Linda Kingsberg married the actor Ernie Hudson in 1985, and in the years since she has given almost no interviews. Most of what the public knows about her has come from Hudson, who talks about his wife often. One thing he keeps coming back to is a morning in 2011, when he woke up sure that something was wrong.
He had recently had surgery for rectal cancer. His stomach felt like a rock, and his first instinct was to wait and see how he felt. Kingsberg told him to get to a hospital instead. By the time he arrived, doctors found that an infection had turned septic, and one of them said a few more hours at home could have been fatal.
Hudson has repeated that morning often since, usually to push other men toward early cancer screening. Over his career he became one of Hollywood’s most familiar character actors, with roles in Ghostbusters, the prison drama Oz, and the BET series The Family Business. His wife built none of that in public.
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Who is Linda Kingsberg?
Linda Kingsberg is a former flight attendant from Minnesota and the wife of Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore in the Ghostbusters films. The two married in 1985 and raised two sons. She has no acting career and no public profile of her own, which is part of why solid information about her is so hard to find.
How old is Linda Kingsberg?
Her age has never been confirmed, and she has not made her date of birth public. The one figure with any source behind it comes from a Closer Weekly interview around 2019 to 2020, where Hudson mentioned his wife was 66. That points to a birth year near 1954, which would make her about 71 or 72 today. Anything more exact is an estimate.
How she met Ernie Hudson
Kingsberg grew up in Minnesota, and that is where the two crossed paths. In the mid 1970s, Hudson was building a reputation in Minneapolis theater. He had started a doctoral program at the University of Minnesota before leaving it for the stage, and in 1975 he played the boxer Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope at Theatre in the Round. Kingsberg was a graduate student at the same university then, and Hudson has said she was part of why he ended up in the state.
His first marriage, to Jeannie Moore, ended in divorce in 1976. He and Kingsberg were together for about nine years before they married in 1985.
A marriage that began against the odds
The early years were hard, and Hudson has been candid about the reason. He worried about building a life with a white woman in a period when an interracial couple still met open hostility. He told People in 1992 that he had expected trouble, and it came. Kingsberg has described real estate agents who would not show them homes, and people who warned them against having children on the grounds that the kids would be, in her word, “confused.” They married and had those children regardless.
Four decades on, Hudson gives his wife much of the credit for the marriage holding. He has said she saw “the better part of me when I didn’t see it in myself,” and he ranks her with the grandmother who raised him. Asked about reaching 40 years during an October 2025 appearance on the talk show Sherri, he answered in a single line.
“I can’t imagine life without her.”
Ernie Hudson on Sherri, October 2025
He has also figured out which arguments are not worth having. In a 2024 People interview, he said a recurring dispute over which way to hang the toilet paper roll eventually taught him to let the small things go and take his wife as she is.
Hudson’s two bouts with cancer
Hudson is a two time cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1998 and with rectal cancer in 2011, the illness behind that hospital morning. He has since worked with the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and credits routine screening for catching both cancers while they were still treatable.
Their children and life today
Kingsberg and Hudson have two sons, Andrew and Ross, born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is also stepmother to Hudson’s two older sons from his first marriage, Ernie Hudson Jr., who became an actor, and Rahaman Hudson. The couple have no daughters.
They now divide their time between California and Minnesota. After years near Los Angeles, they bought a place in the Twin Cities to be close to Kingsberg’s father, who was 98 when the Minneapolis Star Tribune profiled Hudson in early 2019. They also keep a lake house in Brainerd, Minnesota. Hudson, who turned 80 in December 2025, has said his wife travels with him more now than she used to.
What is still unknown about Linda Kingsberg
A lot of what circulates online about Kingsberg has not been confirmed by any reliable source. These are open questions rather than settled facts:
- Her exact date of birth. The 1954 estimate rests on a single comment from Hudson that she was 66.
- Any net worth of her own, apart from her husband’s.
- Her parents, her schooling past the University of Minnesota, and the years she spent working as a flight attendant.
There is only so much anyone can fairly report about someone who has kept this much of her life to herself, and an honest account leaves those blanks unfilled.
What is not in doubt is the part she has played. Hudson has spent more than 50 years working in front of cameras and crowds, and the person he points to as the steadiest part of that life is the one who never sought any of the attention. She raised four sons with him, stood by him through two rounds of cancer, and held together a marriage that plenty of people once expected to fail.
