Star Couples With Surprisingly Large Age Gaps

Dec 30, 2020

When it comes to love between consenting adults, age is certainly just a number. While some might inexplicably frown upon couples with larger age gaps, others choose to ignore the noise and instead follow their hearts. In honor of some of the most heartwarming love stories in Hollywood, we're taking a look at six star-studded relationships with large age differences.

While the couple might have an almost four-decade-wide age gap, Patrick Stewart and Sunny Ozell have proven to be an unlikely powerhouse couple in Hollywood. Although many might gasp at their generational differences, Ozell insists she is unfazed. 

"He is so youthful and I guess I'm kind of an old worrywart, so we bridge the gap," she told the Daily Mail in 2015.

"It hasn't come up much. He's in better shape than I am physically, which infuriates me," Ozell added.

Now married for seven years, the pair met in 2008 at Franny's, a New York pizzeria restaurant where Ozell was working at the time. 

"I was a little freaked out by seeing Patrick Stewart in my restaurant," she admitted. 

The up-and-coming musician had just turned 30 years old at the time and was working towards her breakthrough by working tirelessly in jazz clubs across New York. Enamored by Ozell, Stewart slipped a note with his phone number to the young waitress, under the pretense that he could get her tickets to his Broadway show, which was sold out. The two met after the show and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Stewart and Ozell married in 2013 at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where they had fellow-actor and longtime friend to Stewart, Ian McKellan, officiate the ceremony. 

Hollywood movie stars Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones might have been together for an impressive 20 years, but the two insist they are still just as in love as when they first laid eyes upon one another in the late 90s. 

The couple first met in 1998 at the Deauville Film Festival in France, where Douglas almost instantly became enamored with his now-wife. But while we might think of Douglas as a charming smooth-talker, what he first blurted out to Zeta-Jones was admittedly disastrous. 

"I looked at her, and I said, 'Catherine, I'm going to be the father of your children,'" Douglas said, according to E!Online. "The first time I met her! You think that went over big?"

Clearly, it didn't, with Zeta-Jones replying: "You know, I've heard a lot about you and I've seen a lot about you, and I think it's time I say goodnight."

Cringey opening line as that might have been, Douglas knew he ought to make amends with Zeta-Jones, so the next day, he got her some flowers and a heartfelt apology. "Anyway, so I guess it worked out OK!" he joked. 

The couple wed just two years later, three months after the birth of their first son, Dylan. They have since also had a daughter together, Carys, born in April 2003. 

Celine Dion and René Angélil first met in 1980, when Dion was a 12-year-old aspiring singer and Angélil worked as her record producer. However, their relationship did not become romantic until years later, when the singer had become a young adult. Angélil and Dion recalled their first kiss in a 1999 interview with Larry King, which took place eight years after they met, although Dion admitted she was in love with him long before that.

"We were in Dublin, in Ireland for the Euro Vision contest 1988 and at night when we kissed goodnight we always kissed on the cheek, and that night I made a little stop right here," Angélil said motioning towards his lips, "And everything changed."

The powerhouse couple married in 1994 in a lavish broadcasted ceremony in Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal. The two have since had three children together, René-Charles, born in 1999, and twins Eddy and Nelson, born in 2010. 

Angélil tragically passed away from a heart attack in 2016. Dion told GMA that she is "learning to make her own decisions, taking on new projects and slowly finding confidence again, without the man who guided her life for so long and helped propel her to stardom."

Dion opened up to The Sun about Angélil's passing, saying, "I think I will probably grieve for the rest of my life." But she optimistically added, "Rene has prepared me for all my life since I'm 12. I have never met another man in my life, never kissed another man in my life. I miss him a lot. I miss him a lot — for my partner, for the man I was embracing, kissing, making love with. My worries, my dreams ..."

When British rockstar Rod Stewart first met Penny Lancaster in 1999, he had almost given up on love. He had, after all, only recently separated from his second wife, Rachel Hunter. 

"When my marriage to Rachel ended, the last thing I wanted to do was fall head over heels in love with a tall blonde girl in her 20s," he wrote in his memoir Rod: The Autobiography, according to the Daily Mail. 

A photography student at the time, Lancaster approached the singer for an autograph after her friends dared her to do so. "The next night I got an invitation to go to a concert and photograph him," she told Loose Women in 2015.

The singer then asked Lancaster for her number and gave it to his bass player. "A couple of days later I went can I have Penny's phone number, and he went 'no your not ready yet', and he kept it for six months," he explained at the same interview. 

When he was finally allowed to have her number back, he called her up and asked her out on their first date. While the young photographer had been anxious to hear back from Stewart, she knew she had to be patient. "I did know that he had only just broken up, so I kind of gave it a bit of a grace period," she said. 

The couple married in 2007 in Portofino, Italy, and share two children: Alastair Wallace Stewart, born in 2005, and Aiden Patrick Stewart, born in 2011.

Legendary actor Dick Van Dyke and his wife, make-up artist Arlene Silver, might share the most significant age gap on this list, but Van Dyke insists that they actually balance each other out. "She's very mature for her age, and I'm very immature for my age, so it's just about right," he told Parade in 2013. 

The duo first met in 2006 when Silver worked as a make-up artist for the SAG awards and quickly became friends.

"I remember seeing Dick at the catering table with his bow tie and his big smile," she recalled in an interview with the Huffington Post. "Right when I sat down, he was sitting next to me. He said, 'Hi, I'm Dick.' The first thing I asked him was, 'Weren't you in Mary Poppins?'"

Van Dyke was still mourning the death of his partner of 33 years, Michelle Triola Marvin, at the time, so their romance would not blossom until much later on. 

"I didn't really realize how powerful the relationship was becoming. I would come over but I didn't want to bother him I guess," Silver said. "He gets so many people around him I didn't want to be intrusive, so I would just say I'll come over after work and we'll have dinner, and it turns out he was looking forward to it the whole day. (Laughs) I didn't know that. He was just very respectful. We were both trying not to impose on each other."

The couple wed in February 2012, and Van Dyke has since described marrying Silver as "one of the smartest moves" he's ever made. 

Matthew McConaughey is known for his roles as the romantic lead in big Hollywood movies, so it's no surprise that the actor is a romantic in real life too. His marriage with Camila Alves seems to be one that is based on true love.

The couple met in 2006 and were in love from the first moment they laid eyes on each other, reports E!Online. McConaughey reported that he was so stricken with Camila that he felt she was an other-worldly being. She possessed qualities that he didn't completely understand, and they made a big impression on him. He described her as graceful, beautiful, and maintaining a strong sense of identity.

He reported to Playboy Magazine that he is faithful to his wife to the point that he is selfish. He believes he is under a spell around her, and he wants to remain that way. The couple was married in 2012, which occurred six years after they began dating each other. Matthew and Camila have three children, Levi, 10, Livingston, 5, and Vida, 8.

McConaughey claims that his approach to maintaining the romance in his marriage is due to a low-key approach, and he doesn't like to buy extravagant gifts for his wife. 

"I don't have a certain thing I buy her," McConaughey told  TODAY. "An earnest handwritten note, that she knows I sat down and took some time and has some poetry to it, that's worth more than whatever retail I paid for something."

Do you know of any other star-studded couples with a larger-than-average age gap? Let us know in the comments, and make sure you pass this along to your friends and family!