There’s a classic caption in the Robert Evans autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. The photo shows producer Evans dancing with his then-wife Ali MacGraw, who at the time was involved in an on-set romance with Steve McQueen. “Was she madly in love? You bet!” Evans notes next to the shot. “But not with me. Did I know it? Would you?”
MacGraw would leave Evans for McQueen, but MacGraw and McQueen wouldn’t be on-screen together again; their chemistry in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway is what you’d call definite, but it takes a bit of a backseat to all the other heist ugliness and betrayal and shooting the 1972 picture highlights. When a real-life couple teams up on-screen—as Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone do in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, opening this weekend—the results can vary wildly—the dynamic in the resulting performances can sometimes sell an absolutely implausible scenario (see Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal) or make a silly film look even sillier (see, or don’t see, Affleck and Lopez). And there are all kinds of stops in between, as we’re about to learn.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
When they met on the set of The Long, Hot Summer, Newman was widely renowned as the most physically beautiful man in Hollywood. While Joanne Woodward was no slouch in the looks department either, she was known more as a virtuoso actor (she had recently turned heads with a multiple-personality portrayal in The Three Faces of Eve). They clicked big time in this Faulkner pastiche, and Newman left his wife of nine years (with whom he’d had three kids) and married Woodward, in 1958. They remained one of Hollywood’s most revered couples until his death, in 2008.
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart
Stewart was a seasoned young actor, but not a star when she was cast as Bella Swan in the multi-film Twilight saga; Pattinson, her, and our, Edward, had been part of the Harry Potter ensemble, which employed, it seemed, every actor in Britain under 20 and above 50. Their smoldering and/or surly expressiveness enchanted the chaste-teenage-vampire core demo, and endless were the rumors that they were real-life romancing (unchastely) offscreen. The awkward public acknowledgement of that came after Stewart was revealed to have dallied with her Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders, widely derided as the dawg in this quadrangle (Sanders was married at the time). It’s all over for them now, but they may meet again at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where they are both starring in what they call auteur-driven pictures: David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars for Pattinson, and Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria for Stewart.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez
What’s your favorite Affleck-J.Lo on-screen pairing? The Martin Brest-directed bomb, Gigli, in which Affleck and Lopez play competing mob goons charged with kidnapping a mentally disabled young man? Or the “Jenny from the Block” video, in which a terry cloth robed Affleck buttresses the patriarchy by slapping the singer on the derriere? Both media commodities have mentioned the associated parties with some degree of mortification in the ensuing years. Not enough mortification, we humbly suggest.
Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger
Pretty people doing ugly things: that’s, alas, the experience of watching the leaden Neil Simon-penned 1991 The Marrying Man. Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger met on the set of the picture, and while the chemistry they display isn’t exactly light—they come off like an aspiring power-couple throughout—it’s evident. The two married in 1993, had a tempestuous (to say the least) marriage, and divorced, in 2002, with a daughter and one other bad movie (a very ill-advised remake of the Ali MacGraw-Steve McQueen classic, The Getaway) to their credit.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
The making of the hypertrophied 2005 action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith was epic in many respects, not least on account of director Doug Liman’s multi-take meticulousness. The long shoot created a lot of are-they-or-aren’t-they speculation concerning über-hot stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. As we now all know, they were. Now they are married, have a squadron of children that seems to rival that of the Duggars’, and are our last best hope for saving the world. Their union also eventually produced, indirectly, one of the greatest celebrity quotes ever—Jennifer Aniston’s pronouncement: “What Angelina did was very uncool.”
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