Laura Dern left home to work on a film, and while she was away, her partner married someone else. She told the story herself in Talk magazine in 2000: “My boyfriend got married, and I never heard from him again”.
Dern and Billy Bob Thornton had been together for more than two years, shared a home, and were engaged. But in 1999, while filming Pushing Tin, Thornton met Angelina Jolie, who was 20 years younger than him.
A year later, the couple married in Las Vegas in a spontaneous wedding with no advance notice. According to reports, Dern found out through calls from news programs.
She described it with a devastating phrase: “It’s like a sudden death”. Thornton, who has been married six times, and Jolie separated in 2002 and divorced in 2003.
He attributed it to their opposite lifestyles: she had a global lifestyle, while he was agoraphobic. And so, one of Hollywood’s most remembered episodes ended with a fiancée learning through the press that her story was over.
