Hollywood marriages rarely get their happily-ever-after. Many end amicably, while others break up amid raging controversy.
As much as netizens love to stay invested in these romances, both the happy and the heartbreaking, some celebrity marriages have simply been too short-lived for anyone to remember.
While these stars once said “I do” in front of family, friends, or even the cameras, they did not wait long to ultimately part ways.
Be it a whirlwind romance or a long-term companionship falling apart in a heartbeat, these 13 marriages ended in a matter of months or weeks, and in one case, in two days.
#1 Sophia Bush And Chad Michael Murray (5 Months)
Sophia Bush was 21, and Chad Michael Murray was 22 when they met in 2003 on the set of One Tree Hill, the nine-season drama in which they played on-and-off lovers, Brooke Davis and Lucas Scott.
Offscreen, they seemed to be the real deal. They quickly started dating, got engaged in 2004 while on vacation in Australia, and married the next year in April at Hotel Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, California.
But it was all over in five months amid rumors of Murray’s adultery.
Bush, now 44, petitioned to have the marriage annulled in February 2006, citing “fraud” in her filing.
“Sophia went into the marriage believing in the sanctity of marriage, and Chad simply did not share that vision,” a source told People Magazine at the time.
“It devastates me now that I have been reduced to a Hollywood statistic—another joke marriage,” she said in an interview after the split.
“I never expected to be married more than once… because I knew what I was getting into and will always believe in love.”
While both parties have kept quiet about the circumstances of their breakup for two decades, Bush finally opened up about it in her October 2026 memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine.
The actress said that she was drawn to Murray’s “sensitive side,” but soon “the insecurity, the possessiveness, and the controlling demands” surfaced.
Bush’s One Tree Hill co-star, Hilarie Burton, warned her not to date Murray, but she paid no heed. Even when rumors of Murray’s infidelity surfaced in the media, she believed his denials and defended him.
“I knew someone who lived in Wilmington, NC, when that show was filming, and it was a known thing around town that he was constantly cheating on her,” one user recently wrote on social media.
Gregg DeGuire
However, the controversy eventually led Bush to return the engagement ring to Murray, but they worked it out in couples counseling and tied the knot anyway.
The final blow came when one of Murray’s groomsmen fell “mysteriously ill” the night before the wedding and didn’t show up to the ceremony.
Bush didn’t think much of it at the time, but as the arguments continued into their marriage, she finally confronted the no-show friend a few months after the wedding.
The friend confirmed that Murray was indeed cheating on her with multiple other women. In fact, he once had a girlfriend living in his Los Angeles house.
“[The friend] told me everything he could about all the girls he knew of,” Bush wrote. “Girls I knew and plenty of girls I didn’t. The number and the details are not important now. But at the time, they were shocking. Unimaginable, really. And brutal.”
“Including the fact that another woman was living in my spouse’s house in L.A. when I had met him in North Carolina,” she continued. “Not a bats**t-crazy ex who’d shown up unannounced at all. Another partner. So much for the cute single guy at work.”
“Looking back now, I see the heat map of red flags. I didn’t then. Love exists in real time, and in its absence, all the things that it blurs become clearer. Hindsight is a mother**ker.”
Bush later married entrepreneur Grant Hughes in 2022 and filed for divorce 13 months later, and then married former soccer star Ashlyn Harris in 2025.
She started dating Harris in October 2023, just a month after Harris filed for divorce from her ex-wife Ali Krieger, sparking speculation about whether the relationship started before Harris and Krieger officially split.
“Is she just the girl version of her ex-husband?” one user commented.
Meanwhile, Murray has been with his wife, Sarah Roemer, since 2013, and they share three children.
Image source: Gregg DeGuire
#2 Jim Carrey And Lauren Holly (9 Months)
Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly tied the knot on September 23, 1996, two years after starring together in the 1994 hit comedy Dumb and Dumber. Their marriage ended nine months later, when they parted ways in June 1997.
Although the marriage was short-lived and rocky, Holly revealed in a 2013 interview with George Stroumboulopoulos that they had been together “for years.”
She also shared that their romance began as tabloid culture took root, and their relationship suffered from intense media attention and paparazzi invading their personal space.
“At first it was fun, and then our whole life became about—we have to keep them out, because they would do things like scale the fence at our house and live in our backyard, and go through our garbage,” she said.
“We made our lives—it was all about running away from them and making sure we have privacy,” she said.
Despite the public scrutiny, their union had a significant positive impact on both their careers, Holly shared on a May 2026 episode of the Work in Progress podcast with Sophia Bush.
“We definitely sort of highlighted each other in a lot of ways,” Holly said.
“If you look back at what we were both doing in our relationship, it’s really cool because we were both, you know, growing exponentially, and I think we helped each other.”
“And probably he helped me more, even though at the beginning, I was the one who was more well-known. Like, it was kind of strange,” she added.
Carrey and Holly’s union was the second marriage for both. The Mask actor was previously married to Melissa Womer from 1987 to 1995, and shares a daughter, Jane Erin, with her.
He dated multiple women after Holly, including actress Renée Zellweger and makeup artist Cathriona White, who passed away from a prescription medication ov*rd*se in 2015.
In 2008, while dating Jenny McCarthy, Carrey told Weekend magazine that he “probably won’t get married again” and believed people should stop trying if they have already been married twice.
In October 2026, he married his long-term girlfriend, Korean actress Min Ah.
Holly was previously married to Danny Quinn from 1991 to 1993.
After Carrey, she was linked to actor-filmmaker Edward Burns and tennis star Pete Sampras, eventually marrying investment banker Francis Greco in 2001. Before their 2014 divorce, they adopted three sons.
Image source: Vinnie Zuffante
#3 Elisabeth Moss And Fred Armisen (8 Months)
The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss has been married only once—to comedian Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live (SNL) and Portlandia fame.
The two started a whirlwind romance after meeting on SNL in October 2008, when Moss appeared in a parody sketch for an episode hosted by her Mad Men co-star, Jon Hamm.
Moss and Armisen got engaged three months later, and on the first anniversary of their meet-cute, the couple tied the knot in a small ceremony in Long Island City.
“It’s private, so I don’t want to share the details of how it happened, but I will say it was perfect,” Moss told USA Weekend at the time.
But the “perfect” relationship quickly dwindled, and the pair separated in June 2010. Moss filed for divorce three months later.
In 2012, Moss famously told Page Six about her marriage, “One of the greatest things I heard someone say about him is, ‘He’s so great at doing impersonations. But the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person.’ To me, that sums it up.”
Armisen confessed to being a “terrible” husband and boyfriend in a 2013 interview with SiriusXM’s Howard Stern.
“I want it all… fast,” he explained. “I want to be married, I want to live together… and then somewhere around a year or two years, I get fr**ked out. I fr**k out emotionally, and then I actually feel like, ‘Oh my God, who’s this stranger in my house?’”
He admitted he got lost in “the fantasy of this person from Mad Men” and then struggled to accept that Moss was a “real person” living with him, describing the experience as “almost like an amnesia.”
“It’s like cheating and infidelity. I’m neither ashamed nor proud of it. It’s just something that happens in my life,” Armisen confessed.
A year later, Moss told the New York magazine that the relationship was “extremely traumatic and awful and horrible.”
Armisen is currently married to actress-comedian Riki Lindhome after exchanging vows in a courthouse ceremony in 2022. Moss, meanwhile, welcomed her first child in 2024 but has kept the baby’s name, gender, and the father’s identity a secret.
Most users blame Armisen’s “awful” personality for the divorce, but a few have pointed fingers at Moss’ faith in Scientology.
“Scientology has a Hollywood PR team that never sleeps, ready to break any relationship apart if they don’t conform,” one user said.
Another speculated they got into it too soon, saying: “It seems like they didn’t think through a proper relationship before getting married.”
Image source: Dimitrios Kambouris
#4 Pamela Anderson And Kid Rock (4 Months)
Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock, real name Robert James Ritchie, crossed paths in a rather low-key manner backstage at a VH1 Divas Live concert in April 2001.
“I didn’t think there were any girls left out there—especially with what I do—who want to be moms anymore, who want to do the sewing and cooking and have me go out and fix the car and throw the kids around the yard,” Kid Rock told the Orlando Sentinel at the time about why he liked Anderson.
Both were already parents when they started dating, and they wanted to welcome more kids of their own.
Anderson shared sons Brandon and Dylan with ex-husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, while Rock had son Robert Jr. with ex-girlfriend Kelley South.
They made their first public appearance in September 2001, and in April 2002, a year after they first met, the couple got engaged. The engagement did not last, and Rock blamed Anderson’s unwillingness to move cities for him and issues over the prenup.
However, the breakup did not last long either. In July 2006, they reconciled on a friend’s yacht in France and decided, “Let’s just f**king get married and get it over with.”
“I’ve raised my kids alone in hope of a miracle. Well, my miracle came and went. And came back because he knew that I’d wake up one day and realize that I was waiting for nothing. I’m moving on… I feel like I’m finally free… I’m in love. I’m happy,” Anderson wrote on her website.
They wed on a yacht in St. Tropez that very month, Anderson wearing a white bikini and a sailor’s hat, and Rock shirtless in jeans and his signature fedora.
“Wasn’t easy finding a downgrade from Tommy Lee, but she did it,” one netizen commented about their wedding. Another said, “Pam had some real sh*t taste in men.”
The marriage was over by November. Fans weren’t really surprised by the divorce, but what primarily made headlines was the rumored reason behind the split.
An anonymous friend of Anderson’s told the New York Post that the breakup happened because of the 2006 Sacha Baron Cohen-starred satirical comedy, Borat.
In the movie, Anderson plays a fictionalized version of herself, and she is in on a staged prank where Cohen’s titular character tries to abduct her at a book signing to make her his wife.
Rock allegedly had an outburst following a private film screening and screamed at Anderson in front of everyone, saying, “You’re nothing but a wh*re! You’re a sl*t! How could you do that movie?”
Cohen added to the narrative in 2019 on The Last Laugh when he detailed a text exchange with Anderson after the screening. He had asked her what Rock thought of the movie, and the Baywatch alum responded, “He’s getting divorced.”
When Cohen asked why, she said it was because of the movie.
“That was a bit of an overreaction,” one user recently said about Rock’s alleged reaction. Another said, “He’s a racist piece of sh*t. He probably thought it was real.”
Rock denied the rumors and called Anderson a “psycho” for spreading them. He said they split because he had to upend his life from Michigan to Los Angeles after the wedding, and his son didn’t like living on the West Coast.
Later, in 2007, he claimed that Anderson once lied to him about having a miscarriage.
Image source: Kevin Winter
#5 Renée Zellweger And Kenny Chesney (4 Months)
Renée Zellweger has had a few high-profile relationships (Jim Carrey, Bradley Cooper, Doyle Bramhall II), so fans often forget she was once married to country singer Kenny Chesney.
In fact, it was so short-lived that the actress herself has admitted she sometimes forgets it ever happened. However, at the time, it was one of the biggest celebrity controversies.
The two met in January 2005, but they were already pretty smitten with each other. Chesney called Zellweger one of his top celebrity crushes, and the latter also admired the singer from afar.
Chesney’s 1999 song, You Had Me From Hello, was also rumored to have been inspired by Zellweger’s famous line from the 1996 rom-com film, Jerry Maguire.
The two started a long-distance relationship and went public when Zellweger appeared on stage at one of Chesney’s live shows in Florida and kissed him on the cheek.
They married in May, four months after they started dating, and their marriage also lasted only that long.
In September, Zellweger filed for an annulment, citing “fraud” as the reason for the split, but later clarified that it was simply a legal term and was not a commentary about Chesney’s character.
Regardless, it started a rumor that Chesney preferred men, which he denied in a 2009 interview with a popular men’s magazine.
“I think people need to live their lives the way they want to, but I’m pretty confident in the fact that I love girls,” he said. “I’ve got a long line of girls who could testify that I am not gay.”
“In order for us to get an annulment, the legal papers could claim either physical ab*se, which wasn’t true, or three or four other things that also weren’t true. The best thing we could put in there was fraud. So I said, ‘All right, do it. Whatever.’”
However, the former spouses are more or less amicable.
“She and I fell in love like a couple of schoolkids,” Chesney said years later about the relationship. “I’m glad to know that can happen, that it exists, and we still really care about each other. It would’ve been a bad thing if I hadn’t met her.”
In his 2025 memoir, Heart Life Music, Chesney admitted that most of his relationships “fell apart” because of how much he prioritized his career.
“Any girlfriend, no matter how much I cared, was going to finish third or fourth, maybe even fifth,” he wrote. “First, there was how music consumed me. Second, there was songwriting, followed by the fans, my career, and what that required.”
Remember when they dated? Kenny Chesney & Renée Zellweger A whirlwind romance that resulted in marriage then an annulment after only 4 months. Reason cited was “fraud”. Lots of speculation but a joint statement noted “miscommunication of the objective of their marriage at the start” I would’ve liked to have seen this one last.
— GenTXer2 (@GenTXer2) August 29, 2026
Image source: J. Vespa, Robert Knight Archive
#6 Britney Spears And Jason Alexander (2 Days)
In line with the rest of her controversial life story, Britney Spears had one of the shortest marriages in the industry to childhood friend Jason Alexander, which fans have often labeled a “quickie wedding.”
The Toxic singer spilled it all in her 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me, and detailed how she ended up marrying Alexander at a Las Vegas wedding chapel in January 2004.
They had the marriage annulled in 55 hours, and the documents said that Spears “lacked understanding of her actions, to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage.”
“He and I got sh*tfaced,” she wrote. “I don’t even remember that night at all, but from what I’ve pieced together, he and I lounged around the hotel room and stayed up late watching movies—Mona Lisa Smile and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—then had the brilliant idea of going to A Little White Chapel at three thirty in the morning.”
Her family did not approve and acted like she had “started World War III,” she wrote in the book, even though to her, it was nothing but “innocent fun.”
She clarified that she and Alexander were “not in love.”
“I was just honestly very drunk, and probably, in a more general sense at that time in my life, very bored,” Spears explained.
Alexander, however, felt very differently.
In a 2012 interview with ABC News, he said that Spears had proposed the marriage, and he went with his “feelings” at the time.
“I was in love with her… I feel like she felt the same way,” Alexander said. He also hinted that they had physical relations that night.
“I mean, we were in Vegas, you know. I mean… well, we had a suite. Hmmm,” he said.
Alexander claimed Spears’ mother and her managers pushed the annulment, saying they “went crazy because there was no prenup.”
When he signed the annulment papers, he expected them to get back together, since he had gotten his “feelings involved.” It hurt him when that did not happen.
“She was fighting everyone who was controlling her every move,” one user empathized with Spears, who was then four years away from being placed under a conservatorship.
In 2022, Alexander crashed Spears’ wedding to Sam Asghari hours before the nuptials and argued with security that he was invited.
Kevin Federline, the man Spears married after Alexander and divorced in 2007, wrote a memoir titled You Thought You Knew in 2025, in which he accused Spears of erratic behavior and heavy drinking and substance use during pregnancy.
Spears and Federline share two sons: Sean and Jayden.
Alexander called Federline out after the book’s release, saying, “It’s easy to point fingers now, to talk about Britney’s struggles like you were just some innocent bystander watching it all happen.”
“But that’s not what went down. You were her husband. You were supposed to be her protector. Instead, you were partying right alongside her—the dr*gs, the alc*hol, the chaos… You were there for all of it.”
“If you’re going to write a book, at least have the guts to tell the truth about your part in it,” he said.
Image source: Matthew Peyton, Enos Solomon
#7 Shannen Doherty And Ashley Hamilton (5 Months)
Shannen Doherty and Ashley Hamilton met at a party in Los Angeles in 1993.
They fell into a fast-paced romance. After knowing each other for just two weeks, they married on September 11, 1993, when Doherty was 22 and Hamilton was 18.
They split after just five months, and Doherty filed for divorce in April 1994, citing irreconcilable differences amid Hamilton’s struggles with substance issues.
Years later, in a 2024 episode of the Let’s Be Clear podcast, Doherty partially blamed the marriage for her firing from Beverly Hills, 90210, where she played Brenda Walsh, after the show’s fourth season in 1994.
Speaking with her former co-star Jason Priestley, Doherty said, “Towards my last season, I was in a really horrible marriage, and there were things transpiring in that marriage that made it very hard for me to consistently be on time for work.”
“I know that became a very big problem for the rest of you, because if everybody else is on time and you’re waiting for one person, it s**ks, right, because it means that you’re now going to work longer hours.”
She said she understood the decision to write her character off stemmed from her own tardiness, but she expected the showrunners would at least give her a warning. She also said that she wasn’t “transparent” about her personal life with her colleagues.
“I don’t think anybody knew that my dad was super sick, and I don’t think anybody knew that my husband was a massive dr*g ad*ict,” she said, claiming that Hamilton would “get incredibly violent” at times during the relationship.
“It was all-consuming for me. I didn’t even want to leave the house because I was scared that he would go and get dr*gs.”
After Doherty passed away from cancer in July 2024, Hamilton shared a heartfelt tribute for his ex-wife.
“Shannen was not only my wife. She was my guardian angel,” he said in a statement. “Even though things don’t always work out the way we hope they will, she stood by my side during some of my darkest times. My love and admiration for her lasted far longer than our short-lived marriage.”
The same year, he posted on social media that he was ten years clean and sober.
However, many fans speculated whether Alexander was one of the people that Doherty said she did not want to attend her funeral.
“I guarantee he was one of the people on her list that she didn’t want there,” one wrote on social media after her demise.
Image source: Ron Galella
#8 Carmen Electra And Dennis Rodman (9 Days)
Actress-model Carmen Electra and NBA player Dennis Rodman first met in early 1998 at a West Hollywood nightclub in Los Angeles.
A friend of Rodman’s grabbed Electra’s coat and hid it behind the bar, leading to a playful exchange in which the Chicago Bulls star offered to buy her a drink, and they swapped phone numbers.
At first, Rodman thought she was “another beautiful woman in a long line of beautiful women,” but then they connected on a deeper level.
“We exchanged numbers, and he would call and call and call,” Electra said about the beginning of the romance. “I wouldn’t respond. Finally, one day I picked up the phone, and he invited me to come hang out with him, and I went for it.”
They married on November 14, 1998, at Little Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas, but Rodman filed for an annulment just nine days later, citing an unsound mind due to liquor influence. Though they briefly reconciled, Electra officially filed for divorce in April 1999.
A year later, on an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show, Electra looked back on her marriage to Rodman, which came shortly after she lost her mother and sister in the space of a few weeks.
“People couldn’t understand why I loved him because he had a reputation for being a bad boy,” she said. “What I saw in the beginning was this gentle giant that was in a lot of pain—so in a way we understood each other.”
“When it was good, it was amazing. And when it was bad, it was the worst,” she added.
Rodman previously dated Madonna and married Annie Bakes for 82 days. He married Michelle Moyer in 2003, and they were together until 2012.
Electra married the Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro in 2003, and they split in 2007.
Electra later shared some iconic stories from her whirlwind relationship with Rodman. In one, she found herself, completely bare-bodied, hiding in Rodman’s Chicago house as a basketball legend showed up at the door.
“We were both n*ked, actually, when there was a knock at the door. Dennis jumps up—I don’t know if he answered the door n*ked or not. I can’t remember that part because I was hiding. He just turned around to me and said, ‘It’s Michael Jordan. I’ve got to go practice,’” she said to the Associated Press.
In another interview with the Los Angeles Times, she revealed that once they spent an entire day going “crazy, like two kids in a candy store” at the Bulls’ practice facility.
“We were eating popsicles from the fridge and pretty much having s*x all over the d*mn place—in the physical therapy room, in the weight room. Obviously on the court,” Electra said.
But things quickly stopped being all sunshine and rainbows, and it became “too hard to continue” and keep up with Rodman’s lifestyle, Electra revealed in a May 2026 appearance on the Legally Goff podcast.
She said Rodman would be “so loving, and then he’s wild and he’s drinking.”
“It was constant drinking. I just remember looking at myself in the mirror—I was at home and I didn’t recognize myself,” she said. “I had bags under my eyes. My face was puffy. And I’m in my 20s, and I thought, ‘It’s got to stop.’”
But she emphasized that none of it was fake: “It wasn’t a made-up story. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. It was real love. It’s sad, but it had to end.”
Image source: Denny Keeler
#9 Zachary Levi And Missy Peregrym (10 Months)
Shazam! actor Zachary Levi and Rookie Blue actress Missy Peregrym had a whirlwind romance that led to a surprise, private wedding in Maui, Hawaii, on June 15, 2014, after dating for about 10 months.
The couple called the event an impromptu “coffee date” when they announced it on social media, wearing matching Mr. and Mrs. hoodies.
Just six months later, the two had an equally surprising split.
Peregrym filed a petition to dissolve the marriage in April 2015, citing irreconcilable differences. The document said that the couple had separated in December.
Peregrym later married actor Tom Oakley in December 2018 and has since welcomed two children: Otis Paradis and Mela Joséphine. Levi and partner Maggie Keating welcomed their first child, a son named Henson Ezra, in April 2025.
In 2022, Levi opened up about his divorce from Peregrym with The Christian Post and said that “a lot of darkness and depression” ensued from the experience.
“Hollywood is not exactly the most loving, kind, safe place for people’s hearts and minds and souls,” he added. “And so there’s a lot of trauma and ab*se that I suffered, even at the hands of a lot of my employers and a lot of just the system that is Hollywood.
“And again, I didn’t recognize it as trauma; I just thought, well, these are struggles, and you kind of worked through them. Little did I know that all of that was feeding into the same trauma that I experienced as a child, and I was just reliving a lot of that pain over and over and over again.”
Peregrym has refrained from publicly commenting on the breakup.
Image source: Tommaso Boddi
#10 Vanessa Morgan And Michael Kopech (6 Months)
Riverdale star Vanessa Morgan and MLB star Michael Kopech got engaged a year after meeting on social media and married in January 2020.
“Our relationship probably doesn’t make sense to many people for a sh*t ton of reasons, but we’re not doing it for them. We know this is forever. Why would we wait? Lol,” Kopech wrote in the engagement announcement, and thanked Morgan for staying by his side at times when he “didn’t deserve it.”
Kopech, who was a pitcher with the Chicago White Sox then and the Los Angeles Dodgers now, filed for divorce merely six months later, and days after Morgan announced her pregnancy. She gave birth to their son, River, in January 2021.
In March 2024, Morgan spilled details of the divorce on Rachel Bilson’s podcast, Broad Ideas.
“In the moment, it was so painful,” she reflected. “It’s almost like we idolize what our dream reality [was] from when we were a kid… [then] you mourn the future that never happened. You mourn the fantasy that you created, and that wasn’t the reality that was the best alignment for me.”
As for the relationship itself, Morgan said that she went through “two years of pain.” Moreover, she was embarrassed about her failed union and didn’t want to face the reality of a “broken family.”
“You get married, and you want to have that fantasy,” she shared. “I think it’s almost like you feel disappointed to tell people that it didn’t work out.”
Morgan also said that she doesn’t want to be a victim and feels River was her blessing from the tough times. She added that Kopech is in their son’s life, but the two don’t get to see each other very often.
Morgan has since been engaged to basketball player James Karnik and welcomed a daughter with him, Kaia Autumn Skye, in 2024.
Kopech married Morgan Eudy in December 2023. The couple shares two children, Vander and Clover, and he is also the stepfather of Morgan’s daughter, Veda.
Image source: Rich Fury
#11 Colton Haynes And Jeff Leatham (6 Months)
Teen Wolf star Colton Haynes and celebrity florist Jeff Leatham got engaged in March 2017 and tied the knot in October in a star-studded Palm Springs ceremony officiated by Kris Jenner.
Mutual friend Serena Williams once set them up, but the date fell through because of a scheduling conflict. When they met at a Paris airport a few years later, it was “love at first sight.”
They exchanged numbers on the flight, and things kicked off from there. Before the wedding, Haynes admitted to becoming a “bridezilla” for the “Cher-meets-Guns-‘N-Roses” celebration that was decorated with approximately 60,000 roses, according to People Magazine.
However, by April 2018, Haynes deleted several photos of him and Leatham together from Instagram and dropped their hyphenated married name. In May, he released an acoustic recording of his song, Man It Sucks, whose lyrics referred to “cheating drama” and “staying up all night with a bottle of wine, drunk with lonely tears.”
When asked if the song was meant for Leatham, Haynes denied it at the time and said it was about a past relationship. However, he filed for divorce before the month ended, which was finalized in August.
The split came just two months after Haynes lost his mother, Dana Mitchell, to advanced cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure. He was also struggling with being open and public about his s*xuality.
“I came out and, in a way, my downward spiral started,” he told Attitude magazine in March 2019.
“I felt extremely free, but at the same time the amount of attention I was getting was making me spin out of control. I got married, and that didn’t work out. That was extremely public and heartbreaking, and right when that was going on, my mom d*ed. That was only a year ago.”
“At that point, I fell apart. My brain broke. I was doing this massive comedy for a studio, showed up to work and got fired on the first day,” he went on. “They said I looked as if I had ‘de*d in my eyes’ — and I did.”
Haynes also got candid about having a mental breakdown where he locked himself in a hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills for seven days and was found with bruises all over his body.
“It looked as if somebody had beaten the sh*t out of me,” he said. “I couldn’t walk, so I was falling everywhere. I almost ruptured my kidney, ended up in the hospital, and ended up on 5150 [a temporary psych hold]. I was on such a destructive path that I could not function.”
Image source: Mark Sagliocco
#12 Dennis Hopper And Michelle Phillips (8 Days)
On Halloween 1970, Michelle Phillips, best known as a member of the iconic 1960s folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas, married actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper.
Eight days later, she filed for divorce, to which Hopper would later say, “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.”
Phillips, who had recently separated from her first husband, fellow musician John Phillips, had begun exploring an acting career when she became involved with Hopper. The actor, who had gained widespread recognition following the success of Easy Rider (1969), was preparing to direct The Last Movie (1971) and cast Phillip in it for her debut.
The couple exchanged vows on October 31, 1970, in Taos, New Mexico. By November 8, Phillips had filed for divorce.
“Days 2-6 are truly the honeymoon years, before things start getting real on day 7,” one user recently joked about their split on social media.
Although the exact circumstances surrounding their separation have been discussed differently over the years, their relationship was reportedly tumultuous.
A 1995 Los Angeles Times profile of Hopper recalled how Phillips’s former husband, John, had jokingly described the turbulent period as the “Six-Day War.”
Reports claimed that Hopper had destroyed parts of their home, damaged Phillips’s belongings, and had even defecated on her bed.
In Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the author claimed that Hopper terrified Phillips and her and John’s daughter, Chynna, during their marriage by firing weapons inside the house and handcuffing Phillips because he had convinced himself she was a “witch.”
Interestingly, Phillips did not appear to look back on the marriage with entirely negative feelings.
In an interview, she reportedly described their eight days together as the happiest days of her life. She never publicly offered an extensive explanation for why the relationship ended so quickly.
Hopper married three more women—Daria Halprin, Katherine Lanasa, and Victoria Duffy—before his 2010 demise from metastatic prostate cancer. Phillips married twice more—Robert Scott Burch, a radio producer, and Grainger Hines, an actor, with whom she had a son, Austin.
Image source: Michael Ochs Archives
#13 Axl Rose And Erin Everly (9 Months)
Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose and Erin Everly, daughter of Everly Brothers singer Don Everly, dated in the Eighties briefly before tying the knot in April 1990.
They annulled the marriage in January 1991.
Rose and Everly first met in 1986, when he was still trying to establish himself in the music industry.
Everly, then a model, quickly became an important part of his life and inspired one of the band’s biggest hits, Sweet Child O’ Mine. She also appeared in its music video.
As epic their romance was to the fans, it was already troubled long before they exchanged vows in a spontaneous ceremony at Cupid’s Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.
In fact, Rose had already filed for divorce less than a month after the wedding, citing irreconcilable differences. They reconciled, but not for long.
In October 1990, Everly suffered a miscarriage, a devastating experience for the couple. The following month, she left Rose.
The circumstances surrounding their separation later became the subject of serious allegations.
In a 1994 interview with People Magazine, Everly claimed that Rose had pressured her into marrying him by threatening to take his own life if she refused.
She also claimed that the marriage was physically and emotionally ab*sive.
“You never knew what would set him off,” she said about Rose.
“I didn’t think I could survive mentally any longer; I was dy*ng inside,” she recalled the moment she decided to leave. “At the door I turned around and said, ‘I want you to look at me, because you’re never going to see me again.’ And he never has.”
Rose, meanwhile, had previously described their relationship in court documents as involving mutual violence, humiliation, and property damage.
“I would have stuck it out and gone to therapy with him. She’s mad to have left. They would have had beautiful babies,” one netizen said about their breakup.
Another said, “Erin deserved better than Axl at the time. What a maniac he was, the way he treated her.”
Everly later auctioned off artifacts from their time together, including letters from him in harsh language. One of them was famously signed, “FROM AN A**HOLE!!!!”
Image source: Vinnie Zuffante
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