Linda Cardellini spent her 51st birthday back in the spotlight for a very private reason: the long relationship she has kept mostly off camera with Steven Rodriguez. Cardellini has been engaged to Rodriguez for over a decade, yet the pair still rarely appear together and do not post photos of each other on social media.
The renewed interest lands because Cardellini, who turned 51 on June 25, has now shared more than one rare detail about the life she and Rodriguez built before the engagement. Rodriguez is not only a Hollywood make-up artist, but also her regular make-up artist, and she said they were friends for a long time before he moved to Los Angeles to do makeup and they reconnected as adults. She recalled knowing him first when he was the new kid at her school in elementary school, and she said she was impressed by the bike tricks he could do. That old friendship eventually turned into something more, and she said it did not take long to see they could be good partners.
What made the story resonate is the part Cardellini almost never discusses in public: the start of her family with Lilah-Rose. She gave birth to their daughter on February 29, 2012, during a pregnancy and delivery she later described as very traumatic. Lilah-Rose was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, and Cardellini required an emergency C-section. She said the experience left both mother and child lucky to be alive, and that she later had to go on medication as her weight fluctuated erratically after the birth.
That history matters because it helps explain why Cardellini and Rodriguez have stayed so guarded even after years together. They have made only a few red carpet appearances over the years, with their most recent one in 2013, but beyond that they have kept their relationship almost entirely out of view. Cardellini confirmed in June 2013 that Rodriguez had proposed after they watched Lucky Guy and then went to dinner, where he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. The proposal is now more than a decade old, and there is still no public wedding date in sight.
For a couple that has spent years avoiding the spotlight, the clearest next question is the simplest one: whether their engagement ever turned into a marriage. Cardellini has answered the rest in fragments, but not that part.
