You’ve all heard it before – some actress met some actor on the set and they hooked up. It happened to Liz and Richard, Brad and Angelina, and even Jennifer and her new guy, Justin Theroux.
Who else has hooked up while on the set? Well, onset hookups go back quite a ways in the annals of Hollywood history. And often, like in two of the three cases above, it involves cheating on a spouse. Clark Gable and Loretta Young got closer-than-this on the set of The Call of the Wild in 1935. Their onset dalliance resulted in Young getting pregnant. She fled the country to have the baby, saying later that her baby was adopted. Young and Gable’s daughter would not know who her father was until she was an adult.
Humphrey Bogart was an established star and 45-years-old when he starred in To Have and Have Not with 19-year-old beauty Lauren Bacall. Despite his marriage and their age difference, the two continued their romance off the set. Bogart divorced his wife then he and Bacall married and remained a happy couple until his death from cancer 12 years later.
Before Elizabeth Taylor hooked up with Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, she hooked up with another co-star – Eddie Fisher. The two appeared in Butterfield 8 and began their affair during the filming, as Fisher was consoling Taylor over the death of her husband and his friend, Michael Todd.
Many times, the onset hookups prove to be disastrous for the films. It happened with Cleopatra and then again with Proof of Life. I personally loved the film, but after the news of the married Meg Ryan’s hookup with Russell Crowe, the film seemed doomed. The romance ended quickly and Ryan’s good girl image was forever tarnished.
And yet, all onset hookups don’t involve cheating. It is rumored that Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz enjoyed playing a married couple in their latest movie Dream House a lot. So much so that the couple married last June.