Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Before I begin, let me get one thing out of the way: I am obsessed with Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m charmed by her humble beginnings as a tap dancing prodigy in the quaint Welsh seaside town of Mumbles, her early days performing in musicals on the West End, and her breakout performance as an English rose living in the Yorkshire countryside in The Darling Buds of May. I’m captivated by her memorable turns as an iconic Hollywood screen siren in The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment, and her impossibly chic wardrobes in Ocean’s Twelve and Intolerable Cruelty. I’m agog at her Oscar-winning performance as Velma Kelly in Chicago, complete with the Louise Brooks bob, powerhouse vocals, and show-stopping dance moves. And as for Casa Zeta-Jones, her lifestyle brand? Don’t even get me started. If they’re accepting job applications any time soon, I’ll be the first in line. (Sorry, Vogue.)
Zeta-Jones has always had that special, effortless kind of cool you simply cannot manufacture. Imagine my delight, then, that in Zeta-Jones’s romantic life, she has truly met her match. For who embodies a certain brand of slick, leading-man cool better than Michael Douglas, from his role as a rugged dreamboat adventurer in Romancing the Stone to his oh-so-’90s taupe Cerruti suits in Basic Instinct? (My personal favorite, if a little less dapper, is his ecstatically flamboyant turn as Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra.)
The pair were first introduced by another iconic Hollywood couple, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, after the latter invited them both to a private dinner at the Deauville Film Festival in 1996. Following a nightcap at their hotel, Zeta-Jones jetted off the next day, but soon received flowers from Douglas to apologize for his unsubtle pick-up line (“I’m going to be the father of your children,” apparently). After staying in touch with plenty of hours-long phone calls, they eventually decided to make things official.
From the get-go, much of the media attention focused on their 25-year age difference, which both of them have breezed over in interviews, with Zeta-Jones saying she “never even questioned” it. (I, too, will not be entertaining any age-gap discourse here.) The pair married in a lavish ceremony at New York’s Plaza Hotel in 2000, and despite a brief separation in 2013, have remained rock steady ever since. “We worked things out—if both people want to work something out and make it better, you can do it,” Douglas said afterwards, describing the rift as simply “a bump in the road.”
Indeed, one of the joys of following Zeta-Jones and Douglas’s romance is seeing how they have never pretended that long-term love is easy and loyally supported each other through thick and thin, including a series of health battles. In 2010, Douglas was diagnosed with stage IV tongue cancer, undergoing an aggressive program of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. (Contrary to a much-publicized quote at the time, this did not actually result from contracting HPV after performing too much oral sex.) So too has Zeta-Jones been open about her bipolar disorder, stating that “there is no need to suffer silently and there is no shame in seeking help” when it comes to mental health. Both actors have expressed that these issues made their bond stronger than ever.
“True love takes work,” Douglas once said. “Love is an extraordinary feeling that comes from the bottom of your soul, but has to be nurtured, you know. The thing I’ve learned about getting older is you can’t take love for granted. You protect it, nurture it, and it grows, and after one’s initial, physical, emotional aspects, it becomes deeper.” If those aren’t words of wisdom to live by, then what are? Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas: I really, truly, want what you have. Oh, and I’ll take a post at Casa Zeta-Jones, if there’s one going.