Gallery: Weddings and Movie Stars

Movie stars and marriage have always helped the headline-writers. When in 1956 Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe tied the knot (he for the second time, she the third), they were dubbed the Egghead and the Hourglass. “Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” claimed the blushing bride. The civil wedding lasted five minutes. The marriage lasted five years.

Fittingly, it all fell to bits on the set of The Misfits. As is amply testified by Weddings and Movie Stars, a new book of photographs depicting the stars in a state of nuptial bliss, actors can marry near and marry far but, for whatever reason, the ending is usually unhappy.

1. 1951 Young Hollywood got hitched to itself when the girl who would enter the shower from Psycho got hitched to the man who would seduce Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. True stardom was a way off for both Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Their contribution to film includes their daughter Jamie Lee Curtis. "For a while, we were Hollywood's golden couple," Curtis said. "I was very dedicated and devoted to Janet, and on top of my trade, but in her eyes that goldenness started to wear off. I realised that whatever I was, I wasn't enough for Janet. That hurt me a lot and broke my heart.” They divorced in 1962. Image © Photofest
2. 1954 A case of beauty and the beast: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall at their reception. “I think he was fascinated by this unformed thing which he could make into the perfect wife,” a friend told Bogey’s biographer. “And she wanted to be Mrs Bogart.” They met 10 years earlier on the set of Howard Hawks’s Passage to Marseille when he was 44 and she was 19. The director then cast them in To Have and Have Not, and Bogart went about divorcing his first wife, actress Mayo Methot. Bacall was widowed in 1957. Image © Ed Clark/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
3. 1956 Hollywood allied itself to European royalty when Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco wed. In return for releasing her from her contract, MGM secured the rights to make a film of the wedding, The Wedding in Monaco. As a wedding gift, the studio commissioned Helen Rose, who had designed Kelly’s costumes for High Society (1956), to make the gowns for both the civil and religious ceremonies. In addition, MGM made a wedding gift of Kelly’s favourite costumes from High Society which formed part of her bridal trousseau, including the ensemble she wore as Tracy Lord in the closing wedding scene. Following the marriage, Prince Rainier banned the showing of Grace Kelly’s films in Monaco. She was killed in a car crash in 1982. Image © mptvimages.com
4. 1958 Jayne Mansfield married Hungarian actor/bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay after spotting him in a restaurant. “I’ll have a steak and that tall man on the left,” she told the waiter. At their wedding he drank from the shoe of his new bride. Her dress, as usual, left little to the imagination. They had an extremely messy divorce in 1963. Image © Stephen Black/Archive Photos/Getty Images
5. 1965 Catherine Deneuve and David Bailey met when he was shooting her for Playboy. She was making Repulsion whose director, Roman Polanski, persuaded her to promote the film by taking her clothes off. Photographer married subject in London two months later. They divorced in 1972. Image © Bentley Archive/Popper Photo/Getty Images
6. 1968 Roman Polanski married Sharon Tate in Chelsea. He later wrote in his autobiography that sartorially they made “a grotesque sight”. Photographers outnumbered guests, and they were given the wrong cake to cut at the reception. Tate was murdered the following year. Image © Bettman/Corbis
7. 1969 For her second marriage, Audrey Hepburn stayed away from Hollywood (her first husband was Mel Ferrer) and hooked up with Italian psychiatrist Dr Andrea Dotti whom she met on a Mediterranean cruise. At the wedding in Lake Geneva, as ever Hepburn wore Givenchy. She had her second child at 40 and put up with Dotti’s infidelities until they divorced in 1982. Image © Bettman/Corbis
8. 1972 Classic denim nuptials for Seventies pin-ups Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. This was their second marriage to each other, the first having lasted from 1957 to 1962. The second ceremony took place aboard the yacht from which Wood would fall overboard and drown in 1981. Image © 1978 Chester Maydole/mptvimages.com
9. 1973 Michael Caine saw Indian model Shakira Baksh on a TV commercial for Maxwell House coffee. He was all set to pursue her to the ends of the earth, only to find she had been living on the Fulham Road since placing third in Miss World in 1967. When they married in Vegas she was carrying their only child together. They are still together. Caine credits the longevity of their partnership to separate bathrooms. Image © 1978 Gene Trindl/mptvimages.com
10. 1973 The official wedding portrait of Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett and Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors, though the marriage began before either had embarked on their most famous TV roles. They separated in 1979 and Fawcett lopped the second half of her double-barrelled name off her credit. Image © 1978 Bruce McBroom/mptvimages.com
11. 1978 Charlotte Rampling's French husband Jean-Michel Jarre, whose music supplied the soundtrack to Midnight Express. Rampling later described the impact of meeting Jarre as "love at the sight of, for ever. We knew. We both knew." They split in 1996. Image © Christian Simonpietri/Corbis
12. 1985 Unlike the other movie-star weddings, the press were not invited to the nuptials of Madonna and Sean Penn. They came anyway, by helicopter, to be greeted by a message in the sand. Their cinematic gift to posterity was the much raspberried Shanghai Surprise. Penn spent 33 days in jail after assaulting a photographer on set. He was also charged with felony domestic assault. The happy couple filed for divorce in at the end of 1987. Image © SIPA Press/Rex Features

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