Hollywood's longest love stories: Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos and more
Tom Hanks is best known to audiences as the two-time Oscar-winning actor from hit movies such as Forrest Gump and Big, but there’s another area where he’s just as accomplished as he is in his career: Hanks and actress wife Rita Wilson have been married for more than 30 years. They’ll celebrate their 31st anniversary on April 30, to be exact.
Although you wouldn’t know it from the quips about Hollywood loves being short-lived — and, yes, there are plenty of breakups in Tinseltown — Hanks and Wilson aren’t alone in having a romance that’s lasted.
Here’s a closer look at some of them:
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson
Wilson was cast on Hanks’s show Bosom Buddies in 1981, but the two didn’t get together until 1985, after they co-starred in the movie Volunteers. And they just knew, much like his Sleepless in Seattle character said of his late wife. “When we first looked at each other there was definitely a kind of, ‘Hey, this is the place!’ I felt that anyway,” Hanks told Entertainment Tonight in November 2015. “I think the end result is that we got married for all the right reasons.”
Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
The actors married in 1988, just a few years after his hit movie Footloose. They’re still so in love that they marked their 30th anniversary by adorably singing the Bee Gees’s “To Love Somebody.”
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air alum tied the knot with Jada in December 1997, but the two are so close now that they no longer use the word “married” to describe their relationship. "We refer to ourselves as life partners, where you get into that space where you realize you are literally with somebody for the rest of your life,” Smith said on Tidal’s Rap Radar podcast in July 2018.
Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa
The musicians coupled up following Springsteen’s 1988 split from his first wife, and they married in 1991. Twenty eight years later, they’re still making music together.
Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos
Ripa and Consuelos married in 1996, while both were cast members of All My Children, and they continue to work together when they get the chance. He occasionally fills in as co-host on her talk show, Live! With Kelly, and she’s appeared on his CW show, Riverdale.
Mark Hamill and Marilou Hamill
Hamill swapped vows with his dental hygienist on a day off from filming the sequel to the original Star Wars way back in 1978.
Elton John and David Furnish
For the 25 years that they’ve been together, the “Your Song” artist and Furnish have written each other weekly love letters. Really. “Every Saturday, we gave each other an anniversary card, because we met on a Saturday,” Furnish said in 2018. The two entered a civil partnership in 2005 and married in 2014, when it became legal for gay couples to wed in John’s native England.
Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick
By the time audiences saw SJP step into Carrie Bradshaw’s glamorous heels on Sex and the City, she had already wed the star of Election and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who continues to be her plus-one. They exchanged vows in 1997.
Denzel Washington and Pauletta Washington
When asked to reveal the secret to staying together with his wife, Pauletta, for so long, Hanks’s Philadelphia co-star, who’s a two-time Oscar winner himself, gave an honest answer: “There’s too many things!” he told People in July 2018. The two celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary on June 25.
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