As depicted in the recent film A Complete Unknown, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan became romantically involved in the early 1960s. They collaborated several times in the ensuing decades, but Baez said her relationship with Dylan devastated her. She shared how she was able to move past this hurt.

Joan Baez said she let go of her anger towards Bob Dylan

While Baez and Dylan’s relationship had some bright spots, she said it was overall “totally demoralizing.” With age, she said she came to the realization that she couldn’t hold it against him forever, but she wasn’t happy with him for a while.

“We were in our early 20s,” she told People. “We were stupid, and you can’t blame somebody forever. I certainly tried but finally stopped.” 

She said she has finally reached a point of “total forgiveness” by painting Dylan in his youth while she listened to his music.

“I put his music on, and I just dissolved into tears,” she said. “When I was through with the painting, I had no animosity left. None. It’s remained that way.” 

Bob Dylan expressed guilt over the end of his relationship with Joan Baez

While Baez felt angry at Dylan, she said she loved him deeply when they were together.

“I was crazy about him,” she told the Toronto Star. “We were an item and we were having a wonderful time.”

Dylan concurred. Years after the breakup, he said that he enjoyed the relationship and felt badly about the way things ended between them. 

“I feel very bad about it,” he said in 2009. “I was sorry to see our relationship end.”

She spoke about the film ‘A Complete Unknown’

This year, Monica Barbaro portrayed Baez in the film A Complete Unknown. She had the chance to speak with Baez, for which she felt immensely grateful.

“I struggled with this feeling of just so much gratitude for everything she’s done and for being willing to speak to me and how much I admire her – I tried to let that get out of the way and just have a conversation, but that’s hard,” she told the Guardian. “Having studied her voice so closely – her speaking voice, every interview in the 60s – and then hearing Joan’s voice now in her 80s, in real time, speaking to me, was an incredibly emotional experience: really cool and kind of mind-blowing.”

Barbaro said that Baez didn’t seem concerned about her portrayal in the film or the possibility of another biopic about her life. 

“But she was really not fussed about the film, truly,” Barbaro said. “I think I was more concerned on her behalf than she was for herself. I was sort of saying: you deserve your own biopic! So many biopics with different chapters of your life! And she said: ‘I’m just sitting in my backyard watching the birds.’ You know: I lived it, I did it.”