12 FAMOUS Actresses Who Had NO CLUE Their Husbands Were GAY 

 

 

 

the word marriage from two people who love each other, why the state should be interested, but I don’t understand the preoccupation with gays being permitted to marry. >> Hollywood has always had its secrets, and behind some of its most glamorous marriages were stories nobody was supposed to know.

 Stories that only came out years, sometimes decades later. Today, we are looking at 12 famous actresses who had no clue their husbands were gay. Number 12, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli. Judy Garland is one of the most beloved performers in Hollywood history, but her personal life was marked by heartbreak that many people never saw coming, including Garland herself.

 Her five marriages were, each in their own way, a search for something she could never quite hold on to, and two of those marriages ended in a revelation that shaped how people understood both her life and the broader culture of Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century. In 1945, she married director Vincente Minnelli, the man behind some of the most celebrated musicals of the era, including Meet Me in St.

 Louis, which he had directed with Garland in the lead role just the year before. By all outward appearances, they were one of Hollywood’s golden couples, a brilliant director and a luminous star building a life together. Their daughter, Liza Minnelli, was born in 1946, but behind closed doors, the marriage was troubled in ways that Garland began to understand only as the years went on.

Minnelli had lived openly as a gay man in New York before arriving in Hollywood, but the studio system of the 1940s demanded that its stars conform to a certain image, and that image did not include openly gay directors. He married Garland in part because the marriage provided the cover that the industry required of him.

 Garland eventually became aware of the truth and by all accounts the realization was devastating. They divorced in 1951 after 6 years of marriage. What makes this story particularly striking is that it was not the last time it happened to Garland. She would later marry actor Mark Herron in 1965 only to discover after a very short time that he too was gay.

 For Garland the pattern had repeated itself without her having any way of knowing it would. Vincente Minnelli went on to marry three more times after Garland. He never publicly confirmed his sexuality but his history and the testimony of those who knew him in his New York years has been widely documented. He died in 1986. His daughter Liza has spoken over the years about the complexity of her parents relationship with a care and a warmth that reflects just how much she loved both of them whatever the circumstances of the marriage.

Number 11, Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen. If Judy Garland’s story is remarkable the fact that her own daughter repeated a version of it just a decade later is something that stops people in their tracks every time they hear it. Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland’s daughter with Vincente Minnelli, married Australian entertainer Peter Allen in 1967 when she was 21 years old.

 They had met when Allen was performing as part of a duo called The Allen Brothers opening for Judy Garland on her Australian tour in 1964. Garland herself had introduced the two perhaps not fully grasping what she was setting in motion. Allen was charming, energetic, musically gifted and genuinely fond of Liza.

 The marriage had warmth in it. It was not simply a transaction. Allen was gay, and while the early years of the marriage had an element of genuine affection between two young people with enormous talent and enormous energy, the fundamental truth of who he was eventually made the marriage impossible to sustain. They divorced in 1974, after 7 years together.

 Allen later came out publicly, had a long-term relationship with a man named Gregory Cornell, and built a successful career as a songwriter. He co-wrote I Honestly Love You, which became a major hit for Olivia Newton-John, and Don’t Cry Out Loud, and wrote Arthur’s Theme, Best That You Can Do, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1982.

 He was, by any measure, genuinely talented. Allen died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. He was 48 years old. Liza has spoken about Peter Allen with generosity and affection over the years. She has said that she loved him, and that the end of the marriage was painful in the way that endings are painful even when they are necessary.

 What she has also acknowledged is that she was 21 when they married, barely an adult, the daughter of a woman whose own romantic life had been defined by complexity and difficulty, and that she did not see it coming. The fact that both mother and daughter found themselves married to gay men, Judy twice, Liza, at least in this first marriage, is one of those Hollywood patterns that says something about the specific world they lived in, where a certain kind of man with a certain kind of artistic sensibility was drawn to women with similarly large

presences, and where the arrangement served various purposes until it no longer could. Number 10, Phyllis Gates and Rock Hudson. Rock Hudson is one of the most famous cases of a gay actor living a closeted life in Hollywood, and his marriage to Phyllis Gates in 1955 sits at the center of that story. Hudson was, by the mid-1950s, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, a rugged, impossibly handsome leading man whose on-screen presence made him an object of genuine romantic fascination for audiences across America. He

appeared opposite Doris Day in a string of romantic comedies that made the two of them one of the most beloved pairings in the history of the genre. Audiences who watched those films saw a man who embodied heterosexual charm so completely that the idea of him being anything else seemed, at the time, almost unthinkable.

 He was also gay, and he had been gay throughout his entire Hollywood career, maintaining relationships with men while the studio and his publicist carefully managed his public image. His agent, Henry Willson, who also represented other clients he helped keep in the closet, was deeply involved in arranging the aspects of Hudson’s life that needed to remain hidden.

 The marriage to Phyllis Gates, who was Willson’s own secretary, was arranged, at least in part, to counter rumors that were beginning to circulate about Hudson’s sexuality. Whispers had appeared in a gossip column, and the studio moved quickly to neutralize them. A marriage to a woman was the most effective tool available for that purpose in 1955 Hollywood.

 The marriage lasted 3 years, from 1955 to 1958. Gates later wrote a memoir in which she said she had no idea Hudson was gay when she married him, and that she was blindsided when the marriage collapsed. She described falling in love with him genuinely and being genuinely confused and hurt when the relationship deteriorated.

 Hudson’s friends and associates from that era have offered different accounts. Some have suggested that Gates was aware, or at least had access to enough information to have known. Others have supported her version of events entirely. The truth, as is often the case with these stories, probably sits somewhere in the middle. A person who may have sensed something without having the framework to name it clearly in a world that did not encourage that kind of naming.

 Hudson never publicly came out during his lifetime. In 1985, he became one of the first major public figures to announce that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, a disclosure that came only when his illness had made concealment impossible. He died that same year at the age of 59. His death was a turning point in how the American public understood the AIDS crisis and who it affected.

 For many people, Hudson’s death was the moment when AIDS stopped being something that happened to strangers and became something that happened to people they felt they knew and cared about. Phyllis Gates died in 2006. She had outlived Hudson by more than two decades and the marriage that had ended so quietly in 1958 had defined in the public memory a significant part of both of their stories.

Number nine. Angela Lansbury and Richard Cromwell. Angela Lansbury is one of the most distinguished actresses in the history of American entertainment, an icon of stage and screen whose career has spanned more than eight decades. She received Academy Award nominations for her very first two film roles and gave one of the most beloved television performances in the long run of murder.

She wrote from 1984 to 1996. But before any of that fame arrived, she made a brief, youthful marriage that ended in circumstances she did not fully understand at the time. In 1945, when Lansbury was 19 years old, she married actor Richard Cromwell. He was 35, 16 years her senior. The marriage lasted less than a year.

 They divorced in 1946, and at the time, the reasons for the breakup were not publicly disclosed. In the world of 1940s Hollywood, the quiet end of a brief marriage was not something that required public explanation. Cromwell was gay. Lansbury revealed this fact many years later, saying that the marriage ended because of his sexuality, and that she had not known about it when they married.

 Given her age at the time of the wedding, barely out of her teens, newly arrived in Hollywood, still finding her footing in a world that was entirely new to her, the situation takes on a particular poignancy. She had no framework for understanding what was happening, and no one who could explain it to her in terms that would have been useful.

 Cromwell died in 1960 at the age of 50. He had worked relatively little in the years after the marriage to Lansbury, and his place in film history rests primarily on his earlier work in the 1930s. Lansbury, for her part, went on to marry Peter Shaw in 1949, a match that was entirely different in character. That marriage lasted until Shaw’s death in 2003, 54 years of genuine partnership that she has described as the foundation of everything else in her life.

 The brief first marriage to Cromwell became, in retrospect, a chapter that she could discuss with the distance of someone who had built something very different and very lasting afterward. She is now in her late 90s and remains one of the most revered figures in the entertainment world. That she began her adult life with this particular difficulty and that she went on to achieve everything she achieved in the decades that followed is simply part of the texture of a very long and remarkable life.

Number eight, Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson. Vanessa Redgrave is one of the finest actresses of the 20th century, a performer of extraordinary range and commitment whose career has included some of the most demanding roles in British and international theater and film. Her marriage to director Tony Richardson was, in its early years, one of the great creative partnerships of the British film world.

 They married in 1962. Richardson had already directed Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, films that established him as a central figure of the British New Wave in cinema, a movement that was changing how British film thought about class, sex, and and social reality.

 Redgrave was already establishing herself as one of the most compelling actresses of her generation. They were, by all appearances, two artists at the height of their powers building something together. Both of whom became accomplished actresses in their own right, carrying on a family tradition of performing that runs through three generations of the Redgrave family.

Richardson did not come out as gay during the marriage. He and Redgrave separated and eventually divorced in 1967 with the specific reasons kept largely private. The official story of the marriage’s end was, like many of these stories from that era, carefully managed. Richardson went on to have relationships with both men and women in the years that followed.

 It was only when Richardson was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s that the full truth of his sexuality became part of the public record. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991 at the age of 63. Redgrave had been divorced from him for more than two decades by then, and she processed the disclosure and his death privately, as she has processed most things in her life.

 Natasha Richardson, her daughter, died tragically in 2009 following a skiing accident at a resort in Quebec. She was 45 years old and at the height of a distinguished career. Vanessa Redgrave’s loss of her daughter is something she has spoken about with tremendous pain in the years since. The marriage to Richardson is simply one chapter in a life that has carried a great deal more than its share of grief and complexity.

Number seven, Betsy Drake and Cary Grant. Cary Grant is widely considered one of the most charismatic actors in the history of Hollywood. A performer whose combination of wit, physical grace, and understated charm placed him in a category that very few actors in the history of the medium have ever occupied.

 He was also a man whose private life was considerably more complicated than his public image suggested. Grant was married five times across his life. His second wife was actress Betsy Drake, whom he married in 1949 after the two had appeared together in the 1949 film Every Girl Should Be Married. Drake was a thoughtful, intelligent woman who became, later in life, a psychotherapist.

Her interest in the inner life of people was genuine and sustained. The marriage lasted 13 years, which makes it longer than most of Grant’s other marriages. During those 13 years, Drake was publicly supportive and privately navigating a relationship that was, in ways she has never entirely disclosed, not what she expected it to be.

The question of Grant’s has been the subject of considerable historical discussion. The most frequently referenced piece of evidence is his decade-long living arrangement with actor Randolph Scott, whom Grant shared homes with in Hollywood through much of the 1930s. Photographs of the two men together, their evident closeness, and the nature of the arrangement have been interpreted in various ways by various writers and biographers.

 Grant, when the subject arose in interviews, consistently denied being gay and expressed irritation at the question. Drake has been measured in how she has spoken about the marriage in the years since. She has not made dramatic public claims about Grant’s private life, and whatever she knows or suspects about the full nature of who he was, she has chosen to hold privately.

He died in 1986 without having addressed the subject directly or definitively. What is clear is that the marriage, for all its length, did not survive. It ended in divorce in 1962, and that Drake’s subsequent life, built around her work as a therapist and author, was a life she built largely apart from the world of Hollywood fame she had once inhabited.

Number six. Fran Drescher and Peter Mark Jacobson. Not all of these stories belong to the golden age of Hollywood. Fran Drescher’s marriage to Peter Marc Jacobson was a partnership that lasted more than 20 years and that ended in circumstances that Drescher has spoken about publicly and with considerable candor.

 They met as teenagers growing up in Queens, New York and married in 1978 when both were young and at the beginning of what would become significant careers in entertainment. The marriage had the particular texture of a partnership between two people who had known each other as kids and who were building their adult lives together.

 There was real history there, real shared experience, real friendship underneath everything else. Jacobson went on to become the co-creator of The Nanny, the hugely successful sitcom that ran on CBS from 1993 to 1999 and that made Drescher one of the most recognizable faces in American television. The show was, in a very direct sense, a product of both of them.

Drescher’s performance defined it, but Jacobson’s creative partnership was integral to what it was. They made something significant together, which made the end of the marriage more complicated than it might otherwise have been. They separated in 1996 when Jacobson came out to Drescher as gay. The divorce was finalized in 1999.

Drescher has spoken about the revelation with a frankness and a generosity that has surprised people who might have expected more bitterness. She has said that their love was genuine even if the nature of his made the marriage ultimately untenable and she has maintained a genuine friendship with Jacobson in the years since the divorce.

 They have continued to work together professionally on various projects, a collaboration that speaks to the unusual depth of what they managed to rebuild after the end of the marriage. What makes Trussure’s story particularly notable is the openness with which she has addressed it. She has not treated it as a painful secret or as something to be managed carefully for public consumption.

She has talked about it on television, in interviews, in the kind of public honesty that reflects a combination of resilience and a genuine desire to help other people in similar situations feel less alone. Jacobson has also been open about his sexuality and about the marriage. Both of them have managed to turn a situation that might have been defined entirely by its painful elements into something that accommodated over time the genuine affection and shared history that had always existed between them.

Number five, Charlotte Rae and John Strauss. Charlotte Rae is best remembered as Mrs. Edna Garrett on the long-running television series The Facts of Life, which ran from 1979 to 1988, one of the most enduring characters in American family television. Before that, she had appeared on Diff’rent Strokes as the same character, introducing Mrs.

Garrett to audiences who would follow her onto the spin-off. She was a beloved television presence for millions of American viewers, and her personal life carried a complexity that most of those viewers never knew about. She had been married since 1951 to John Strauss, a composer and musician. The marriage lasted 25 years.

 During that time, they had two sons together, Andrew and Larry, and built what appeared from the outside to be a stable and functional partnership through the decades of Rae’s developing career. 25 years is long enough to make a shared life feel genuinely solid, genuinely established. In 1976, Straus came out as gay. The marriage ended.

 Rae, who was 50 years old at the time, found herself starting over in ways she had not anticipated and had not prepared for. She spoke about the experience in her 2015 memoir, The Facts of My Life, with the honesty about how difficult it had been and how unprepared she had felt. She wrote about the shock of the revelation, not necessarily that she had suspected nothing, but that 25 years of shared life had contained this truth that was simultaneously so significant and so separate from the daily texture of what they had built.

She described the grief of it alongside the understanding that eventually came, an understanding that her husband had been dealing with something he himself had not been fully able to acknowledge or address across all those years. What is particularly notable about Charlotte Rae’s account is the compassion she extended toward Straus in writing about him.

 She did not frame the marriage or its end as a story of betrayal, exactly. She framed it as the story of two people who had genuinely tried and whose trying had reached a limit that neither of them had anticipated. That kind of generosity, especially after 25 years and two children and everything that comes with that length of shared life, is not nothing.

 Charlotte Rae died in 2018 at the age of 92, having spent decades after the divorce building a career that gave her some of her greatest public recognition. The Facts of Life years came after the marriage ended, which means that the Mrs. Garrett that America fell in love with was a woman who had already navigated one of the most disorienting experiences of her personal life.

Number four, Berry Berenson and Anthony Perkins. Anthony Perkins is one of those actors whose defining role, Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, was so overwhelming in its cultural impact that it followed him throughout his career and his life. He was also a man who spent decades navigating his own sexuality in private while maintaining a public identity that did not reflect it.

Perkins had relationships with men throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Relationships that were known to people close to him, but carefully kept from public view. In 1973, he married photographer and model Berry Berenson, the granddaughter of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the sister of actress Marisa Berenson.

 Berry Berenson has been described by people who knew her as having been genuinely in love with Perkins and genuinely unaware of the full history of his private life before the marriage. Whether she knew after the marriage what she had not known before is a more complicated question that the historical record does not answer cleanly.

 Perkins died in 1992 of AIDS-related complications. He had not disclosed his diagnosis publicly before his death. It was disclosed by his family after he died. Berry Berenson’s response to his death was one of profound grief. She spoke of him as the love of her life and continued to speak of him that way in the years that followed.

 Berry Berenson died on September 11th, 2001 aboard American Airlines Flight 11, one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center in New York. She was 53 years old. The tragedy of her death added an additional layer of loss to a story that had already carried more than its share. Their son Oz Perkins has gone on to a career as a film director, becoming one of the more distinctive voices in contemporary horror cinema.

Number three, Carol Channing and Charles Lowe. Carol Channing was one of the most singular presences in American musical theater, the woman who created the role of Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly on Broadway in 1964 and who embodied a particular kind of theatrical larger-than-lifeness that could fill any stage she walked onto.

 Her personal life was, for decades, organized around a marriage that turned out to be something other than what it appeared. She married her manager, Charles Lowe, in 1966. He remained her manager for most of their time together, and the professional dimension of the relationship gave it a structure and a purpose that kept it functional even as the personal dimension grew more complicated over the decades.

 Lowe was believed by many people in their social world to be gay. He never publicly confirmed it, and Channing, for most of the years they were married, did not speak about it, either. They were estranged for many years before Lowe’s death in 1999, and their marriage lasted on paper from 1956 until that death, 43 years.

Channing eventually revealed in her 2002 memoir, Just Lucky I Guess, that she had realized the truth about Lowe at some point during the marriage, but that she had stayed because leaving felt too complicated, too disruptive, too uncertain. She also revealed in the memoir that she had been in love long ago with another man entirely, a childhood sweetheart named Harry Colligan, whom she eventually married in 2003, four years after Lowe’s death.

 She was 82 years old when she and Colligan married. He had been the one she wanted before all of it, and she had finally gotten back to him. Channing died in 2019. The story of the marriage to Lowe and the marriage to Colligan at 82 and everything in between is one of the more complex personal narratives in the history of American show business.

Number two, Elton John and Renate Blauel. Elton John is one of the most prominent openly gay figures in the music world, but there was a period in his life when the full truth of his sexuality was something he was still working through. And during that period, he married. By the early 1980s, Elton John was already one of the most successful recording artists in history.

 He had dominated the charts throughout the 1970s with a run of albums and singles that remains almost unparalleled in terms of commercial impact. He had also, by that point, made various public statements about his own sexuality that were ambiguous or contradictory. He had described himself as bisexual in a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, which was a more honest disclosure than most public figures of his stature were making at that time, but it was not the full truth, either.

 In 1984, he married Renate Blauel, a German recording engineer who had worked with him on several albums, most notably the 1983 album Too Low for Zero. The wedding took place in Sydney, Australia on Valentine’s Day. It was, by external appearance, a romantic and significant event, the famous pop star marrying in a foreign country in a ceremony that attracted considerable press attention.

The marriage lasted 4 years. They divorced in 1988. In subsequent interviews and eventually in his 2019 autobiography, Me, Elton John spoke with candor about the marriage and about the confusion and pain of that period of his life. He has described it as an attempt to find in a heterosexual relationship a stability and a normalcy that he had not been able to build on the terms that were actually true for him.

 He was not trying to deceive Renate Maliciously. He was, in some genuine sense, trying to convince himself, but the outcome for her was deeply painful regardless of his intentions, and that is something he has acknowledged. Renate Blauel maintained a very private life in the years after the divorce.

 In 2020, she took legal action related to how the marriage had been discussed in Elton John’s memoir. The details of the legal settlement were not made public. The action reflected the fact that for Renate, the marriage was not simply a historical footnote, but a significant and personal experience that she had the right to have handled with care.

 Elton John came out fully and publicly in 1988, the same year the divorce was finalized. He met David Furnish in 1993, formed a civil partnership with him in 2005, and legally married him in 2014. He has spoken of Furnish and their life together as the thing he had always been looking for. The marriage to Renate Blauel stands as a chapter from a time before he had fully arrived at that understanding.

Number one, Wanda Sykes and Dave Hall. Wanda Sykes is one of the most successful comedians and actresses of her generation, a performer whose timing and wit have made her a fixture in American comedy for more than three decades. She is also, since 2008, openly gay. And she was, before that, married to a man.

 Sykes married Dave Hall in 1991. By her own subsequent account, she was not fully aware of her own at the time of the marriage. Not in the way that makes it a simple story of a gay man deceiving an unknowing wife, but in the more complicated way that reflects how difficult and confusing the process of understanding one’s own identity can be, particularly in earlier decades when the cultural framework for that understanding was considerably more limited. The marriage lasted 7 years.

They divorced in 1998. In 2008, Sykes publicly came out as gay at a rally in Las Vegas protesting Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that had banned same-sex marriage. The announcement was both personal and political. She was not simply sharing information about herself, but aligning that disclosure with the broader cause of marriage equality.

 Later that year, she married Alex Sykes, with whom she has twins. She has spoken about her first marriage with honesty, acknowledging that it was a period in her life during which she was still figuring out who she was, and that Dave Hall was not a villain in that story, but simply a person who had married someone who was on a journey she had not yet completed.

 Unlike some of the others on this list, Sykes’s story is one in which the wife, not just the husband, was navigating questions about identity. It complicates the simple framework of the video’s premise in a way that is worth acknowledging because not all of these stories are the same story even when the surface details look similar.

 Hollywood has always been a place where public image and private reality existed in separate rooms. The women on this list, some of them icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood, some beloved figures in American television and entertainment. Some of them now gone. Each experienced in her own way the particular difficulty of discovering that the person she had built a life with was not entirely who she had believed him to be.

 These stories come from different eras, different circumstances, and very different degrees of knowing and not knowing. Judy is inseparable from the studio system that enforced a particular vision of who its stars were allowed to be. Rock Hudson’s story is inseparable from the AIDS crisis that eventually made concealment impossible.

 Fran Drescher’s story is one of two people who loved each other genuinely and then figured out over time that love was not the only thing that mattered. Wanda Sykes’s story is one in which the lines are more blurred than the others because she too was on a journey of self-discovery during the years of her first marriage. What connects them is not a simple shared experience of deception.

 It is something more complicated, the experience of building a life with someone and then discovering that a fundamental aspect of that life was built on a foundation that could not hold. What each of these women did after that discovery, how they rebuilt, how they spoke or did not speak about what they had been through, how they carried the experience forward is different in every case. Most of them kept going.

Most of them built lives and careers that outlasted and outgrew the marriages that ended in this way. Angela Lansbury’s 54-year second marriage, Fran Drescher’s unusual post-divorce friendship with Jacobson, Carol Channing marrying her childhood sweetheart at 82, Liza Minnelli continuing to perform with the same electric commitment that defined her from the beginning.