Reel couples to real love: When on-screen chemistry grows into the real thing

We watched Brad and Angelina fall in love on screen – and their break up and divorce have been just as public.

Wed, 15 Aug, 2018 - 01:00

We watched Brad and Angelina fall in love on screen – and their break up and divorce have been just as public.

Rita de Brún looks at other co-stars who found love on a movie set. What happens on set doesn’t always stay on set, when screen couples take their passion off camera.

Because there’s nothing lovelier than a good love story, or any love story at all, we like it when reel-couples couple-up for real.

We like it, too, when, long after they have parted, former screen couples remain so close they can mock one another with good-natured affection. Demi Moore did that when she recently told Bruce Willis, at his Comedy Central Roast, that their marriage was like The Sixth Sense, in that he was ‘dead all the time’. The pair appeared in three films together and stayed married for 13 years.

There’s nothing new about screen lovers falling in love for real. That’s been happening since the dawn of film.

Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier co-starred in Hamlet in 1937, fell in love, and married three years later. Katherine Hepburn’s romance with Spencer Tracy was less straightforward. Those darling lovebirds met in 1942, while making Woman of the Year. Although Tracy was married, the two began an affair that lasted 25 years.

In 1943, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart met while making To Have and Have Not. Bacall was 19 and living with her mother. Bogart was 44 and somebody’s husband. They had an affair and married two years later.

Their union was complex, with Bogie keeping a long-term mistress and Bacall hooking up with Frank Sinatra. But despite, or perhaps because of all that, they stayed together until Bogart died, with Sinatra and Bogart remaining friends to the end.

While the days of classic Hollywood glamour couples such as Bogie and Bacall have long faded, traces can still be found in the glitz that surrounds the Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds partnership.

The beautiful couple met on the set of Green Lantern, in 2010. At the time, Reynolds was married to the exquisite and massively successful Scarlett Johansson, and Lively was dating Penn Badgley, who played her boyfriend in Gossip Girl. Within three months of Lively and Reynolds meeting, Johansson and Badgley were off the scene.

It was 2011 before the Green Lantern couple emerged as real-life lovers. Whether their romance was a slow burn, only they know for sure, but other screen couples, such as Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, took far longer to couple up in real life.

Kunis first kissed Kutcher on the set of That 70s Show. She was 14. He was five years older. Maybe it was because of their screen smooch, maybe it was Cupid’s arrow, but the two stayed in touch and, in later years, developed a friends-with-benefits/no-strings attached relationship. This was ironic, given that they both appeared separately in movies with storylines based around those very themes.

Later, as happens in all the best love stories, the two fell in love. Today, 20 years after their first screen kiss, they seem blissfully happy together.

Another, apparent slow-burn love-story was that of Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis. The two played married couple, Sue and Pete Brockman, in 2007, in the partly improvised BBC comedy show, Outnumbered.

In recent weeks, Dennis confirmed to the Mail on Sunday that he and Skinner were in a relationship.

Because of their on-screen chemistry, their getting-together in real life seems not only understandable, but right. The spark they share lights up the screen, a fact that likely played a role in Outnumbered being supposedly set to return later this year.

On-screen chemistry is difficult to fake. In Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart

had none.

Asked whether she agrees, Dr Ruth Barton, who heads up TCD’s film department replies: “I don’t think being on a Hitchcock set fostered intimacy. Can you think of any Hitchcock film where there’s a convincing screen couple? He was too cynical for that.” As for whether good actors with good direction can convincingly fake on-screen chemistry, she replies: “One of the most steamy on-screen sexual encounters is between Ellen Barkin and Denis Quaid, in The Big Easy, [a performance] which is just down to two good actors and their director, Jim McBride.”

Contrasting their stellar performance with that of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Far and Away, she says: “It would be hard to uncover any particular screen chemistry or anything memorable between them.

Affirming that good actors should make convincing on-screen lovers, she continues: “It’s easier if they actually are a couple and it helps the publicity people, too.”

She’s right, as was the inimitable George Burns, when he quipped: “Sincerity is everything. Fake that and you’ve got it made.”