Famous power couples have made Hollywood on the throne
With no one to waste a course, Ethan Hawke spent the dark days of 2020 putting together The Last Movie Stars, a remarkable documentary series about one of his heroes, Paul Newman. But not just Newman, because the great star of the 1950s and 60s was one of Hollywood’s most enduring and popular couples.
ewman was married with two children when he met actress Joanne Woodward during a rehearsal for the Broadway play. Going picnic. As they say, it is Coup de foudre: this couple fell madly in love, married in 1958 and stayed together for the next 50 years, each excelling in their chosen field and supporting the other’s ambitions. There were many problems along the way: Newman lost a son, Scott, from his first marriage and, as we find out in Hawke’s documentary, he also struggles with evidence. Alcoholism.
But it seemed their rarest: a happy Hollywood marriage. More than that, it was a successful power marriage, and Hawke, who in the late 1990s was briefly involved in Hollywood’s high-profile liaison with Uma Thurman, must know what it’s like. .
The Last Movie Stars based on transcripts Newman compiled for a proposed biography that never materialized, and in Hawke’s six-part series, which will air here later this year, A-list stars include George Clooney, Laura Linney, Rose Byrne and Karen Allen lined up to read testimony from Newman’s intimate circle.
The results are remarkably revealing, and show that even in the most powerful of couples, the scales of success are rarely equal. When Newman and Woodward met, she was a big star, having just won an Academy Award for Best Actress for Eve’s Three Faces. He still hasn’t landed a major role, but over the years the scale has changed as she has kids and he’s become a huge star.
“Why did Shirley MacLaine get all those parts?” she mused bitterly at one point, before making a remarkably honest admission. “If I had to do it all over again, I probably wouldn’t have had children.” In his voice acting, Hawke is sympathetically wise. “Many of us lose our dreams,” he says, “but most of us don’t have a partner with the same dream and he came true.”
It’s completely natural that movie actors should fall in love and get married, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea.
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Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were Hollywood’s original power couple. Photo by General Photographic Agency / Getty Images
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are Hollywood’s original power couple, and possibly the most powerful of them all. He is the mighty hero of Zorro and countless other adventures, she was the “curly-haired girl”, the lover of America: they met in 1916, and then married. As two of the highest-paid actors in silent-era Hollywood, they put their star power to good use when they teamed up with Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffith to form their own studio, United Artists.
The idea was to give the artists complete control over the paintings, and the studio was successful for a while. But the marriage of Pickford and Fairbanks was not very smooth, as both careers were destroyed by the appearance of love lightning, and in 1933 he married an English socialite, Lady Ashley, the end of this dream of the sexiest couples.
In 1932, when Charles Chaplin was painfully creeping into the sound era, he met and began a relationship with a woman almost half his age. Chaplin is 43, Paulette Goddard is 22, but at least for a while, the pair have found love – and shared career interests.
Chaplin is a big star, a one-man studio, and Goddard might look like another conquest of his at first. But she was a comic actress with remarkable talent and grace, and in 1936 helped him create what is arguably his greatest film yet, Modern. She shined positively as Ellen, an orphan girl Chaplin’s Tramp befriended, and her performance made her a star.
Chaplin planned many projects with Goddard as his co-star, but only one of them, Great Dictator, have seen the light of day. And by the time the Anti-Nazi Treatise was released in 1940, liaison Chaplin-Goddard was on the rocks.
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On the face of it, there’s something slightly off-putting about Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s initial meeting. Indeed, their director on Yes and No (1944), Howard Hawks, completely disapproved of their budding relationship, and went to great lengths to dismiss it. Bacall, a New York model, is 19 years old and just starting her acting career: Bogie is 44 years old, a three-time divorcee whose explosive relationships have provided ample sustenance for homeowners. gossip column.
It all sounds a bit scary, but the Bogart-Bacall alliance turned out to be an equal encounter. Together they made three more memorable films – Big sleep, Dark road and Key Largo – had two children, and, according to Bacall, was overjoyed until Bogart’s death in 1957.
Spencer Tracy was one of Bogart’s best drinking buddies, and in the 1940s and 50s, he and Katharine Hepburn became one of Hollywood’s hottest power couples.
One thing to note, however, is that Tracy and Hepburn were never officially a couple. “I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy,” quipped Hepburn when the unlikely couple met on the set of the 1942 George Stevens comedy. Woman of the yearbut they quickly fell in love.
But Tracy was married and refused to divorce his wife, so he and Hepburn kept their 26-year relationship a secret.
They became a hugely successful couple at the box office, making nine films together, the last one, Guess who will come to join me, was completed just 17 days before he died of a heart attack. It was Hepburn who found him: “He looked so happy to be alive,” she said later, “that, for all his accomplishments, was a terrible burden to bear. with him.”
By the late 1950s, Newman and Woodward had become Hollywood’s emerging power couple, with great ease and an incredibly good relationship. But when they can afford it, they increasingly shun the limelight, leaving the stage for other couples to become the object of media attention.
Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were rarely on the front page of their brief two-year marriage. The baseball star was obsessively jealous, maybe physically abusive, but when Monroe left him, much of the American public turned against Monroe and never forgave her. Meanwhile, she quickly entered another power couple, having a relationship with the radical playwright Arthur Miller: their marriage also failed.
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Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of ‘The Sandpiper’ in 1965. API photo via Getty Images
But if there’s one power couple that makes more column inches than any other, it’s Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Married twice, forever flammable, they are sometimes more like rock stars than movie actors. She is Hollywood royalty, a child star turned box office beauty, he is a working-class boy from a Welsh mining town with a drinking problem and wearing a chip on his wrist. shoulder.
They met on the lavish set of the epic 1963 Cleopatra, and Taylor, who was married to Eddie Fisher at the time, caused a Hollywood scandal when he began an affair with young tea singer Burton. Their decades together were rarely smooth, but they did star as a couple on screen, especially in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?in which they play a bickering, drunk, heartbroken couple.
Although they were never married, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland upset a lot of God-fearing Republicans in the early 1970s when they returned to their anti-war satire on the street. In the ’80s, though, Jane would veer toward center, becoming a fitness guru and settling down (for a while) with media mogul Ted Turner.
In the 1970s, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw were once a golden duo, although their relationship may not be as beautiful as it once was. And by the mid 70’s, they were overtaken by Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, he was a great screen actress of the time, she was the talented daughter of director John Huston. Their parties have become legendary.
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Still together: Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell 2013. Photo by Dan Steinberg via AP
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell may not be as glamorous, but have amazing staying power. They started dating in 1983 – and are still together – the two forged a successful acting career together while raising a family.
The 1980s were the heyday of the power couple: Sean Penn and Madonna were practically the only thing the media wanted to talk about for a few short years in the late 1980s, but Bruce Willis and Demi Moore became became the real Hollywood power brokers during their tabloid-friendly 13-year marriage.
When he first met Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks was on the verge of becoming the greatest movie actor of his time. Their enduring marriage is one of the most decent marriages the film industry has ever seen. Brad Pitt has been in not one but two power couples (with Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie), both of which did not end up particularly well for him. Recent blasts aside, there’s always something chillingly pre-planned about how Will Smith and Jada Pinkett conduct their business.
And when Ben Affleck hooked up with Jennifer Lopez in the early 2000s, much of the fun was that on the red carpet he looked like a rabbit in the headlights. How we mocked, but now, 18 years later, they seem to be happily reunited, and possibly becoming the matchless power couple God intended them to be.
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/the-celebrity-power-couples-that-set-hollywood-alight-41889807.html Famous power couples have made Hollywood on the throne