This Lady Was a Waitress Who Married 'The Dude' Who Won an Oscar & Shaved His Iconic Shaggy Hair amid Cancer

• The Hollywood star came to a realization following his first date with his future wife.
• The actor was hit particularly hard during the pandemic, but he learned something about his loved ones.
• A makeup artist made an incredible discovery concerning the actor and his wife over a decade after shooting "Rancho Deluxe."

A waitress at the Chico Hot Spring was not her best self when a Hollywood actor first laid eyes on her, but she left an impression from the jump. She had survived a car crash and still had two black eyes and a broken nose.

The actor was filming "Rancho Deluxe" at the resort in Paradise Valley, Montana, and was taken by her beauty juxtaposed with her injuries. After filming wrapped for the day, he worked up the courage to ask the enigmatic server out.

She turned him down twice. However, she left a window of hope open, telling him that as it was a small town, they might run into each other again. They reconnected not long after. He remembers:

"She came to the wrap party, and we danced, and we fell in love, and boom, that was it."

Their first date was the very next day when she agreed to accompany him to view a ranch house he was interested in purchasing. As they were walking around, he recalled a voice in his head telling him:

"'You are now looking at a house with your future wife.'"

His first thought was, "Oh, no, let me outta here!" In his mid-twenties, he feared losing his autonomy and freedom. Yet he also did not want the love of his life to slip through his fingers.

Two years into their relationship, living in Malibu, California, he experienced a similar feeling. Sitting in a cave with his girlfriend after a long hike, he sensed deep inside that he should ask her to marry him.

As he tried to fight the feeling, she could see his distress, with tears sprouting from his eyes, and she got him to tell her what was going on. She assured him that he did not have to propose. But shortly after that incident, he did ask her to marry him. Susan Geston and Jeff Bridges wed in June 1977.

The Actor References His Most Famous Character to Give a Health Update

"As the Dude would say... New [expletive] has come to light," Bridges tweeted in October 2020, invoking his famous role in "The Big Lebowski." He was diagnosed with Lymphoma. He explained that though it is a "serious disease," the prognosis was good, and he had a "great team of doctors."

Geston remembers they felt "kind of numb" on the news of her husband's diagnosis and "just immediately went through the steps of doing what needed to be done."

In mid-December, he shared a photo of his bald head as he lounged on a reclining chair with the ocean in the background; on his lap, a new puppy, Monty. Bridges confirmed he was "feeling good" and had shaved his head.

Due to the chemotherapy, the "Crazy Heart" star's immune system was compromised during one of the worst times in modern history, the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the vaccine was available, he contracted the virus at the treatment center in January 2021.

"I had no defenses. That's what chemo does—it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it," the actor said a few months later:

"COVID made my cancer look like nothing."

The Bridges family did not know if the patriarch was going to recover. When the hospital informed Geston that her husband might need to be placed on a ventilator, she told them, "Save his life. No matter what you have to do."

The actor came "pretty close to dying" during his five-month stay in the hospital but was not put on a ventilator. He recovered from COVID-19, and his cancer had gone into remission.

"It's all like a bad dream now," Susan said in May 2022 of the year and a half her husband was ill. "And now's the good dream part." The couple relished life's small pleasures. For Bridges, they did not have to do anything; being together was already "wonderful."

He caught a second bout of COVID during his travels while promoting his FX series "The Old Man." This time around, it wasn't severe.

Bridges told PEOPLE that beating cancer and COVID "sort of heightened the experience of dancing" with his "mortality." His family was very supportive of him during his illnesses. He said:

"It just brought to my attention how much they loved me and how much I loved them."

An Early Moment of Jeff Bridges and Susan Geston's Relationship Caught in Time

Over a decade after making "Rancho Deluxe," the film's makeup artist came across behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot when going through his files. He wrote to Bridges that he found snaps of him trying to ask out a "local girl."

Enclosed were two photos, one featuring a smiling Geston, her eyes bruised. The other was of the actor making his first utterances to her. He shared the photographs on "Off Camera" with Sam Jones in 2019.

The pair celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary this year. They have three daughters, Isabelle, Jessica, and Haley. He wrote in his book, "The Dude and the Zen Master," that his wife shows him how to look at the world differently.

She also points out how he defeats himself. For instance, when he is afraid to embark on new projects, she reminds him, "Hey, you always get like this when you're asked to do something new."

Asked what their secret to a lasting marriage in Hollywood is, Bridges said, "The easy answer about how to keep a marriage going is you don't get a divorce.

"It's when those big challenges, those upsets come up in your relationship," he elaborated. "Those are real opportunities to get to know each other more and become more intimate with each other, try to see what makes each other tick."