Kaho Cho: The Woman Who Loved Redd Foxx Last
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Ka Ho Cho |
| Born | 1959 |
| Birthplace | Seoul, South Korea |
| Age (2026) | Approximately 66–67 years old |
| Nationality | South Korean-American |
| Ethnicity | Korean |
| Religion | Christianity (per some sources) |
| Known For | Comedian Redd Foxx’s fourth and last wife |
| Occupation | Professional dancer (prior to marriage) |
| Marriage Date | July 8, 1991 |
| Wedding Venue | Small Church of the West, Nevada’s Las Vegas |
| Widowed | October 11, 1991 |
| Marriage Duration | Approximately three months |
| Children | Unconfirmed |
| Current Location | Private; believed to have returned to South Korea |
| Estimated Net Worth | ~$400,000 (unverified) |
Introduction: Three Months, a Lifetime of Questions
Some love stories are remembered not for how long they lasted but for the weight of everything they carried.
On July 8, 1991, Ka Ho Cho wed Redd Foxx. She became his widow on October 11 of that same year. Three months and three days. That is the entire duration of the marriage that connected her name to one of the most celebrated comedians in American entertainment history.
Redd Foxx was the man who created Fred G. Sanford — the grumbling, scheming, perpetually dramatic junk dealer at the center of Sanford and Son, the sitcom that ran from 1972 to 1977 and became one of the most-watched television series in America during that era. He was also a legendary stand-up performer whose raw, uncensored comedy records had been selling to Black audiences since the 1950s, passed around at a time when mainstream radio would not touch them. He was groundbreaking, brilliant, and by the time he met Ka Ho Cho, deeply complicated.
She was a professional dancer who moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, from Seoul, South Korea, and fell in love with a seventy-year-old performer icon at a point in his life when he was trying to rebuild what illness and financial disaster had taken from him.
What followed was brief, and then it was over.
Who Ka Ho Cho was before that story, and who she became after it — that is the biography worth writing.
See also “Midori Fujiwara: Inside the Life Behind the Name“
Early Life: Seoul in the Late 1950s and the World She Was Born Into
Ka Ho Cho was born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea — a city that was, in that year, still physically and economically recovering from the Korean War, which had ended six years earlier with an armistice that left the peninsula divided and much of its southern capital in rubble.
The Seoul of Ka Ho Cho’s childhood was a city in the process of dramatic reinvention. South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s underwent one of the fastest economic transformations of any nation in the twentieth century — a shift from an agricultural, war-damaged economy into an increasingly industrialized and urban society. The city she grew up in was changing around her in ways that would have been unimaginable even a generation earlier.
Her family background, the names and occupations of her parents, her siblings if any, and the specific neighborhood in Seoul where she spent her childhood are not part of any documented public record. She has never shared them. What the cultural context of her upbringing provides is a framework: she grew up as a young woman in a rapidly modernizing country where traditional expectations of women’s roles were beginning to shift, even if not dramatically, and where entertainment, performance, and dance were legitimate professional avenues for women with talent and ambition.
At some point in her early adulthood, she made the decision that many ambitious young people from cities across the world were making in that era: she came to America. Specifically, she came to Las Vegas.
Education: The Craft of Dance as Foundation
Ka Ho Cho’s formal academic education is not documented from any primary source. What is confirmed is that she pursued a professional career as a dancer — a discipline that requires years of dedicated training, physical conditioning, and performance experience before anyone considers paying you to do it in one of the most competitive entertainment markets in the world.
Las Vegas in the 1980s was not simply a city of casinos. It was a production entertainment hub where major showrooms featured elaborately staged revues with large casts of dancers, singers, and specialty performers. Being a working dancer in that environment required real professional competence — not background filler, but the kind of technical precision and stage presence that directors and choreographers could depend on night after night.
Whatever Ka Ho Cho’s formal training looked like — whether it came from institutions in South Korea before she emigrated, or from instruction in the United States after she arrived, or both — it produced a professional who was working in one of the most demanding performance environments in America. That speaks to both ability and persistence.
Dancing Career: The Life She Created in Las Vegas
Las Vegas in the 1980s was simultaneously glamorous and grinding for working performers. The showroom era was still alive — Bally’s, Caesars Palace, The Sands, the Desert Inn all hosted major production shows with casts that numbered in the dozens. Being part of that world meant demanding performance schedules, auditions that were physically and emotionally taxing, and the particular experience of contributing to something spectacular while remaining largely anonymous to the audience watching it.
One of the main resort establishments on the Las Vegas Strip, Bally’s Hotel and Casino, employed Ka Ho Cho as a dancer. Bally’s in that era was a genuine entertainment destination, hosting not only production shows but major headliners and comedy performers who drew audiences from across the country.
It was in this environment that she encountered Redd Foxx.
Foxx had a long history with Las Vegas. He had performed in the city’s showrooms for decades, developing the live performance style that complemented his recording career and his television fame. In the late 1980s, as he was attempting to rebuild his finances following a catastrophic 1989 IRS seizure of his home and possessions, Las Vegas remained one of the places where his name still drew audiences.
By most accounts, Ka Ho Cho and Redd Foxx first crossed paths around 1989, when she was working at Bally’s and he was performing in the city. Whatever the specific moment of introduction — across a showroom, after a performance, through mutual connections in the entertainment world — the connection that formed between them proved lasting enough to survive two years of whatever came between that first meeting and their July 1991 wedding.
Meeting Redd Foxx: Two Different Worlds Finding the Same Space
To understand Ka Ho Cho’s story fully, you have to understand something about the man she married.
John Elroy Sanford, born Redd Foxx in St. Louis, Missouri — had been one of the most significant figures in American comedy for four decades by the time Ka Ho Cho met him. His “party records,” recorded for Dooto and later Laff Records beginning in the 1950s, had circulated through Black communities across America at a time when mainstream culture had no interest in his kind of comedy. When Norman Lear cast him as Fred Sanford in 1972, it was the culmination of a decades-long career that most of white America was only just discovering.
The success of Sanford and Son made Foxx wealthy and famous. It also, eventually, created the conditions for his financial unraveling. He had three marriages before Ka Ho Cho — to Betty Jean Harris, Betty Jeanne Tucker, and Joi Yun Chi Chung — and each had its own complications. By 1989, the IRS moved against him with devastating completeness, seizing his Las Vegas home, his possessions, his furniture, his jewelry. He was forced to move out of his own house while agents catalogued everything inside it.
When he filmed The Royal Family pilot in 1991 — a CBS sitcom he hoped would revive his television prominence — he was in the middle of a legal and financial negotiation with the IRS that was slowly being resolved. He was also in the middle of a new marriage.
Ka Ho Cho and Redd Foxx were married on July 8, 1991, at the Little Church of the West in Las Vegas — a venue famous for its role in countless Las Vegas weddings, including several celebrity ceremonies over the decades. The ceremony was small and private. Few specifics about the event have entered the public record.
The Marriage and Its Sudden End
The three months of their marriage unfolded against a backdrop of professional hope and financial strain. Redd was filming The Royal Family in Los Angeles. The IRS situation was moving toward some form of resolution. Ka Ho Cho had become the wife of a man who was simultaneously a legend and someone fighting to maintain both his career and his financial stability at sixty-eight years old.
Then came October 11, 1991.
Redd Foxx was on the set of The Royal Family at the Paramount lot in Hollywood when he collapsed from a massive heart attack. He died later that evening. He was sixty-eight years old.
The immediate aftermath of his death was chaotic in ways that compounded Ka Ho Cho’s grief with financial and legal confusion. The IRS had been working with Foxx’s estate prior to his death, and the question of what remained after taxes, debts, and estate proceedings left little clarity for anyone immediately connected to him. Reports indicate that the estate was substantially depleted by the obligations Foxx had accumulated, leaving Ka Ho Cho widowed and facing a financial reality that bore almost no resemblance to the wealth associated with his earlier career peak.
She had been married for ninety-four days.
Personal Life: After the Grief, the Quiet
Following Redd Foxx’s death, Ka Ho Cho disappeared from public life with a completeness that has been essentially total in the thirty-five years since.
She has given no interviews. There are no records of her public appearances. She has not published any memoir, participated in any documentary about Foxx’s life, or engaged with the various retrospective celebrations of his career that have occurred since his death. When major profiles of Redd Foxx have been written — for anniversaries, for historical assessments, for entertainment journalism — Ka Ho Cho has been a footnote rather than a participant.
Some sources report that she returned to South Korea following the death. Others suggest she may have remained in Nevada or relocated to California for a period. None of this has been confirmed from any primary source. She has simply chosen not to be findable, and she has sustained that choice for more than three decades.
Whether she has a child has also been reported inconsistently. One source mentions a child, while others make no such reference. In the absence of confirmation, this cannot be stated as fact.
Challenges: Three Months of Marriage and the Weight of What Followed
The specific challenge Ka Ho Cho faced was one almost no one is prepared for: losing a spouse in the first year of marriage, then confronting the aftermath of that loss inside a complicated financial estate while simultaneously being grieving.
The IRS situation that had surrounded Redd Foxx’s later years did not resolve cleanly upon his death. Reports of what remained — and what Ka Ho Cho received or did not receive from the estate — have been vague and inconsistent. The general picture that emerges from available sources is of a widow who did not emerge from the experience with significant financial resources, and who retreated from public life partly because the public life on offer was not one that served or comforted her.
There is also the specific challenge of being a Korean-born woman who had immigrated to the United States, built a career in a demanding and competitive performance environment, married a celebrity, and then been widowed within the same calendar year as the wedding. The speed of everything — meeting, relationship, marriage, death — compressed a life’s worth of major events into a few years, and the aftermath required navigating grief, financial uncertainty, and the entirely unasked-for attention of a public curious about Redd Foxx’s last chapter.
Financial Situation: What Remained After Everything
Ka Ho Cho’s estimated net worth today is placed around four hundred thousand dollars by sources that have attempted to assess it. That figure reflects not wealth accumulated but rather what may remain after the complicated resolution of an estate that had significant IRS obligations attached to it.
Redd Foxx, at his peak, earned millions from Sanford and Son residuals, live performances, recordings, and endorsements. By the time of his death, those resources had been substantially diminished by the IRS seizure of 1989 and the ongoing legal resolution that followed. The estate that Ka Ho Cho inherited was not the estate of a man at his career and financial peak.
Whether she had independent financial resources from her own career as a dancer, or from any other activity in the years since, is not documented. The four hundred thousand dollar estimate is speculative rather than verified.
Life Today: The Choice to Stay Private
In 2026, Ka Ho Cho is approximately sixty-six or sixty-seven years old. Her current location and life situation are not publicly confirmed. The most consistent reports suggest she returned to South Korea at some point following the death, though this too is unverified from any primary source.
She has maintained her privacy across thirty-five years with the kind of consistency that suggests genuine deliberateness rather than accidental obscurity. She could have spoken about Redd Foxx. Documentaries about his life have been made, tributes have been written, his cultural legacy has been reassessed. She has participated in none of it.
That choice — to honor the grief and the love privately, to refuse the role of celebrity widow that public appetite would have cast her in — is itself a kind of statement. She loved him. She lost him. And she decided that what happened between them was hers to keep.
Final Words
History remembers Ka Ho Cho as the last chapter in Redd Foxx’s personal biography — the fourth wife, the shortest marriage, the woman who was widowed before the year of her wedding had even ended.
That framing is accurate as far as it goes. It simply doesn’t go very far.
Before she was Redd Foxx’s wife, she was a woman who crossed an ocean to build a life in a country where she did not grow up, in a city that demands something real from anyone who wants to work in its entertainment industry. She built a professional career in Las Vegas at a time when that required genuine discipline and skill. She fell in love with someone three decades older than her, someone whose public life had been enormous and whose private financial life had become genuinely difficult. She married him. She lost him in three months. And she has spent the thirty-five years since making sure that none of what followed defines her more than she allows it to.
There is something worth respecting in the decision to be private about the most painful chapter of your life. Not every grief needs a documentary. Not every love story needs a public accounting. Ka Ho Cho made that decision very early and has sustained it ever since.
She was the last person to love Redd Foxx. She has kept that as her own.
FAQs
1. Who is Ka Ho Cho?
She is a South Korean-born woman best known as the Comedian Redd Foxx’s fourth and last wife, the legendary actor and stand-up performer famous for Sanford and Son. Born in Seoul in 1959, she later moved to the United States and worked as a professional dancer in Las Vegas before meeting and marrying Foxx in 1991.
2. When was Ka Ho Cho born?
She was born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea. Her exact birth date is not part of the public record, as she has never shared it publicly.
3. Where did Ka Ho Cho grow up?
She grew up in Seoul, South Korea, a city that was undergoing dramatic economic and social transformation during the 1960s and 1970s. She later emigrated to the United States, settling in Las Vegas where she built her performance career.
4. What did Ka Ho Cho do for a career?
She worked as a professional dancer in Las Vegas, performing in the showroom entertainment environment that was central to the city’s identity during the 1980s. She was working at Bally’s Hotel and Casino — one of the major resort properties on the Las Vegas Strip — when she first encountered Redd Foxx.
5. How did Ka Ho Cho meet Redd Foxx?
The two first crossed paths in Las Vegas around 1989, when Ka Ho Cho was working as a dancer at Bally’s and Foxx was performing in the city during one of his regular Las Vegas engagements. The precise circumstances of their first meeting are not documented, but their connection developed across approximately two years before they married.
6. When and where did Ka Ho Cho and Redd Foxx get married?
They married on July 8, 1991, at the Little Church of the West in Las Vegas, Nevada, in a small private ceremony. It was Redd Foxx’s fourth marriage and, as things unfolded, his last.
7. How long were they married?
Their marriage lasted approximately ninety-four days — from July 8, 1991, until Redd Foxx’s death on October 11, 1991. It was the briefest of his four marriages.
8. How did Redd Foxx die?
He died on October 11, 1991, from a massive heart attack that struck him while he was on the set of his CBS sitcom The Royal Family, which was filming at the Paramount lot in Hollywood. He was sixty-eight years old.
9. What happened to Ka Ho Cho after Redd Foxx died?
She stepped entirely out of public life following his death and has remained there ever since. Some sources suggest she returned to South Korea at some point, while others place her in Nevada or California for a period following the death. None of these post-1991 location claims have been confirmed from any primary source.
10. Did Ka Ho Cho and Redd Foxx have children?
This has been reported inconsistently across sources. One source mentions a child, while most others make no reference to any children. In the absence of clear, cross-verified confirmation, this cannot be stated as established fact.
11. What is Ka Ho Cho’s estimated net worth?
Her net worth is estimated at approximately $400,000 by sources that have attempted to assess it. This figure reflects the complicated financial circumstances of Redd Foxx’s estate at the time of his death — which included significant IRS obligations from the 1989 seizure of his assets — rather than any accumulated independent wealth. The figure is unverified and should be understood as a rough estimate.
12. Where is Ka Ho Cho now?
Her current location is not publicly confirmed. She has maintained total privacy for more than thirty-five years since Redd Foxx’s death in 1991, giving no interviews and participating in no public tribute or documentary about his life. Most sources believe she either returned to South Korea or lives quietly somewhere in the United States, but neither has been verified.
