Fairytale gone wrong: Has love breathed its last in Hollywood?

Family therapist, legal expert weigh in on celebrity divorces

LOS ANGELES: The imminent divorce of ‘Brangelina’ is simply the latest in a series of celebrity splits giving the impression that an average Hollywood marriage has about as much chance of success as a non-white actor at the Oscars.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie-Pitt have both been through divorces before, he with Friends star Jennifer Aniston and she with actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton. But this year has also seen Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin finalise their “conscious uncoupling” around the same time that Johnny Depp and Amber Heard were squabbling over the terms of their split. Drew Barrymore, Lisa Marie Presley, Dennis Quaid and James McAvoy have announced divorces from their respective partners too, sparking some gossip websites to dub 2016 the year of Hollywood divorces.



In 2012, statistics website PolitiFact estimated that the lifelong probability of an American marriage ending in divorce was 40% to 50%, citing academics and the National Survey of Family Growth. Kelly Frawley, a partner at law firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres and Friedman, believes that while there is no reason to think the rich and famous split more often, the pressures which put strain on relationships are amplified in Tinseltown. “There are standard things that cause marriages to disintegrate: concerns about money, how to raise children, issues of fidelity,” she said. “Those are much bigger when you are a celebrity couple. There’s so much accessibility to all the things that make it easy to step out of a marriage. You can spend money with ease, you can leave with ease and you can have affairs with ease.”

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Denzel and Pauletta Washington have been going strong since 1983, while Billy Crystal, Christopher Walken and their respective sweethearts expect to celebrate golden wedding anniversaries before the end of the decade.

But divorce is one celebrity fad that has endured through the ages and the Hollywood hills are littered with carcasses of euthanised showbiz marriages. Among other high profile casualties are Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, who announced that they were calling it a day on June 30, 2015, one day after their 10-year anniversary. Tom Cruise was on his third marriage by the time he and Katie Holmes split in 2012 and there were divorces in 2010 for Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson and Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar.

“Celebrities are under a unique microscope, where every nuance is dissected over and over again. The slightest misunderstanding is reported like you’re splitting up right away,” said Judi Bloom, a licensed marriage and family therapist in California. “That can really wear down a couple.”

One big problem for Hollywood couples is that they spend so much time apart on their separate projects, which “pulls at the fabric of a relationship.” Some avoid growing apart by continuing to work together after getting hitched. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening began dating during the filming of Bugsy in 1991, married a year later and filmed Love Affair together in 1994. Will Smith and Jada Pinkett are still together, a quarter century after meeting on the set of his sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Pinkett didn’t get the part but she got Smith, marrying the actor in 1997 and appearing alongside him in 2001’s Ali.

This also doesn’t always work, of course. Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton have joined forces for no fewer than seven films but called it a day after 13 years, an unlucky number which was also the length of Woody Allen’s marriage to Mia Farrow and the number of his films she appeared in.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2016.

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