Robin Christensen-Roussimoff met her father, wrestling legend Andre the Giant, only five times in person during his lifetime.
She is his only child, born in 1979 to a relationship her father never treated as serious, and she has spent the decades since his 1993 death working to understand a man defined publicly by his extraordinary size while she knew him mostly as an occasional, gentle presence who appeared a handful of times and called from the road.
Robin Christensen-roussimoff Biography
She was born in 1979 in France, the only child of Andre the Giant and Jean Christensen, an American who worked in wrestling public relations.
Robin’s parents met through the wrestling industry in the early 1970s, and their relationship was brief and never serious on Andre’s side.
Robin Christensen-Roussimoff was raised primarily in the United States by her mother, though she was born in France and spent part of her early childhood there. She stands 6 feet tall, a trait she has attributed to her father’s genetics.
Jean Christensen spent years pushing to ensure Andre provided some financial support toward raising their daughter, a dynamic that remained strained throughout Robin’s childhood, and shortly before Andre’s death, Robin and her mother appeared together on the tabloid television program A Current Affair to discuss that strained relationship publicly.
By her own count, Robin met her father only five times in person. Their contact wasn’t limited entirely to those visits.
She has said that Andre’s demanding wrestling travel schedule occasionally brought him near Seattle for matches, giving them a chance to see each other in person, and that the two also spoke by phone between those visits.
She has spoken about that limited relationship with real candor. In an interview with The Post and Courier, she reflected on what she lost, saying that had he lived longer, she might have had a closer relationship with him, that he might have attended her graduation or been proud of her successes, and that she will never really get to know who he was as a person.
In an interview tied to the 2018 HBO documentary, she described what it was actually like seeing him, explaining that the wrestling persona never touched her personally, since she only ever saw him backstage, before and after matches, so to her he was her dad.
Asked what she loved most about him, she said he was truly the gentle giant, that she never felt any fear around him whatsoever, and that he was a genuinely cheerful person whenever they did get to see each other.
Andre died in 1993 at age 46. Robin was named the main beneficiary of his will.
Career
Robin Christensen-Roussimoff briefly attempted a career in professional wrestling herself, following in her father’s footsteps, but the attempt did not lead to lasting success, and she moved into acting instead.
She became a consultant on the 2015 film adaptation connected to the book Andre the Giant: Closer to Heaven, and later served as a consultant on an Andre the Giant biopic that was reported to be in production as of 2023, though no release date has been confirmed.
Her most significant public role came through the 2018 HBO documentary Andre the Giant, where she served as one of the central voices offering a personal, rather than purely professional, account of her father’s life.
Some reports suggest she may also be associated with Titan Championship Wrestling through her social media presence, though the nature of that connection has not been detailed publicly.
She currently lives in Seattle, Washington, and has largely kept her personal life, including her relationship status, private.
Parents
Robin’s father, Andre Rene Roussimoff, grew up alongside four average-sized siblings, two older and two younger, in the small farming community of Molien, roughly 40 miles east of Paris, despite being billed throughout his wrestling career as hailing from Grenoble in the French Alps.
He weighed 13 pounds at birth, and by age 12 already stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed around 200 pounds.
His extraordinary size was caused by acromegaly, a hormonal disorder in which the pituitary gland produces excess growth hormone.
This condition would eventually contribute to serious chronic pain and, ultimately, his early death. He became one of professional wrestling’s most singular attractions, billed at 7 feet 4 inches and more than 500 pounds.
Known as The Eighth Wonder of the World, he built a 15-year undefeated streak in the WWF, with occasional disqualification or countout exceptions, and losses outside official WWF canon to The Sheik in Toronto in 1974 and Antonio Inoki in Japan in 1986.
He won the WWF World Heavyweight Championship in 1988 in a controversial finish before immediately handing the title to Ted DiBiase.
This storyline twist set up the first-ever WrestleMania tournament for a vacant championship, and he won the WWF Tag Team Championship alongside Haku in 1990.
His most legendary in-ring moment came at WrestleMania III in 1987, when he faced Hulk Hogan in a match that ended his famous undefeated streak and remains one of the most iconic bouts in wrestling history, punctuated by Hogan’s now-famous body slam of a man most opponents couldn’t budge.
In 1993, the WWF inducted him as the inaugural, and for that year, sole member of its Hall of Fame.
Andre also built a genuine career outside the ring. His best remembered role came as Fezzik, the gentle giant in Rob Reiner’s 1987 film The Princess Bride, a performance that introduced him to an audience well beyond wrestling and remains his most beloved on-screen work.
He also appeared on television in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Greatest American Hero, and his friendship with actor Billy Crystal, formed on the set of The Princess Bride, later inspired the 1998 film My Giant, which Crystal wrote.
His health declined significantly as his career went on. He coped with chronic pain from his condition partly through heavy drinking, and wrestling lore is filled with stories, some exaggerated, of his extraordinary tolerance for alcohol.
He never underwent surgery to remove the pituitary tumor responsible for his acromegaly, as treatment options at the time were limited, and the untreated condition eventually led to serious cardiac and metabolic complications, including diabetes.
In January 1993, Andre traveled to Paris to attend his own father’s funeral and chose to stay in the city longer to spend time with family.
On January 27 or 28, depending on the source, he was found dead in his sleep in a Paris hotel room, at age 46, from congestive heart failure widely attributed to his untreated acromegaly.
In his will, he requested to be cremated, and his ashes were reportedly scattered at his ranch in Ellerbe, North Carolina, a property he owned himself.
His legacy has remained enormous in wrestling and pop culture. WWE has held the annual Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal at WrestleMania since 2011, won in 2015 by Big Show, a wrestler frequently compared to Andre for his size.
Street artist Shepard Fairey built an entire early career campaign, Andre the Giant Has a Posse, around his image. His life has since been the subject of the 2014 graphic biography Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, the 2020 book The Eighth Wonder of the World: The True Story of Andre the Giant, and the 2018 HBO documentary Andre the Giant, produced with WWE and Bill Simmons Media Group and directed by Jason Hehir.
Robin Christensen-Roussimoff Net Worth
Robin Christensen-Roussimoff’s net worth is estimated at $10 million, tied to her inheritance as Andre the Giant’s main heir, ongoing licensing fees from WWE’s continued use of her father’s name and likeness in media, video games, and merchandise, and her own appearances at wrestling conventions and events connected to his legacy.
