The Messiest Celebrity Affairs Of The 1990s

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Forget the meet-cutes, the proposals, and the walks down the aisle. Nothing gets the tabloid press, and those of us who feed on showbiz gossip, salivating more than news of a celebrity relationship that's gone decidedly south. Even more so if it entails an act of infidelity. And the 1990s, an era that also gave us the political scandal involving Bill "I did not have sexual relations" Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and the royal family saga of Princess "there were three of us in the marriage" Diana and Prince Charles, served up plenty of examples.

And thanks to the rise of the internet and proliferation of supermarket magazines and TV channels, they were covered in more detail than ever before. Who can forget the national sweetheart who ditched her future husband for his best friend? Or the thespian who left his wife for a co-star who was playing his mother at the time? Or the serial monogamist who saw his partner's work commitments as an opportunity to get hitched to another woman? Here's a look at 10 of the messiest affairs of the decade.

Five years after they were first introduced to each other on "The Arsenio Hall Show," Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson were cast opposite each other in the 1993 romantic comedy "Made in America." And the sparks flew just as much off-screen, too. But while the former was very much single and ready to mingle, the latter was still a married man.

Although they tried to keep things hush-hush, word eventually got out, and Danson's wife of 16 years, Cassandra Coates, subsequently headed for the divorce courts. The "Cheers" star further damaged his reputation later that same year when he decided to don blackface to impersonate Goldberg at a comedy club roast.

By the end of the following year, the couple had gone their separate ways. "It was really painful, and it was very public," Goldberg told Closer (via The New York Post) about the split. "And the loss of his friendship hurts a great deal. We can never go and have a soda, anywhere. I'm friends with almost every man I've gone out with, except this man." Danson has been less candid about their 18 months together, but in an interview with NPR, he hinted that he may have been at fault for their breakup, remarking, "I didn't really grow up emotionally until I was in my 40s ... I am horribly embarrassed about many things in my past, things that are cringeworthy, but that's my life."

In 1995, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh released a joint statement confirming that they'd split after six years of marriage, citing their work commitments and the lengthy periods of time apart while fulfilling them as the reason. However, several years later, the former revealed that infidelity had, in fact, been the root cause.

"I was utterly, utterly blind to the fact that he had relationships with other women on set," Thompson told The New Yorker, referring to Branagh and his "Frankenstein" co-star Helena Bonham Carter. "What I learned was how easy it is to be blinded by your own desire to deceive yourself." She also spoke of how the betrayal deeply affected her, recalling, "Any sense of being a lovable or worthy person had gone completely."

Branagh and Bonham Carter ended up dating each other for five years before he married Lindsay Brunnock in 2003. Coincidentally, just a couple of months later, Thompson got her own happy ending when she wed fellow actor Greg Wise. And she was also able to draw upon her experiences later that same year in the most heartbreaking "Love Actually" scene. "I had my heart very badly broken by Ken, she said during a theater fundraiser (via Independent), before referencing the moment when her character realizes that her husband has bought another woman some expensive jewelry. "So, I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn't meant for me."

Julia Roberts was undoubtedly the perfect leading lady for the 1999 rom-com "Runaway Bride." After all, only eight years previously, she famously jilted her similarly famous husband-to-be in the kind of drama you might expect from a Hollywood screenwriter.

Indeed, on the very day she was due to walk down the aisle with her "Flatliners" co-star Kiefer Sutherland in a swanky multimillion-dollar ceremony, Roberts fled the country with the man he called his best friend, Jason Patric. And according to onlookers, they were "practically making love" on their flight to Ireland. Of course, things between the pair had already become decidedly rocky beforehand. The tabloid press reported that Sutherland had strayed with a stripper during his bachelor party, allegedly prompting Roberts to seek treatment for "the flu" at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. In fact, they are said to have split up three days before they'd planned to say "I do," with the "Pretty Woman" star apparently the one doing the dumping. 

Roberts did eventually get hitched in 1993 to country singer Lyle Lovett. Sutherland, meanwhile, exchanged vows with Kelly Winn in 1996. He and Patric, who has never tied the knot, understandably didn't speak for nearly two decades before patching things up. On Michael Rosenbaum's podcast, "Inside of You," Sutherland claimed he'd been more affected by Patric's absence than Roberts'. "I lost my pick-up and my dog and my best friend, and I miss my best friend," he said (via The New York Post). 

It's rare for the origin story of a celebrity affair to be screened live on television. But that's exactly what happened in 1994 when TV presenter Paula Yates interviewed — and outrageously flirted with — INXS frontman Michael Hutchence for British morning show "The Big Breakfast" on a giant pink bed.

The pair had actually first met nine years earlier during an interview on another TV show, "The Tube." But their on-screen reunion was something else as Yates draped herself around Hutchence, proclaimed (via The Standard), "For the first time, this is a guest I want to have my leg over," and acted like an excitable schoolgirl throughout. The pair even made fun of each other's romantic partners at the time, with Yates making a bad-taste quip about Hutchence's model girlfriend Helena Christensen and the rock star arguing that he'd been more successful in the charts than her husband Bob Geldof.

There are question marks as to whether the giddy pair were already engaging in an affair by this point or started one soon afterward. Either way, they soon made it clear they were together, and at the start of 1995, Yates dumped Geldof to continue pursuing her relationship with the rocker. A year later, they welcomed daughter Tiger Lily into the world. But their story had a truly tragic ending. Hutchence died by suicide in 1997, and three years later, Yates suffered a fatal heroin overdose.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

You could almost fill this entire list with affairs that Mick Jagger is said to have conducted while married to the long-suffering model Jerry Hall: The veteran rocker was linked to everyone from model Jana Rajlich to Hollywood actor Uma Thurman. But Carla Bruni, who'd later become the first lady of France after marrying president Nicolas Sarkozy, appears to have been the most enduring "other woman."

The pair reportedly first met in 1992, and Jagger is said to have fallen so hard that within just 24 hours of welcoming his third child with Hall, Georgia, he took a plane out to meet Bruni in Thailand. When word of their dalliances got out, the Rolling Stone's wife issued him a "me or her" ultimatum. And his decision broke Bruni's heart, as she later recalled (via The Telegraph) in Christopher Anderson's biography "Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger": "I thought I'd never get over it. I used to wake up every morning in despair. I thought I'd never fall in love with someone else."

But the pair didn't seem to cut all ties. In 1998, soon after Hall had described (via The Guardian) her husband as a "lying, cheating, no-good slimeball" in response to the news that he'd fathered a child with Luciana Gimenez Morad — a 20-something model from Brazil — he was pictured reuniting with Bruni in the French capital.

At the same time he was steering the box-office blockbuster "Titanic," James Cameron was also trying to navigate a love triangle that eventually resulted in two different marriages. Indeed, the filmmaker had been in a relationship with "The Terminator" actor Linda Hamilton for several years when he embarked on an affair — well, kinda — with one of the much younger actors he was directing, Suzy Amis.

Hamilton explained in a chat with Daily Mail that she had actually given Cameron permission to see other women. "'Titanic' was the most painful thing in the world," she said. "But this wasn't because Jim was cheating on me. Jim went off with Suzy because we were taking a break from each other and he was free to go with her. It was a painful time because we'd had a relationship where I'd push him away, then he'd push me away."

Cameron ended up returning to Hamilton, who is also the mother of his daughter Josephine, and in 1997, the pair got hitched. But this wasn't the end of the story. "Then he felt terrible about what he'd done to her and went back to her," Hamilton recalled. "Yes, there was a period when he did sort of cross over because he was confused." After hitting the divorce courts, Cameron said "I do" in 2000 to Amis, who played Rose's granddaughter in the present-day "Titanic" scenes, and they went on to have three kids together.

As one of Hollywood's most famous womanizers, the oft-shady Jack Nicholson is no stranger to adultery. Just ask Anjelica Huston, who finally called time on their 17-year on/off relationship upon learning that he'd fathered another child with the much younger actor Rebecca Broussard. But the star of "The Shining" wasn't the cheating party in this particular instance.

Indeed, Nicholson was very much a free man when he set his sights on Lara Flynn Boyle. She, however, wasn't. The "Twin Peaks" star initially resisted his advances, as then-boyfriend David Spade recalled to Details several years later. "She got mad because I didn't stick up for her," he recalled (via E! News) of the time Nicholson tried to make a move on Boyle in his presence. "I said, 'I've been in this town long enough to know when I'm outranked. You're either gonna go out with him or you're not.'"

Apparently, Boyle was disgusted by the idea of accepting, claiming that Nicholson was even worse than Donald Trump when it came to the ick factor. But she obviously changed her mind, as Spade discovered when he received a call from the National Enquirer about her new romance. "The funniest part was, they got caught in a car crash, and she crawled out of the sunroof and yelled, 'I have a boyfriend! I can't be here!' Like, 'Oh, now I'm your boyfriend?' ... That's how I found out. She and I didn't talk too much after that."

"I feel no connection to him or to her now. It's been so long, I can't quite believe I was ever married to him." That's how "ER" favorite Alex Kingston described the current state of affairs with her former husband Ralph Fiennes to The Standard. And when you learn why their marriage broke down, you may understand her detachment.

Kingston and Fiennes were first introduced to each other in the early 1980s when they were both studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1993, they walked down the aisle. But just three years afterward, the former discovered that her husband was having an affair with Francesca Annis, the actor who, at the time, was co-starring in a production of "Hamlet" as his mom!

In a chat with Daily Mail years after she split from "The English Patient" star, Kingston revealed (via Hello!) that she took the betrayal hard. "I was feeling worthless, that I would never find anyone else as good as my husband, which is ridiculous, but I had so little self-esteem. Divorce is awful, but it is also something I don't regret happening to me because it has shaped who I am now." Fiennes and Annis split in 2006, while Kingston was married to Florian Haertel's between 1998 and 2013 before marrying Jonathan Stamp in 2015.

Laura Dern got quite the shock when she returned home from a film shoot only to discover that her boyfriend, the oft-tragic Billy Bob Thornton, had not only just ditched her without any prior warning, but that he'd also wed another woman entirely. Yes, the Oscar winner fell head over heels for Angelina Jolie while shooting the 1999 movie "Pushing Tin." And despite the fact that both parties were already attached — the "Tomb Raider" star was seeing fellow actor Timothy Hutton at the time — they pushed on with a relationship.

In a chat with Talk, Dern revealed (via ABC News) that she hadn't heard a word from Thornton — who she also shared the screen with in indie film "Daddy and Them" — since his vanishing act. "It's like a sudden death," she remarked, having spent three years with the impulsive star. "For no one has there been any closure or clarity." To add insult to injury, Jolie's father Jon Voight revealed that Dern once babysat his daughter in the late 1970s.

Thornton, who split with fifth wife Jolie in 2003 before entering into a long-term relationship — and eventual marriage — with Connie Angland, hinted at regret over his behavior when he admitted to The Guardian that he hadn't exactly been the perfect partner. "See, I've f****d a lot of things up. I've been wrong. In relationships, I've been, like, not present. Or doing some wrong things ..."

Antonio Banderas first met Melanie Griffith when she was at the 1989 Oscars with her husband at the time, Don Johnson. And he was instantly smitten. "I saw this beautiful woman with a cream dress, with pearls," he told ABC News about his first impression. The Spaniard, who was also wedded himself, didn't act on his attraction, however, until six years later when the pair were cast together in romantic comedy "Two Much."

"It was very, very fast and very compulsive, but at the same time, we were tied at the time," Banderas remarked about how he and Griffith's sizzling on-screen chemistry spilled over into real life. "We tried as much as we could to be respectful. We just thought this may be one of those, you know, infatuation moments that we have when we shoot movies because we got to play together a couple, so let's just go home."

Of course, their mutual infatuation was far from momentary. Within a year, they'd both divorced their respective spouses and walked down the aisle together, with Banderas' ex-wife Ana Leza later claiming that Griffith was guilty of stealing her husband. The couple went on to have a child together, Stella, but amicably split in 2014, admitting that they'd had issues for years.