A look at Hollywood divorces – Cotillard’s partner slams ‘stupid’ Pitt fling rumours

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NEW YORK, Sept 25, (Agencies): Doug and Mary. Eddie and Debbie. Alec and Kim. Brad and Angelina. Liz and, well, take your pick.

As long as there’s been a Hollywood, there’s been scandalous Hollywood divorce.

“Then and now, they’re just under enormous scrutiny. And like many people, they often marry for reasons that are not solid”, said Jeanine Basinger, a professor and founder of the film studies program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

“They get caught up in their own images, in each other’s images and then they get caught up in the images of themselves as a couple. Sustaining that is very difficult”, she said from South Dakota, where she is on sabbatical.

In Hollywood, said Us Weekly’s entertainment director, Ian Drew, “very few couples are Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, staying together forever. Most couples come apart”.

Regardless of the he said-she said nature of Hollywood bust-ups, Basinger believes the public responds in the greatest numbers when private lives clash with, or play right into, public personas.

“I think to do a major story on a Hollywood split is hard because you really do need the kind of mystery, glamour and, sort of, surprise that doesn’t come along every day”, said JD Heyman, People’s deputy editor of entertainment. “You can’t make anybody’s divorce interesting”.

Let’s time hop through the hotbed of celebrity divorce:

Douglas Fairbanks SR and Mary Pickford

In the 1910s and ’20s, mostly in the silent screen era, he was the fearless swashbuckler with a romantic streak and she was America’s sweetheart, the “girl with the curls”.

They married in March 1920, just days after her divorce from silent film actor Owen Moore was final, though she was still married when their affair began. Fairbanks, too, had been married before and by some reports it was Fairbanks who pressured Pickford to end it with Moore, risking her squeaky clean image.

“Everybody overlooked the fact that they’d had to divorce other people in order to marry one another”, Basinger said. “But their own divorce was a huge, huge deal”.

Hollywood chroniclers of the time blamed it, in part, on issues that remain today: Endless days spent away from each other working and promoting projects, along with alleged affairs.

Elizabeth Taylor et al

Taylor, famous in film since she was a kid, was married eight times, including twice to Richard Burton.

“You got your options there”, Basinger laughed.

She divorced her first husband, Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, within six months of marrying him, amid allegations of abuse.

Then, of course, there’s Richard Burton.

“That’s the one that everybody focuses on”, she said. “There was alcoholism, infidelity and probably a kind of fundamental incompatibility that broke them up”.

Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

Speaking of Liz …

Fisher left the girl-next-door actress Reynolds, the mother of his two young children, for Taylor in 1959.

“She was the victim. That big, bad beauty, Elizabeth Taylor, was to blame”, Basinger said.

Reynolds herself has likened their split to the Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt triangle, telling Vanity Fair last year: “My three husbands all left me for another woman and obviously I wasn’t a very sexual lady”.

But Reynolds and Taylor, who had been besties, were able to reignite their friendship years later. When Taylor died in 2011, she left Reynolds a sapphire bracelet, necklace and earrings in her will.

Fisher and Reynolds had been promoted in domestic bliss, he a good friend of producer Michael Todd, the one husband of Taylor’s who died (in a plane crash).

“Elizabeth Taylor was portrayed very much as a home wrecker”, Basinger said. “She told Hedda Hopper, ‘What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?’”

Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger

More than 13 years after their nasty split, time has healed some wounds.

The two met on the set of the 1990 “The Marrying Man” and married three years later. Basinger filed for divorce in 2001.

The two fought over custody of their only child at the time, Ireland Baldwin. In 2007, when Ireland was 11, a bitter voicemail Alec left for her leaked online, calling her a “rude, thoughtless little pig” for not answering his call.

Alec later apologized. He told The Guardian in 2013 that the years of divorce litigation was so painful that he was “staring off a cliff for six years”. He wrote a book about the custody battle in 2008, “A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce”.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

He left his longtime partner, Vanessa Paradis, then took the step of marriage with Heard. Were they more odd than fairytale? Definitely.

So when Heard filed for divorce earlier this year, alleging drunken rage and physical abuse, media and the public ate up the details, including Heard’s display of facial bruises and a video of a raging Depp she secretly shot at home.

They were married just 15 months. Their divorce played out over weeks, rather than years, because — poof — came the magic settlement, of $7 million Heard vowed to donate to charity.

Also:

PARIS: The partner of French actress Marion Cotillard has hit out at the “stupid and baseless accusations” that she helped cause the split between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

“I don’t usually talk about my private life, which until now I have always carefully protected”, French actor Guillaume Canet said in an Instagram post on Friday.

But the relentlessness of the celebrity press, the “stupidity” of some journalists and the hatred of certain internet users required him to speak up, he said.

They “have pushed me to declare the pride, love, respect and admiration that I have for Marion for staying so strong and intelligent in the face of these stupid and baseless accusations”, he added.

Cotillard on Wednesday rebuffed suggestions that she played a role in the “Brangelina” break-up by having a fling with Pitt.

“Many years ago, I met the man of my life, father of our son and of the baby we are expecting”, wrote the 40-year-old Cotillard, who has been with Canet since 2007.

“He is my love, my best friend, the only one that I need”, she said.

Soon after entertainment website TMZ reported Tuesday that Jolie had filed for divorce, speculation arose of an affair between Pitt and Cotillard.

They are co-stars in the soon-to-be-released wartime thriller “Allied”, and filmed together in London.

Though Pitt and 41-year-old Jolie married two years ago, they have been a couple since 2004 and have six children together, three of whom are adopted.

The split between two of the world’s biggest stars spells the end of one of Hollywood’s highest-profile celebrity couples.

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