Deborra Lee Furness has taken a swipe at her ex-husband Hugh Jackman after confirming she’s filing for divorce. Speaking for the first time about what she’s described as a journey of betrayal. Hugh Jackman spent nearly three decades telling every interviewer, every audience, and every camera [music] that pointed at him that his wife was the greatest thing that ever happened to him.
He said it so consistently for so long that the world simply accepted it as one of Hollywood’s few genuine love stories. Then the divorce was finalized on a Monday in June 2025, and within months he was reportedly planning a wedding with someone else. Deborra Lee Furness, the woman who was there before the fame, before Wolverine, before any [music] of it, has now spoken.
And what she chose to say after nearly 2 years of silence is the kind of thing that makes you go back and look at every public declaration he ever made about her, and wonder exactly how long the gap existed between what he was saying and what was actually true. The wedding that reopened everything. Before getting into what Deborra Lee actually said, it is worth understanding what triggered her to say anything at all.
Because for nearly 2 years after the separation announcement, she said almost nothing. She gave one interview. She attended a film screening. She let the story exist in tabloids without adding to it. That kind of sustained [music] public silence from a woman who had every reason to speak is itself a statement, and it makes the moment she finally did speak considerably more significant.
What broke that silence was not the separation. It was not the divorce filing in May 2025. It was the speed of what came after. Reports began surfacing in late 2025 that Hugh Jackman had proposed to Sutton Foster during a New Year’s vacation in Costa Rica. According to sources, he was telling friends about the engagement even before Sutton’s own divorce from screenwriter Ted Griffin had been finalized.
By early 2026, entertainment outlets were reporting that the couple was planning a small private ceremony in New York with Ryan Reynolds reportedly lined up as best man and a guest [music] list drawn heavily from Hugh’s Australian circle. Then came the detail that sources close to Deborra-Lee described as the sharpest part of all of it.
Hugh reportedly had no intention of signing a prenuptial agreement with Sutton, despite having accumulated a fortune estimated at $387 million during his previous marriage. A fortune that was built, in no small part, during the years Deborra-Lee was beside him, raising their children, relocating across the world for his career, and providing the kind of stable domestic foundation that allows a person to focus entirely on becoming one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.
The absence of a prenup with a new partner after a marriage of that length and financial scale is the kind of detail that requires no additional commentary to land. It lands entirely on its own. When sources close to Deborra-Lee were asked how she felt about watching Hugh and Sutton appear together publicly, the response was five words, “A real kick in the teeth.
” Not rage, not a lengthy grievance, just that phrase. Delivered with the particular flatness of someone who has already processed the worst of it and is now simply describing what remains. And what remains, apparently, is a woman who bought the Manhattan penthouse they had shared for $1.7 million 2 days before filing for divorce. She secured that property in her name before she filed a single document.
That is not the move of someone caught off guard. That is the move of someone who had been quietly preparing for an outcome she could see coming long before it arrived publicly. Deborra Lee Furness’ formal statement, released to the Daily Mail, used language that was the exact opposite of the careful corporate phrasing in the joint separation announcement 2 years earlier.
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She wrote about the traumatic journey of betrayal and described it as a profound wound that cuts deep. That word, betrayal, was not accidental. It was chosen by a woman who had waited 2 years to say anything and used her first real opportunity to say exactly what she meant. To understand the full weight of that word, you need to [music] go back 30 years.
Because the story of how this marriage began explains almost everything about why it’s ending hit the way it did. She was the star. He was the newcomer. Here is the part of this story that tends to get lost in the coverage of the divorce. Deborra Lee Furness was not an unknown actress who built her identity around being Hugh Jackman’s wife.
She was an established, award-winning performer before Hugh Jackman existed in any public conversation whatsoever. And that context matters enormously when you try to understand what the last 30 years actually cost her. She trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She worked in the United States on Falcon Crest before returning to Australia, where she built a reputation as one of the most respected actresses in the country.
In 1988, she won Best Actress at the Australian Film Critics Circle for her lead role in the film Shame. By the time she was cast as the lead in the 1995 television series Corelli, Deborra-Lee Furness was a name that Australian audiences and industry professionals recognized. Hugh Jackman, at that point, was 25 years old and fresh out of drama school.
Corelli was his first professional acting job. He played a prisoner. She played the psychologist assigned to work with him. By his own account, the attraction on his side was immediate. By her account, she was considerably more cautious. She was 13 years older than him. She had been in the industry long enough to understand exactly what people would say about a woman in her position falling for a younger man, and she was right about what they would say, because they said it for years.
She tried to end the relationship early, >> [music] >> telling him the age gap was too significant, that it would create problems that goodwill alone could not solve. Hugh Jackman, with nothing to his name except talent and what he described as >> [music] >> absolute certainty, refused to accept that. He told her the age difference was irrelevant.
He told her she was the person he wanted. Within 4 months of dating, he proposed. They married on April 11th, 1996, at St. John’s Church in Toorak, [music] Melbourne. She was 40. He was 27. And for the next 27 years, she walked red carpets knowing that every tabloid photographer was doing the comparison. She aged in public next to a man the world consistently voted the sexiest alive.
She saw the comments. She read the headlines. She absorbed all of it while Hugh told every interviewer who asked that she was the love of his life, the foundation of everything, the person without whom none of the rest of it would have been possible. On their 25th anniversary in 2021, he posted old wedding photographs with a caption describing their love as something that had only deepened with time, that being with her was as natural as breathing.
A woman reads words like that repeated publicly across a quarter century and she builds her life around them. She makes decisions based on them. She turns down opportunities, relocates across the world, raises children, and shows up every single day because she believes what the person next to her has told her publicly and privately is the truth.
What happened after the Broadway revival of The Music Man began rehearsals in February 2022 is where the story shifts entirely. What happened during The Music Man? Hugh Jackman’s Broadway revival of The Music Man began rehearsals in February 2022. His co-star was Sutton Foster, one of the most decorated performers in Broadway history.
A two-time Tony Award winner with a reputation that stands entirely on its own merits. The show ran through January 2023, nearly a full year of nightly performances, press appearances, and the specific intimacy that develops between lead performers who share a stage every single evening. According to multiple sources and subsequent reporting by [music] US Weekly, the relationship between Hugh and Sutton during that run became what people inside the production described as an open secret.
Cast members reportedly observed extended physical closeness between them backstage. Sutton spoke in interviews during the show’s run about the pre-show ritual she and Hugh had developed, describing it as time they set aside each night specifically to talk and connect before going on stage. She described it warmly and publicly, which in retrospect reads differently than it likely seemed at the time.
Sources close to Deborra-Lee said she became aware that something had shifted. Her assessment, as relayed through people close to her, was that an emotional affair had developed during the production, regardless of whether it had crossed into anything physical while the marriage was still intact. And for someone who had been with one person for nearly three decades, the distinction between emotional betrayal and physical betrayal is less significant than people outside the situation tend to assume.
The turning away is the wound. The specific direction someone turns toward is secondary. What makes the timeline of 2023 particularly difficult to sit with is the sequence of events. In April of that year, Hugh posted [music] a public anniversary tribute to Deborra-Lee. In May, the two of them attended the Met Gala together, walking the carpet the way they had done for years, presenting the image that had become one one Hollywood’s most familiar.
4 months after that, on September 15th, 2023, they released a joint statement announcing their separation after almost three decades together. The language of that statement described their situation as a shift in their journey and attributed the decision to a desire to pursue individual growth. It was the kind of language that is specifically constructed to say as little as possible while sounding considered and mutual.
If you have ever been on the receiving end of careful, rehearsed language from someone who has already decided, you understand precisely what that phrasing conceals. Deborra-Lee said nothing publicly for nearly 2 years after that statement. She attended a film event in May 2024 and, when a journalist asked what the previous year had taught her, responded that she had learned she was strong and resilient.
That answer, offered quietly without elaboration, is the kind of thing a person says when they are still in the middle of surviving something and are not yet ready to describe what it actually was. Meanwhile, in October 2024, Sutton Foster filed for divorce from her husband of a decade, screenwriter Ted Griffin.
In January 2025, Ewan Sutton were photographed together in Los Angeles, their relationship now visible and confirmed. Whatever had existed in the space between friendship and something else during The Music Man was now public. The divorce, the penthouse, and the paper trail. The financial architecture of the Jackman divorce tells its own story and it is worth examining in some detail because the decisions Deborra-Lee made in the days before filing reveal a woman who understood exactly what she was doing and had thought carefully about
how to protect herself. On May 21st, 2025, 2 days before filing for divorce, Deborra Lee paid $1.7 million to acquire sole ownership of their Manhattan penthouse. She did not wait to see how the asset division would play out. She moved first, secured the property in her own name, and then filed. That sequence is deliberate.
It reflects legal and financial preparation that does not happen overnight. The divorce was finalized in early June 2025. The total marital estate was estimated at $387 million, accumulated across nearly three decades that included Hugh’s X-Men franchise earnings, his Broadway work, his various endorsements, and the properties the couple held in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Australia, and England.
The split of that estate has not been reported in complete detail, but the overall scale of what was being divided reflects [music] just how much had been built during those 27 years. Deborra Lee’s public statement, released around the time of the filing, was the first time she had spoken in anything approaching direct terms about what had happened.
She wrote about the traumatic experience of betrayal and described it as a wound that cuts deeply. She expressed compassion for others who had experienced similar situations. The statement was brief, but it used the word betrayal twice, which is not an accident when a person has had nearly 2 years to decide what they want to say and how they want to say it.
Hugh Jackman’s response to what was coming next reportedly caused its own friction. Multiple outlets began reporting that Deborra-Lee was in discussions with publishers about a memoir covering her marriage, her divorce, and her experience navigating the aftermath. >> [music] >> Sources indicated there was genuine interest from multiple publishers and that she had been keeping detailed personal notes, described by people familiar with the situation as a divorce diary, throughout the separation period.
Hugh was reportedly aware that the book was a possibility and had hoped she would decide against it. Sources connected to Hugh and Sutton described the project in terms that suggested anxiety rather than indifference [music] about what it might contain. A woman who spent 27 years keeping the private details of her marriage private, who said almost nothing publicly for 2 years after her separation, who chose her words with evident care when she finally did speak, is not someone who would undertake a memoir carelessly or
without knowing precisely what she intends to say. Whether the book ultimately reflects what the separation truly cost her or remains a more measured account, it represents something that the joint statement in September 2023 entirely erased. Her version of what happened. And she has clearly decided that version deserves to exist on the record.
What 27 years actually looked like. The public narrative around the Jackman marriage focused almost entirely on its longevity and on Hugh’s consistent, vocal devotion to his wife. What received considerably less attention across all those years was what Deborra-Lee was actually doing with her time and what she sacrificed to make that marriage function the way it did.
After their wedding in 1996, Deborra-Lee and Hugh tried to have children. The process involved IVF treatments and multiple miscarriages. Hugh spoke about this period publicly on several occasions. Deborah-Lee spoke about it considerably less, which is itself a meaningful detail about how she processed difficult experiences and which one of them was more comfortable using their private pain as public content.
She carried that grief in the way her generation of women often did, not because she was unaffected, but because she had decided certain things were hers to hold privately. When biological options did not produce the outcome they hoped for, they adopted. Their son Oscar was born in 2000. Their daughter Ava arrived in 2005. Deborah-Lee became a committed advocate for adoption reform in Australia, working to change legislation and reduce the stigma faced by adoptive families.
She did not treat motherhood as a consolation outcome. She treated it as a cause worth fighting for publicly and a relationship worth protecting privately. That advocacy work, which continued for years and involved direct engagement with Australian lawmakers, was entirely her own initiative. It was not connected to Hugh’s career or his public profile.
It was something she built independently using her own platform and her own conviction at a time when adoption reform in Australia was genuinely underfunded and politically overlooked. She also made career decisions across those decades that reflected the realities of being the supporting partner in a marriage where one person’s career was operating at a genuinely global scale.
Hugh’s commitments [music] required the family to be mobile. Deborah-Lee maintained her own work where she could, including her role in Force of Nature, The Dry 2, which she was promoting in May 2024. But, the architecture of her professional life was shaped by the constraints of being married to someone whose schedule was dictated by franchise filming, Broadway runs, and international press tours.
There were roles she could not take because the timing conflicted with what the family needed. Some projects required a stability of location that she could not guarantee. Those are not dramatic sacrifices that make headlines. They are the quiet, accumulated costs of building a life around someone else’s trajectory.
And they rarely get factored into the public accounting of what a marriage actually contains. The specific cost of that arrangement is something that becomes visible only in retrospect, once the marriage is over and you look back at the record of what each person gave and what each person received. Hugh received a stable home, a grounded partner, an advocate, a co-parent, and someone who defended him publicly against every [music] tabloid rumor, including years of speculation about his personal life that Deborah-Lee
consistently and quietly shut down simply by being present [music] and unwavering. What she received was 27 years of public declarations that were apparently more comfortable for him to make than they ultimately were for him to sustain. And then, a joint statement written in language designed to make both of them sound equally responsible for an outcome that the subsequent timeline strongly suggests was not equally initiated.
She was the one who tried to walk away at the beginning because she could see the risks. He was the one who talked her out of it. 27 years later, the person who left was not the one who had been afraid to stay. Now, it’s time to hear from you. Deborra Lee Furness spent 27 years proving every skeptic wrong about whether that marriage would last.
And it still ended the way it did. What does that say about whether public declarations of love actually tell you anything real about a relationship? And if she writes that memoir and tells the full story in her own words, is that betrayal? Or is it simply the one thing in this entire situation that she gets to own completely?
