Fame isn’t exactly something that arrives subtly. Instead, it has a way of rearranging everything around it, and for some actresses, these changes became rather clear in their personal lives, especially with their marriages. These ended almost at the same time that their careers began accelerating. Here are a few actresses who ditched their partners after getting famous.
1. Bette Davis
In 1932, Bette Davis married Harmon Nelson while she was still trying to get traction in Hollywood, as she was yet another contract actress finding her footing at that time. Everything changed when Of Human Bondage came out in 1934. Soon after, Davis received serious attention, and her career moved in a completely different direction. Nelson divorced her in 1938.
Apparently, Nelson learned that Davis had been having an affair with actor Howard Hughes and claimed Davis’s “cruel and inhumane manner” was responsible for the marriage ending. He also said that her career kept her too busy for their marriage, although Davis claimed she did try hard to make it work out. She was allegedly distraught when it was finally over.
2. Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe’s first marriage didn’t survive once her life started changing direction. She married James Dougherty at the young age of 16, long before she entered Hollywood, and it was during World War II that she was first scouted. A photographer spotted her working in a factory. Things moved pretty quickly from there, and she started working as a model before getting studio tests & a new identity.
She signed with 20th Century-Fox in 1946. In that same year, Monroe ended her marriage to Dougherty, which he later claimed was due to studio expectations. He said that the studio preferred rising actresses to be single. The change from Norma Jeane to Marilyn happened right as the relationship ended, and the rest, as they say, was history.
3. Rita Hayworth
Edward C. Judson was Rita Hayworth’s husband, and he also worked as her manager during her early career. Judson helped to reshape her image & push her into bigger roles. However, their relationship didn’t last long once she gained real momentum, and by the early 1940s, she was starring in classics like You’ll Never Get Rich and Blood and Sand. These films put her firmly on the map.
Hayworth filed for divorce in 1942, citing “cruelty” as the reason why she was ending the marriage. Apparently, he had threatened to do “great bodily harm” to her if she did not promise to pay him $12,000 (around $240,000 today) while she was getting famous, and he also “helped himself” to her money. Her professional identity had already outgrown the structure Judson had built around her at that time.
4. Ava Gardner
It didn’t take long for Ava Gardner’s first marriage to end. In fact, it happened at the same time that she began establishing herself at MGM, and she ended her marriage to Mickey Rooney within nine months. He was already a major name when they got married in 1942. However, Gardner said she later realized that she wasn’t actually in love with Rooney, so she publicly filed for divorce under the grounds of “mental cruelty.”
But privately, Gardner claimed that Rooney’s gambling & extramarital affairs were the cause of the divorce, although she chose to keep this secret to avoid damaging Rooney’s public image. This was around the same time that Gardner’s own career was beginning to take shape independently from Rooney, and their relationship didn’t continue into the next phase of her career.
5. Lana Turner
Lana Turner was another star who had a marriage that lasted less than a year. She married Artie Shaw in early 1940, but within a few months, the marriage was over. Turner later revealed that Shaw had intense mood swings & difficult behavior that made the marriage impossible for her. She said, “He was a very intelligent man, but he didn’t treat women well.”
The marriage happened at the same time that Turner was starting to make a name for herself as one of MGM’s rising stars. Shortly after they divorced, Turner found out that she was pregnant and had an abortion at the studio’s insistence. They supposedly thought that it would be better for her image.
6. Jennifer Garner
Scott Foley & Jennifer Garner were already married when she was doing smaller roles. But everything changed once Alias became a hit in 2001. Garner became a famous actress and landed major film roles. By March 2003, the pair had separated, and soon after, they divorced, with Foley later speaking to TV Guide about what happened.
He said that “there was no other relationship, there was no adultery” in their marriage. Instead, “Jennifer became a huge celebrity,” and that was the reason for their marriage ending, although they did so on amicable terms. It turns out that the pressure of Hollywood was too much for the pair to handle together.
7. Demi Moore
A lot of people don’t know about Demi Moore’s first marriage, and that’s mostly because it happened before she became the household name she is today. She married Freddy Moore in 1981, and that marriage was where her stage name came from. Her birth name was Demetria Gene Harmon. Moore was still doing smaller TV work when she married Freddy, and she was trying hard to get noticed.
The marriage ended in 1984, around the same time that Moore became a more visible actress after appearing in films like St. Elmo’s Fire. Moore also confessed that she had cheated on Freddy the night before their wedding. She married him when she was 18 years old, and he was 30.
8. Robin Wright
Robin Wright was known for being a daytime TV actress before she appeared in The Princess Bride. It was around that time that she married Dane Witherspoon. Then, in 1987, the film came out, and people started seeing her in a completely different way, with the marriage ending shortly after.
Wright divorced Witherspoon around a year after the film was released, and just as her career moved from soap-level attention to something far greater. She later got married to Sean Penn during the height of his career, shortly after he divorced Madonna.
The timing of each of these relationships says more than anything else, and in a lot of these cases, the marriage didn’t exactly end slowly. No, it was more of a sudden stop. It happened to coincide with a time when everything else was moving faster for these women, and the end of their marriage happened right in the middle of new contracts & bigger roles for these women.
