Not every longtime couple needs to get married to stay together. Case in point: Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling. They first began dating while filming a project together—The Place Beyond the Pines, in 2012. Since then, the two have welcomed two children together, daughters Esmeralda (born in 2014) and Amada (born in 2016). As it turns out, Mendes hadn’t even considered having kids until fatefully meeting her soulmate. “It was the furthest thing from my mind,” she told Women’s Health in 2019. “Ryan Gosling happened. I mean, falling in love with him. Then it made sense for me to have…not kids, but his kids. It was very specific to him.” Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr. met on the 1997 horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer, but it wasn’t exactly fireworks from the jump. Turns out they didn’t start dating until 2000. They got engaged in 2001 and married in 2002, eventually welcoming two kids together—a daughter named Charlotte (born in 2009) and a son named Rocky (born in 2012). They also starred in two Scooby-Doo live-action movies together. “We were fortunate enough to be at the right times in our lives where we both wanted something serious and it worked,” Prinze, Jr. said in a 2016 interview with AOL Build. “So we’re lucky, but we also work very hard at it. It’s not just dumb luck, it’s work.” If you miss seeing these two on screen together, check out their new Cascade ad from 2020 that gives you a little peak into how they do make it work. And for more famous pairs who met while working together, check out Celebrity Couples Who Met on Set. Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden were actually introduced by Diaz’s close pal, Nicole Richie—who just so happens to be married to the Good Charlotte rocker’s brother, Joel Madden. Diaz and Madden wed on January 5, 2015 (just three months after they got engaged, and less than a year after they first became an item). “I don’t know if I was ready [when I got married], but I knew Benji was special. He’s just a good man,” Diaz told InStyle of their nuptials, adding that he is “the best thing” to happen to her. “Marriage is certainly hard, and it’s a lot of work. You need somebody who’s willing to do the work with you, because there’s no 60-40 in marriage. It’s 50-50, period. All the time.” That’s partnership done right! Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance first met back in college at Yale and went on to tie the knot in 1997. They welcomed twin children, a son named Slater and a daughter named Bronwyn, via surrogate in 2006. At the 2016 Emmys, when Vance was accepting an award for his performance as Johnnie Cochran in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, he didn’t pass up the opportunity to give a meaningful shoutout to his longtime love. “To the woman who rocks my chain,” he said. “Angela Evelyn Bassett—this one is for you, girl!” And for a look at A-list romances that lived on in another way, meet the Celebrity Exes Who Are Best Friends Now. Like Bassett and Vance, Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig originally met in college. But it wasn’t a romance right off the bat. In fact, it wasn’t until decades later that Weisz and Craig would get together—when they played a couple in the 2010 film, Dream House. They decided to tie the knot in a top-secret ceremony in June 2011, at which there were only four guests: their two children (one each from previous relationships) and two close family friends to act as official witnesses. Then, in September 2018, they welcomed their only child together. Weisz and Craig have continued to go the extra mile to maintain their privacy. “You have to protect your marriage,” Weisz told More. “When you’re young, you tell your girlfriends everything. One of the great pleasures of not being an adolescent is that you don’t have to share everything. When you’re married, that door closes. The audience goes, and you’re in your own life.” Though they first met while filming 1992’s Jamón, Jamón, it wasn’t until a decade-and-a-half later, while filming Vicky Christina Barcelona in 2008, that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem decided to get together. And even then, they kept the fact that they were an item pretty quiet for awhile. Then, in July 2010, they decided to say “I do” in a private ceremony at a friend’s Bahamian residence. Turns out, as Cruz told Tatler in 2019, she and Bardem made a decision a decade ago “not to talk about our relationship.” “It would feel very strange to do it a different way,” she continued. “I just couldn’t do it.” And if you love celeb facts and updates, sign up for our daily newsletter. Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s romance began when he was looking for a leading lady for 1991’s Bugsy and fell in love with her at first sight. Beatty was a notorious lady’s man, and Bening was the up-and-comer who managed to tame him. Here they are now, married for nearly three decades. “There is no secret as anyone who’s been married knows,” Bening told Us Weekly when asked about their lasting power. “We have an incredible family, we have beautiful children. We’ve been through a lot. It’s the center of life. It’s the most important thing. It’s everything.” And for some newer pairings, check out The Hottest Celebrity Couples of the Summer. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have been married for more than three decades now—a rarity in Hollywood these days. Though they reconnected as young adults while filming the 1988 TV movie Lemon Sky, it turns out these two had actually first met far earlier than that. Back in the ’70s, while visiting a deli after a stage performance, “a little girl was in there who had just seen the matinee, and her brother said, ‘You liked that actor, go tell him you liked him,’ and it was Kyra,” Bacon recalled on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson in 2014. “She was a little girl, yeah, she was 12 years old.” (Given their age difference, Bacon would’ve been around 19 at the time.) The couple has since starred in numerous projects together, and they also have two kids—a son named Travis (born in 1989) and a daughter named Sosie (born in 1992). Sometimes it’s nice to remember that true love does, in fact, exist. And for famous romances that shatter the age barrier, here are Celebrity Couples With Huge Age Gaps. It’s a match made in TV heaven! Alexis Bledel and Vincent Kartheiser began dating in 2012, when the Gilmore Girls star took a guest-starring role on Mad Men and played a love interest for Kartheiser’s character. The two got engaged in March 2013, married in June 2014, and welcomed their first child together (a son) in the fall of 2015—but they’ve been infamously quiet about their relationship. Turns out, Kartheiser has a pretty good reason he and Bledel keep those details to themselves. “It’s something I realized about the most important things in my life,” he told Vulture. “If I share them with the world and I open that door to their fuming anger that they need to get out or their adoration that they want to flaunt, it lessens it. It cheapens it; it weakens it. And it’s magical, love, and all of that is…profoundly spiritual, and it just doesn’t feel right.” Isla Fisher and Sacha Baron Cohen first met at a party in 2002 and they got engaged two years later. It wasn’t until 2010, however, that the two decided to say “I do,” as Fisher converted to Judaism, Cohen’s religion. “We did it—we’re married!” Fisher reportedly told friends in an email, according to Woman’s Day, after marrying Cohen. “It was the absolute best day of my life and in so many beautiful moments I missed you all so much. I thought of you as everything was happening, but Sacha and I wanted no fuss—just us!” They have three children together, born in 2007, 2010, and 2015. Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz knew each other as teenagers, but Keys said she found the music producer “so annoying” at the time. That opinion eventually changed and they started dating. Then, things proceeded at lightning speed: They got engaged in May 2010, married two months later, and welcomed their first child (a son, Egypt) three months after that. In 2014, the two welcomed their second son, Genesis. And their love has only grown stronger since. In celebration of their ninth wedding anniversary, Keys wrote on her Instagram: “I swear I have never been more in love with you! You are everything: my best friend, my lover, my mind-sharer, my life partner, my cheerleader, my dream increaser, my biggest supporter, and I could list 100 more. I am so blessed by your love. Happy anniversary my king. I’m so in awe of the power of love.” Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale have been in a relationship since 2012 and have largely kept to themselves. Throughout their time together, the couple has had two children: a son named Rocco, born in February 2016, and a son named Rafa, born in November 2017. Still, their romance is proof that you don’t need a ring and a contract to be happy. “He’s practically my husband, so calling him that is easier,” Byrne told Evening Standard Magazine. “The formality isn’t a draw for me, but we’ll do it one day. Once you have children, I just think, why not?” In 2015, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons first met while filming the second season of Fargo, on which they played husband and wife. But they didn’t make their off-screen romance official until 2016. Since then, the Bring It On star and the Friday Night Lights actor have gotten engaged, and welcomed a child—a son named Ennis—in 2018. For the most part, unlike some celebrity couples, they keep their private lives out of the spotlight, but Dunst has gone on-record to gush about Plemons. “He’s my favorite actor—the best I’ve ever worked with,” she told Porter. “I just knew he would be in my life forever.” Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester and The O.C.’s Adam Brody have proven to have staying power beyond even that of their massively popular teen dramas from the aughts. The two met while filming the 2011 film The Oranges, but it wasn’t until 2013 that they confirmed they were dating. (They eventually got engaged later that same year.) The couple tied the knot on February 15, 2014. The famously private pair welcomed a daughter named Arlo, in August 2015, and a son just recently in September 2020. Though Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor initially met about a decade ago at a dinner party, it wasn’t until 2015—after reconnecting in real life and getting flirty on Twitter—that they decided to go for it and date. While there’s a 30-plus-year age gap between these ladies, they have proven that age is just a number. “There’s a poignancy to being with someone older,” Paulson told The New York Times in 2016. “I think there’s a greater appreciation of time and what you have together and what’s important, and it can make the little things seem very small.“ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb Believe it or not, Family Ties helped tie Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan together—they just didn’t know they’d found their forever love at the time. In 1985, they played love interests on the iconic sitcom for just one season. Two years later, they reunited for the movie Bright Lights, Big City. And just a year after that, they got married. They’ve since had four children together: son Sam (born in 1989), twin daughters Aquinnah and Schuyler (1995), and daughter Esmé (2001). When they met studying at Northwestern University, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall likely didn’t know just how intertwined their lives would become going forward. They both joined Saturday Night Live in 1982, fell in love, got married in 1987, and have been together ever since. They also worked together on Watching Ellie, which Hall created and Louis-Dreyfus starred in, during the 2002-2003 TV season. “He looked like Björn Borg or something,” Louis-Dreyfus told The New Yorker of first meeting Hall. “I remember thinking early on that this was the guy for me, but I didn’t dare tell anyone, for fear they would say, ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re so young—you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ So I kept that little secret close to my heart.” Maya Rudolph and Paul Thomas Anderson have kept things so quiet that it’s unclear when they officially became an item. They welcomed their first child together, Pearl, in 2004. And since then, they’ve had three more—Lucille (born in 2009), Jack (2011), and Minnie (2013)—while remaining super private about their at-home lives. Even though the two aren’t legally wed, that hasn’t stopped Rudolph from referring to Anderson as her “husband.” In an interview with The New York Times, she said it felt “ooky” to still be calling Anderson her “boyfriend.” The Saturday Night Live alum prefers the term—without the paperwork—because “people know what that means. It means he’s the father of my child, and I live with him, and we are a couple, and we are not going anywhere.” You may think no one actually meets their forever love on a blind date, but apparently, John Corbett and Bo Derek do! They got together back in 2002 and have yet to marry, but that doesn’t mean they’re not sticking by one another. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get married,” Derek told Fox News in 2019. “It’s not necessary for us. We’re not proving our love, we’re not starting a new generation together of families coming together.” It can be tough to believe that Carrie Bradshaw and Ferris Bueller are still together, but it’s the truth. Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have been married for more than 20 years, having exchanged vows in May 1997. They first met in November 1991 at Naked Angels Theater Company, but it wasn’t until February 1992 that Broderick asked Parker out on a date. “I know it sounds nuts, but we have lives that allow us to be away and come back together,” Parker told the Girlboss Radio podcast in 2018 of their marriage. “His work life takes him here, and mine takes me there. In some ways, I think that that’s been enormously beneficial because we have so much to share in a way.” The couple has three children: son James (born in 2002) and twin daughters Marion and Tabitha (both in 2009 via surrogacy).
