which the clinical response was often warehousing rather than adaptation.
Her mother refused. Instead, she made a different decision: she temporarily relocated with Daryl to Jamaica, hoping that a complete change of environment — different light, different air, different social context, slower pace — might help her daughter find her footing. The gambit worked, at least partially. The Jamaican interlude gave Daryl something she hadn’t had: breathing room. When the family returned to Illinois, she was slightly more at ease in the world.
She eventually attended the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago — a progressive school that has been educating independent-minded Chicagoans since 1901 and whose alumni include Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others. The progressive philosophy, which favored individual development over rigid conformity, suited Daryl in a way that more conventional schooling had not.
She also developed two of the physical disciplines that would serve her throughout her career: she studied ballet under Maria Tallchief, the celebrated Native American prima ballerina and the first American to become a major star of classical ballet — extraordinary training for someone whose physicality would later define roles in multiple films. And she played soccer on the boys’ team because there was no girls’ team at her school — demonstrating, very early, a tendency to go where the competition was rather than wait for appropriate provision to be made for her.
The insomnia and the late-night television watching gave her something else: an education in cinema. She absorbed old films with the appetite of someone who had found, in the flickering screen, a world she could participate in without the social demands that exhausted her in the real one. By the time she was a teenager, she was not just watching movies. She was planning to make them.
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Los Angeles, USC, and Stella Adler: The Training
After graduating from Francis W. Parker School, Daryl came to Los Angeles. She initially enrolled at UCLA before transferring to the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts — one of the most prestigious drama programs in the country, which has trained generations of professional actors.
She also studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory — taking private classes with the legendary Stella Adler herself, the acting teacher who had trained Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, and Harvey Keitel, among many others. Adler’s method, based on the Stanislavski system but emphasizing imagination over personal emotional memory, emphasized the actor’s responsibility to inhabit the physical and social world of their character. For Daryl — who had always been more comfortable observing the world than participating in it — the Adler training was revelatory.
She also continued her ballet training in Los Angeles, developing the physical intelligence and body control that would eventually allow her to perform genuine gymnastic stunts on film sets and become one of the more unusually athletic performers of her generation.
As a tall — 5 feet 10 inches — striking blonde woman arriving in Los Angeles with obvious physical presence and a film school education, she was noticed quickly. Her own assessment of this, offered with characteristic self-awareness: “One thing they do well in L.A. is smell out fresh meat.”
Film Debut: The Fury (1978) and The Final Terror (1983)
Daryl Hannah made her film debut at age 17 in Brian De Palma’s supernatural horror thriller The Fury (1978) — a film about telekinetic teenagers, produced by Frank Yablans, which starred Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving. Daryl had a minor role, but getting any role in a Brian De Palma film at 17, before completing her university training, was a marker of real natural ability.
Her next significant film credit was The Final Terror (1983) — a slasher horror film set in the California wilderness that also featured Rachel Ward and Adrian Zmed. The film had actually been shot in 1981, making it one of Daryl’s earliest professional works, but it sat unreleased for two years before finally appearing in cinemas. It was not a vehicle for anyone’s career. But it built her resume.
What came next was an entirely different matter.
Blade Runner (1982): Pris, the Replicant, and the Gymnastic Stuntwork
In 1982, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was released as Blade Runner — and it immediately established itself as a landmark of science fiction cinema. The film, starring Harrison Ford as a blade runner tasked with hunting down humanoid robots called replicants in a dystopian future Los Angeles, featured a brilliant cast of antagonists: Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty, Sean Young as Rachael, Joanna Cassidy as Zhora — and Daryl Hannah as Pris.
Pris was a “basic pleasure model” replicant — a label that could have reduced her to a passive object in less skilled hands. Under Daryl’s interpretation, she was anything but. Physically acrobatic, emotionally feral, wearing white face paint and black raccoon eye makeup that made her simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, Pris was a character defined by her body: the way she moved through space, the way she used furniture as if physics were merely a suggestion, the way she launched herself at enemies with a gymnastic violence that was genuinely shocking on screen.
Daryl performed many of her own gymnastic stunts — a remarkable physical accomplishment that required real athletic training and nerve, and that gave the performance an authenticity no stunt double could have replicated. The famous sequence in which Pris wraps her legs around Deckard’s (Harrison Ford’s) head while he is incapacitated is one of the most viscerally memorable moments in the film, and it required Daryl to perform upside-down physical comedy under pressure.
Blade Runner was not a massive commercial success in its original 1982 release, but its reputation grew steadily over the following decades until it was widely recognized as one of the great films of the 20th century. Daryl’s performance as Pris grew with it.
Splash (1984): The Mermaid, the Saturn Award, and the Typecast
Two years after Blade Runner, Ron Howard’s Splash (1984) gave Daryl Hannah the role that would define her public image for the better part of a decade. She played Madison — a mermaid who comes ashore in Manhattan, falls in love with Tom Hanks’s produce wholesaler Allen Bauer, and tries to navigate human society while concealing the fish tail that appears whenever her legs get wet.
The role required Daryl to be simultaneously otherworldly and warmly funny, physically extraordinary and emotionally vulnerable, entirely non-verbal in some sequences and charmingly communicative in others. She brought all of it, and the film was a considerable commercial and critical hit — one of the defining romantic comedies of the 1980s. It made both Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah genuine stars.
Daryl won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for her performance — the Saturn Awards being the American genre cinema equivalent of the Oscars, awarded by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. It was the first major individual acting award of her career and a genuine recognition of the quality of her work.
It also, as she has observed with characteristic dry honesty, fixed her in the public imagination: “Whatever role the public becomes aware of you in, that’s you, period. I’ll always be seen as a non-verbal mermaid. My manager is constantly being told, ‘She’s good for those ethereal kinds of parts.’ As if that’s all I’m capable of.”
That frustration — being reduced to a single iconic image, being seen as the mermaid rather than the actress — would fuel much of what she did for the next twenty years.
Also in 1984, Daryl appeared in The Pope of Greenwich Village, the gritty New York crime drama starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. It was a completely different register from Splash — scrappy, urban, dramatic — and she held her own in a cast of intensely physical, method-influenced male actors. The range was there from the beginning.
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The 1980s: Roxanne, Wall Street, Steel Magnolias, and the Shape of a Career
The second half of the 1980s saw Daryl build a resume of genuine breadth and quality:
Roxanne (1987): Steve Martin’s modern romantic adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which Daryl played Roxanne — the beautiful astronomer who is the object of Charlie Bales’s (Martin’s) unrequited love and who eventually comes to truly see him. The film was a comedy with real emotional depth, and Daryl’s performance matched Martin’s in warmth and timing. The film was a critical and commercial hit.
Wall Street (1987): Oliver Stone’s searing indictment of 1980s financial culture, starring Michael Douglas as the legendary Gordon Gekko, Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, and Daryl as Darien Taylor — the sleek, upwardly mobile art dealer who is simultaneously Bud’s girlfriend and another asset in Gordon Gekko’s collection. The role was somewhat underwritten relative to the film’s male leads, but Daryl brought to it the specific physical and social confidence required, and her presence in Oliver Stone’s ensemble was itself a marker of how seriously she was being taken as an actress.
Steel Magnolias (1989): Herbert Ross’s beloved ensemble drama, based on Robert Harling’s stage play, with a cast that included Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Julia Roberts — and Daryl as Annelle, the new girl at Truvy’s beauty salon, uncertain, deeply religious, and eventually blossoming into her own. In a film full of powerhouse performances, Daryl more than held her own, and her ability to move from comedy to grief in the same breath matched the film’s tonal demands precisely.
The Role She Turned Down: Pretty Woman (1990)
In 1990, director Garry Marshall was casting a romantic comedy about a Hollywood street prostitute hired by a wealthy businessman to be his escort for a week. The film was Pretty Woman. The lead role — Vivian Ward — was being considered for several major actresses.
Daryl Hannah was offered the role. She turned it down.
Julia Roberts accepted the part. The film grossed $463 million worldwide, was one of the highest-grossing films of 1990, and made Roberts a global superstar of the first order.
Daryl has never expressed regret about the decision, at least not publicly. She has spoken about making choices that felt authentic to her at the time. The Pretty Woman turn-down is, however, one of the great “what if” moments in 1990s cinema — the road not taken that may have sent two very different actresses’ careers onto very different trajectories.
The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) and Other 1980s Experiments
Not every choice of this era worked. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) — based on Jean Auel’s bestselling prehistoric novel about a Cro-Magnon woman raised by Neanderthals — required Daryl to perform an entirely physical, largely wordless role in prehistoric conditions. The film was a critical and commercial failure, largely because the material proved essentially unfilmable in the form the studio attempted. Daryl’s commitment to the role was not the problem.
Legal Eagles (1986) alongside Robert Redford and Debra Winger was a romantic comedy thriller that failed to capitalize on the quality of its cast.
The 1990s: JFK Jr., Jackson Browne, and the Complex Private Years
The 1990s were, professionally, a decade of contradiction for Daryl Hannah. She worked consistently — but the roles were often beneath her ability, and her personal life generated a quantity of tabloid coverage that frequently overshadowed her professional work.
The two significant relationships of this era are both complicated, and both deserve honest treatment:
Jackson Browne (1983–1992)
Daryl and rock singer-songwriter Jackson Browne — one of the most respected figures in the American singer-songwriter tradition, known for “Running on Empty,” “The Pretender,” and decades of politically engaged music — were in a relationship for approximately nine years, from roughly 1983 to 1992. They had met when Daryl was a teenager attending a Browne concert in Chicago.
The relationship ended in 1992 amid allegations that Browne had physically assaulted Daryl. She emerged publicly with visible injuries — a swollen lip, a black eye, and a broken finger. No charges were ever filed. Browne denied any wrongdoing entirely. His supporters offered various alternative accounts. Browne later successfully prevailed in a defamation dispute with Fox Television, which issued a retraction after making statements about the alleged incident in a television biopic about JFK Jr.
The truth of what happened in that relationship belongs only to the two people involved. What is documented is that Daryl left with injuries, no charges were brought, and Jackson Browne has maintained for 30 years that the allegations were false.
The situation also created a years-long tension between Browne and Neil Young — who had been long-time musical peers — after Young became romantically involved with Hannah in 2014. David Crosby publicly called Hannah “a purely poisonous predator” in relation to the Young situation — remarks he later apologized for privately and publicly.
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John F. Kennedy Jr. (1988–1994)
From approximately 1988 to 1994, Daryl Hannah was in a significant relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr. — the most famous bachelor in America, son of the 35th President, Harvard and NYU Law graduate, and founder of the political magazine George. Their relationship was widely covered, intensely scrutinized, and ultimately ended without marriage.
The most oft-cited reason for the non-marriage is that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — John’s mother, who died on May 19, 1994 — disapproved of her son marrying an actress. There is no confirmed account of Jackie’s specific objections, but the belief that she played an active role in discouraging the relationship has persisted for three decades. John Kennedy Jr. was, in most accounts, deeply devoted to his mother’s wishes.
The relationship ended in 1994, and John Kennedy met Carolyn Bessette that same year. He died in the July 1999 plane crash. Daryl has spoken about him rarely, warmly, and with great dignity.
Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2 (2003–2004): The Great Second Act
In 2003 and 2004, Quentin Tarantino’s two-part martial arts revenge epic Kill Bill gave Daryl Hannah the role that defined the second chapter of her film career.
She played Elle Driver — the one-eyed, all-black-clad assassin of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, who was the Bride’s most personal and sadistic enemy. It was a physically demanding, villainously flamboyant, technically precise performance in a film that required every actor to inhabit a highly stylized world of genre references, extreme violence, and pop cultural excess.
Daryl threw herself into it. She trained extensively in martial arts for the role. She wore the eye patch — which covered the empty socket from which Elle’s left eye had been torn by the Bride in a previous confrontation — with a specific brand of menace that was both amusing and genuinely frightening. Her final confrontation with Uma Thurman’s Bride in a trailer in the California desert was one of the most viscerally exciting sequences in either film.
She won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for Kill Bill: Volume 2 — her second Saturn Award, adding to the one she had won for Splash nearly twenty years earlier. The performance was widely regarded as one of the best of her career and as evidence that her abilities had developed significantly beyond the ethereal mermaid period.
It was also, she later revealed, a professional experience that came with a significant personal cost.
Harvey Weinstein: Sexual Harassment and Career Sabotage
In October 2017, Daryl Hannah was one of the dozens of women who came forward as part of Ronan Farrow’s landmark New Yorker exposé that helped bring down producer Harvey Weinstein — one of the most powerful men in Hollywood for three decades.
Hannah stated that Weinstein had sexually harassed her multiple times during the production of Kill Bill, and that on one occasion he had attempted to break into her hotel room. Fearing that he intended to rape her, she fled the room through a fire escape.
Weinstein denied the allegations, as he denied all allegations against him. He was subsequently convicted of rape and sexual assault in a New York trial in 2020.
Daryl also stated her belief that Weinstein had deliberately sabotaged her career in retaliation for refusing his advances — that after Kill Bill, she found herself suddenly unable to get significant film roles, that the machinery of his considerable industry influence had been turned against her without her being able to identify or confront what was happening in real time. She later said she believed she remained blacklisted in certain Hollywood circles.
Daryl was in distinguished company. Mira Sorvino, Ashley Judd, Rosanna Arquette, and Annabella Sciorra all made similar allegations of career retaliation. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson confirmed publicly that Weinstein had conducted a smear campaign that led him to avoid casting Judd and Sorvino — a confirmation that gave specific, named documentary weight to what had long been suspected across multiple actresses’ careers.
Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000): The Improvised Drama
Between the Jackson Browne era and the Kill Bill comeback, Daryl demonstrated her capacity for genuine dramatic range in Michael Radford’s experimental, largely improvised drama Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000). Shot over nine weeks using an improvisational technique that gave the cast enormous freedom, the film followed multiple characters at a Los Angeles strip club and required Daryl to develop her character and dialogue in real time, shooting without a completed script.
It is one of the less-seen films in her canon and one of the most revealing — stripped of the visual iconography that usually surrounds her, she delivered a performance of raw emotional honesty that earned genuine critical attention. The experience also inspired her to make the short documentary Strip Notes (2002), which she directed, produced, and shot herself — a behind-the-scenes companion to the film that aired on HBO and the UK’s Channel 4.
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Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992): John Carpenter’s comedy thriller with Chevy Chase, in which she played Sam Jenkins, a documentary filmmaker who helps and falls for Chase’s invisible man. The film underperformed commercially but showcased Daryl’s comic timing.
Grumpy Old Men (1993) and Grumpier Old Men (1995): The beloved Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau comedy franchise, in which she played Ariel, the younger woman who upends the men’s long-running rivalry by becoming Lemmon’s character’s romantic interest. She was warm and funny and entirely capable of holding her own with two of the most seasoned comedy actors alive.
The Ties That Bind (1995), Too Much (1996, with Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas), and a string of smaller productions filled the mid-1990s. Her performance in the London West End production of The Seven Year Itch (2000) — reprising the Marilyn Monroe role — earned critical praise for her comic intelligence, with critic Lizzie Loveridge calling it “perfect.”
Filmmaker: The Last Supper and Beyond
Alongside her performing career, Daryl Hannah pursued filmmaking as a genuine creative vocation — not as a vanity project but as a disciplined craft.
The Last Supper (1994/1995): She wrote, directed, and produced this 12-minute short film, which won the Jury Award from the Berlin International Film Festival for Best Short Film — one of the most prestigious short film honors in world cinema. It was a remarkable achievement for a first-time director working without any studio support.
Strip Notes (2002): Her documentary companion to Dancing at the Blue Iguana, on which she served as director, producer, and camera operator. Aired on HBO and Channel 4.
Paradox (2018): A full-length film she wrote and directed, featuring Neil Young (her husband), which she brought to the SXSW Film Festival in March 2018 — shortly after their marriage.
Coastal (2025): A documentary she directed about Neil Young’s Coastal concert tour — her most recent directorial project, released just months ago.
She has also, at various points, traveled undercover to Southeast Asia to document human trafficking for a documentary she has been developing — combining her filmmaking practice with her humanitarian advocacy in a way that is entirely characteristic.
Sense8 (2015–2018): The Netflix Wachowski Series
Beginning in 2015, Daryl Hannah starred in the ambitious Netflix science fiction series Sense8, created by the Wachowskis (directors of The Matrix). She played Angelica Turing — the woman who created the “cluster” of eight psychically connected individuals at the center of the show, and whose death opens the first episode. It was a recurring role across both seasons and the final episode, requiring her to inhabit a character of enormous complexity and moral ambiguity.
Sense8 was a critically acclaimed if commercially complicated show — extraordinary in its ambition, global in its casting and shooting locations (filmed across 16 countries on five continents), and deeply beloved by a devoted fanbase. Its cancellation after Season 2 was controversial enough to generate a successful fan campaign that resulted in the production of a feature-length finale episode. Daryl’s role in it gave her a new generation of viewers and reconnected her with the science fiction world in which Blade Runner had first made her famous.
Environmental Activism: The Arrests, the Causes, and the DHLoveLife Mission
Daryl Hannah’s environmental activism is not a celebrity hobby or a publicity exercise. It has been a sustained, decades-long commitment that has included multiple arrests, significant personal risk, and the deliberate sacrifice of opportunities that conflicted with her values.
South Central Farm, Los Angeles (June 2006): She was arrested, along with actor Taran Noah Smith, for her role in a protest against the demolition of the largest urban farm in the United States — a 14-acre community farm in South Central Los Angeles, tended by more than 350 farming families, that was being bulldozed to make way for a warehouse development. Daryl chained herself to a walnut tree. “I’m not thrilled about it, but I felt it was important to sustain my commitment,” she said. The documentary The Garden (2008) chronicles this fight.
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (December 2008): She joined the crew of the MY Steve Irwin, operated by the conservation group founded by Paul Watson, for Operation Musashi — a campaign aimed at disrupting Japanese whaling operations in the Southern Ocean.
Keystone XL Pipeline (2012): She was arrested in Wood County, Texas while protesting construction of the tar sands oil pipeline, facing potential jail time for blocking heavy construction equipment. She was part of a series of high-profile protests against the pipeline across multiple states.
Cowboy and Indian Alliance, Washington D.C. (April 2014): Marched alongside Neil Young and representatives of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in a protest at the national Mall against the Keystone XL pipeline.
United Nations Keynote Speeches: She has addressed the UN Climate Change Summit, the UN Global Business Conference on the Environment, and numerous international universities and conferences.
DHLoveLife (launched 2005): Her personal website and weekly video blog, which she designs, films, and hosts — covering sustainable solutions, environmental news, and practical guides to more ecologically conscious living. She is typically her own sound recordist, camera operator, and on-screen host. As of 2006, her own home was built with green materials and ran entirely on solar power. She has driven a car running on biodiesel since the same period. She has been vegetarian since age 11 and later became vegan.
She is a member of the World Future Council, which advocates for intergenerational equity in policy. She sits on the boards of the Sylvia Earle Alliance (Mission Blue), Eco America, the Environmental Media Association, and the Action Sports Environmental Coalition. She founded the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance. She has participated in the Somaly Mam Foundation’s work against human trafficking.
Her home-grown activism philosophy: “I never gave a lot of weight to material things, and I never really understood wanting to have a lot more money than you need.”
Grammy Nomination (2023): Venturing into Music
In 2023, Daryl Hannah received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Music Film for her work on Neil Young & Crazy Horse: A Band A Brotherhood A Barn — a documentary/concert film that she directed and produced in collaboration with Young’s legendary backing band. The Grammy nomination was a remarkable credential in a field entirely separate from acting, and it underscored that her filmmaking ambitions had developed into genuine craft recognized at the industry’s highest level.
Neil Young: The Love Story That Found Her in the Last Chapter
The most publicly visible relationship of Daryl Hannah’s personal life — and by all accounts the most sustaining — is her marriage to Neil Young, the Canadian rock legend behind “Heart of Gold,” “Rockin’ in the Free World,” “Old Man,” and one of the most enduring catalogs in American popular music.
Their connection began, appropriately for two committed environmentalists, through shared advocacy work. In August 2013, they took a six-and-a-half-hour road trip together (along with several others) in Young’s bioelectric 1959 Lincoln Continental, working with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation on an environmentalist documentary about Alberta’s tar sands for Greenpeace. At that stage, they were described publicly as “friends.”
By April 2014, they were marching together in Washington, D.C. with the Cowboy and Indian Alliance against the Keystone XL pipeline — a public appearance that signaled their relationship had deepened.
Young announced his separation from his wife Pegi Young in July 2014, citing the couple’s growing apart. The timing of the separation and the emergence of his relationship with Hannah generated tabloid commentary. David Crosby publicly labeled Hannah “a purely poisonous predator” — a characterization he subsequently apologized for, both privately (in an email to the couple) and publicly. Young, characteristically, was unbothered: “We didn’t pay any attention to that.”
It is Young’s third marriage and Hannah’s first. They married in August 2018 — quietly, with minimal public fanfare — at a ceremony in California. Young subsequently confirmed the marriage on his website.
Together they collaborated on the film Paradox (2018), which she directed and he starred in, and which they premiered at SXSW in March 2018. In 2025, she directed Coastal, a documentary about his concert tour.
When asked about working together, Young said: “As artists, we support each other and understand.” It is, by the evidence of the past decade, a collaboration and a partnership that has given both of them something real.
The Autism Diagnosis: Public Disclosure and Living Openly
For many years, Daryl Hannah kept her autism diagnosis private — concerned, as she has said, that it would be used against her in an industry that already found her “difficult” or “enigmatic” or “hard to work with.” The same qualities that are autistic traits — the preference for observation over participation, the discomfort in social situations, the sensory intensity, the tendency toward deep focus on specific interests — are qualities that Hollywood tended to interpret as attitude.
She also kept her agoraphobia (fear of open spaces and public places) private for similar reasons. Agoraphobia is a common comorbid condition with autism and anxiety disorders, and for someone whose career required constant public performance, managing it was a daily exercise in will.
She has subsequently been open about both diagnoses — discussing the autism in particular as something that shaped her childhood, her relationship to the social world, and the specific ways she navigated an industry that was not designed for people who think and feel differently. She has said that understanding her neurology was ultimately liberating rather than limiting — that it gave her a framework for understanding why certain things had always been difficult and why others had always been natural.
“As a child, she was so shy that at one point she was diagnosed as borderline autistic,” as one profile put it. “Even today, she says she likes to just sit in a corner and observe people.”
The blue butterfly tattoo on her ankle is, in her telling, a symbol of transformation — which is, given the arc of her life, an entirely fitting emblem.
Physical Profile, Net Worth, and the Numbers
Daryl Hannah stands 5 feet 10 inches tall — a height that contributed to the otherworldly quality that directors repeatedly cast against in the 1980s and early 1990s (the mermaid, the replicant, the ethereal blonde). She has green eyes and the specific breed of pale blonde hair that photographs as almost silver in certain light. She lost the tip of her left index finger in a childhood accident — a detail that has occasionally been visible in photographs and that she has never sought to obscure.
Her estimated net worth is approximately $20 million — accumulated over four decades of acting work, directorial projects, licensing, environmental advocacy-related speaking engagements, and her long personal partnership with one of the most commercially successful recording artists in American history.
Daryl Hannah Today: February 2026
As of February 14, 2026, Daryl Hannah is 64 years old. She is married to Neil Young and living between Wyoming and the West Coast. She has no children. She is still directing films — Coastal was released in 2025. She has more than 100 film and television credits across a career that began in 1978. She is a Grammy-nominated filmmaker. She is a veteran of multiple arrests for environmental activism. She is an autism advocate. She is a published writer on sustainability and food systems. She is a vegan. She is a woman who turned down Pretty Woman and survived Harvey Weinstein and lost a significant relationship partly because of a mother’s disapproval and built, anyway, a life of remarkable fullness and consequence.
Hollywood spent decades trying to decide what Daryl Hannah was. Was she the mermaid? The replicant? The eccentric activist? The girlfriend of famous men? The difficult actress? The has-been making a comeback?
She was, and is, all of those things and none of them. She is a woman who was told as a child that she might need to be institutionalized, who chose instead to study under Maria Tallchief and Stella Adler, who won two Saturn Awards in two different centuries, who won a Berlin Film Festival prize for her debut short, who was nominated for a Grammy, who was arrested chained to a walnut tree, who drove a biodiesel car in 2006, who ran her house on solar power before it was fashionable, who married the author of “Heart of Gold” when she was 57 years old, and who has never, not once, let anyone else define her on terms other than her own.
She is the mermaid who came ashore and decided to stay. On her own terms. Building the world she wanted to live in, one solar panel and one act of civil disobedience and one film frame at a time.
Daryl Hannah is an American actress, director, and environmental activist. She has appeared in more than 100 films and television productions since 1978. She is the founder of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance and the creator of DHLoveLife (dhlovelife.com), a weekly video blog on sustainable solutions. She is married to Neil Young and lives in Wyoming. Her most recent directorial work, Coastal (2025), is available now.
