PRESS UPDATE : IRELAND'S OWN .. JULY 2019 ..

Hollywood Everafters – stars that marry again and again

Jul 2, 2019

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Can it be Hollywood’s charm that’s responsible for the multiple mate-swapping that movie stars indulge in, asks Tom Mc Parland.

Prediction is part of being alive (even incarcerated serial killers can safely predict breakfast). Yet, why is it famous movie stars couldn’t predict – say after one divorce – that there might be just the teeny-weenie chance that it could happen again?

Most of us mortals are only made aware by the occasional bereavement that we’re mere replaceable waves on sand. But when thwarted romantic ambition turns nuptial necrosis, movie stars behave as though they’re hapless victims of a tsunami. Even though we know from Oscar night strutting hunks and overdressed leg-showing divas, that they do both triumph and lachrymose humility equally. These kids have been around more than a few blocks.

They’ve been walking the walk and talking the talk since before we could write our names. And yet, when the farcical announcement emanates from respective lawyers that, Derby and Joan would ask you to respect their privacy at this sad time. We know that privacy means being left alone to determine to the last soupçon, who keeps the pet skunk and who gets the deodorant.

Celebrity comments on their breakups sound like saints self-martyrdom: ‘It cracks you open’ – 2-spouse Jennifer Anniston. ‘I didn’t understand what marriage was’ – 2-spouse Kevin Hart. ‘It’s a nightmare – 3-spouse Nicole Kidman (whose first role was as a bleating sheep in her kindergarten Nativity play).

5ft 11ins Nicole made her nightmare comment after her split from 3-spouse, 5ft-4ins Tom Cruise. Perhaps the real nightmare was trying to find him in the dark. Or possibly enduring the 10-year trauma of being called Mrs Thomas Cruise Mapother IV.
But whether nightmare, frightmare or spitemare, movie stars adopt an unwitting tragic mode, while knowing that saying I do to someone who goes off the boil quicker than a boiled egg, carries a lunatic health risk. Or, even as in Kidman’s case, risking an ‘I thought I did last time but this time I really do’ less than 5 years after a first ‘career conflict’ nightmare, is taking the horns by the bull.

As for liberated ex-seminarian Father Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, he’s since ascended into another monogamy with 1-spouse, 5ft 10in Katie Holmes (18 November 2006) and descended again (20 August 2012) into celibacy.

Matching the gravity of these relationships, tinseltown journalists affect buttock-clenching combo names to keep tags on movie stars’ I do’s or I don’ts: TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez). Although portmanteau names frequently tempt fidgety Cupid to strike his tent for elsewhere, their use was de rigueur even in old Hollywood.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own