Malcolm-Jamal Warner had been private about his personal life in recent years—the beloved actor did not talk publicly about his wife and child—but in the past, he had a high-profile relationship with a girlfriend that did not end well.

Warner dated actress Regina King from 2011 to 2013. The two even lived together, but things ended suddenly in 2013 when the actor reportedly blindsided his girlfriend of two years by ending the relationship.

In March of that year, King posted to Twitter to deny that there was trouble in the relationship. “Hey everybody PLEASE don’t believe everything you read. Me & MalcolmJamalWar are good. Life happens. Forward motion. Godspeed,” she wrote at the time.

But speaking with Us Weekly in 2015, King, now 54, revealed that one of her famous exes broke up with her on Valentine’s Day, and she strongly insinuated that it was Warner. “Someone broke up with me on Valentine’s. Yeah. I’m serious,” she said. “Then he actually sent me flowers that said, ‘I still love you,’ and I threw the flowers in the trash, and he was upset that I threw them in the trash.”

King hinted that the breakup was with Warner, noting that fans would “know” who her ex was.

During happier times in the relationship, Warner called his romance with King “very special.“ “We like to protect what we have because it’s very special and very precious,” he told BET in October 2011, per New York Daily News. “But I will say that it’s a relationship that makes all the sense in the world.”

Warner died from an accidental drowning during a family vacation to Costa Rica, People magazine reported on July 21, 2025. He was 54.

Warner played Theo Huxtable on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992. He went on to star in Malcolm & Eddie from 1996 to 2000, and Reed Between the Lines, from 2011 to 2015. He also played Sticky on the FX motorcycle drama Sons of Anarchy, and played AJ Austin on The Resident from 2018 to 2023.

In 2024, Warner launched the Not All Hood podcast.