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Hollywood marriages collapse like souffles, to the point that even the longer-lasting unions fans pin their hopes on have a habit of eventually imploding.
Couples ranging from Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have been held up as rare examples of a celebrity relationship finally gone right, only to land on the scrap heap with the rest of them.
This week the public was left reeling yet again as Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, the model of solid married life in the industry of Jennifer Lopez and Nicolas Cage, shockingly went public with their divorce after 19 years.
Rumors abound about the circumstances leading up to the split, from Urban's onstage antics with a female guitarist to Kidman's steamy sex scenes on film.
But amid the noxious clouds of scandal and speculation, there are still a few glimmers of optimism to be found in the golden couples of American showbiz.
Now Daily Mail looks at the real-life Hollywood love stories that have defied the odds and lasted down the decades....
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, 40 years
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's ironclad union was forged in fire, as he attempted to navigate his tempestuous divorce from his unstable first wife.
Rita first met Tom in 1981 when she guest-starred on his cross-dressing sitcom Bosom Buddies, but their relationship at that stage was strictly professional.
At the time, Tom was still married to his college sweetheart Samantha Lewes, the mother of his son Colin Hanks, 47, and daughter Elizabeth Anne 'E.A.' Hanks, 43.
Over the next few years as Tom's star rose, his first marriage crumbled, and by 1985 he and Samantha had legally separated from one another.
E.A. has written a memoir about her maltreatment by her mother, who she believes had undiagnosed bipolar disorder with bouts of 'extreme paranoia and delusion.'
Samantha's 'stream of consciousness' diaries contained a shocking passage in which she wrote about 'witnessing her father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl,' E.A. revealed in her autobiography.
The year Tom and Samantha split up, he and Rita reconnected while making the film Volunteers, and their feelings for one another were impossible to resist.
'Rita and I just looked at each other and - kaboing - that was that,' Tom recalled during his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2016. 'I asked Rita if it was the real thing for her, and it just couldn't be denied.'
They went red carpet official at the 1986 premiere of the cowboy comedy Three Amigos, one year before Tom's divorce from Samantha was finalized.
After his first marriage was officially dissolved, he went to his children's Los Angeles school to pick them up, only to discover they were missing because Samantha had suddenly moved them to Sacramento behind his back.
Tom and Rita went down the aisle themselves in 1988, before welcoming their own brace of children, 35-year-old Chet and 29-year-old Truman.
In 1994 their household grew as Tom's two children by Samantha came to live with him and Rita, leaving the shambolic home of their increasingly unhinged mother.
E.A. wrote that the move, which occurred when she was 12 years old, became necessary when Samantha turned abusive.
'One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade,' she wrote.
Samantha died of cancer at the age of 49, and E.A. has since said she regards Rita as her 'other mother' rather than as a stepmother, via People.
'When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they've been together since before I can really remember,' remarked E.A., Tom's only daughter. 'They've been together since I was four or five.'
In a 2001 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Tom hailed Rita as his best friend 'in addition to being my lover. And it has been that way from the very beginning. We laugh just as much now at two in the morning as we always have. And we fight less and less.'
He reflected that the 'success of our relationship was a matter of timing, maturity, and our willingness to have an intimate connection.'
Tom recalled: 'When I married Rita, I thought: "This is going to require some change on my part." I won't deny that providence was part of us finding each other, but our relationship isn't magic - the way it's shown in movies.'
He observed: 'In real life, our connection is as concrete as me sitting here. Not that marriage doesn't come close to being hell in a handbasket sometimes. But we both know that no matter what, we'll be with each other - and we'll get through it.'
Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, 33 years
In 1991, seven years before she achieved global fame as Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker's brothers Toby and Pippin introduced her to Matthew Broderick.
Sarah was an established actress who had dated such heartthrobs of the era as Nicolas Cage, Robert Downey Jr. and even John F. Kennedy Jr.
When she met Matthew, he already a star from movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and was directing a play for the theater company Sarah's brothers had founded.
Sparks flew, but they were both in other relationships, which they waited to end rather than 'catting around' with each other illicitly, she insisted on The Howard Stern Show.
By March 1992, they were both single, and he asked her out on her answering machine, kick-starting a romance that has lasted over three decades.
On top of their chemistry, they 'had been brought up in similar ways,' Sarah recalled decades after her first date with Matthew.
In 1996, they co-starred in a Broadway revival of the Pulitzer-winning musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
The following year, they tied the knot in the Angel Orensanz Synagogue Lower East Side, in a ceremony officiated by Matthew's sister, an Episcopalian reverend.
Sarah and Matthew invited about 100 loved ones to what guests were told was just 'a party,' and then surprised everyone upon arrival by revealing it was actually a wedding, with the bride wearing a black spaghetti strap dress.
They have lived happily together in New York City ever since, welcoming three children - their son James, 22, and twin daughters Tabitha and Marion, 16.
Reflecting on her long-lasting relationship with Matthew, Sarah has acknowledged that they had experienced their ups and downs.
'We've been together for 20 years and you have good days, you have decent days, and you have bad days. That's a marriage,' she told the Telegraph in 2011.
'That's a relationship. That's a friendship, even — relationships outside the marriage run the same course. If you're in it for the long haul and you want meaningful relationships, you are going to go through lots of different periods.'
When asked about the secret to the longevity of her union, she replied: 'Probably that I don’t talk about it. It really is a secret,' via Hello! magazine. 'But maybe it’s because we’re not a Hollywood couple. We live in New York - maybe that’s good.'
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, 42 years
Although they first met in 1968 on their early-career movie The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn failed to fall into each other's arms right away - or indeed until a decade and a half later.
They were already reigning Hollywood sex symbols when they struck up their romance in 1983 on the set of their World War II drama Swing Shift.
Badly hungover one day, he blurted out: 'Man, you got a great figure,' and rather than being scandalized, she replied: 'Why, thank you.'
A sizzling relationship was born, and was cemented when Goldie observed Kurt's gentleness with her children Oliver and Kate Hudson by her ex-husband Bill Hudson.
Kate and Oliver were famously estranged from their biological father for years and began referring to Kurt as 'Pa,' considering him a father figure to this day.
Kurt and Goldie's status as a Hollywood power couple was carved into showbiz history with their 1987 romantic comedy Overboard.
In their most iconic screen pairing, Goldie plays a haughty married heiress called Joanna who stiffs a poor carpenter and single father called Dean, played by Kurt.
When she falls from her yacht, Dean picks her up - but when he discovers she is suffering from amnesia, he gets his revenge by telling her she is married to him and roping her into the hard work of his daily life.
Fans fell in love with their relationship onscreen and off, and they have kept their rea-life romance alive to the present, raising Kate and Oliver and welcoming a son of their own called Wyatt - though their union has not been without incident.
They were briefly trailed by breakup rumors in 2001, after Kurt was glimpsed emerging from an infamously insalubrious massage parlor in Los Angeles.
Split speculation abounded again 2004, with wild unconfirmed gossip linking Goldie to the playboy Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, who later became prime minister of his country and has since been jailed by his successor.
However Kurt and Goldie have remained a rock-solid couple, shrugging off all the sensational claims made about them - including those by her ex-husband Bill Hudson, the father of her two older children.
Oliver acidly wished Bill a 'happy abandonment day' on Father's Day 2015, prompting Bill to declare he would 'break all ties' with him and Kate.
He furiously accused Goldie of 'willfully alienating' him from Kate and Oliver after she took up with Kurt, alleging that she 'wanted to create this myth of a perfect family with Kurt and she wanted me out.'
Bill claimed: 'When we split up, she never had a bad word to say about me. But when Kurt came on the scene, the narrative changed and I became the big, bad wolf.'
He insisted: 'I would say to her: "Goldie, why are you trashing me and saying I’m an absent father when it’s simply not the case?" and she’d laugh and go: "Oh Bill, you know it makes for a better story."'
However three years later Oliver told Larry King that his 'darkly comedic' Father's Day post wound up bringing him and Bill back into contact.
Back in 2016, Kate went on The Howard Stern Show and insisted that Goldie 'never spoke poorly' of Bill when she and Oliver were growing up.
Goldie has spoken candidly about the difficulty of remaining faithful, referring obliquely to the 'elasticity' in her relationship with Kurt.
'Monogamy is a very tough order. You’re in the prime of your life, you are attracted to other people, potentially, you have fantasies about that. It really runs the risk, if you will, if you’re not aware that you could maybe screw up a really good thing by doing that,' she told People back in 2017.
The solution she subscribed is mutual frankness within the couple: 'I’m sure I’ve been party to it, and Kurt’s been - we’re all normal this way. It’s like: "You really liked that guy, didn’t you?" Or the woman says, "You were looking at her." My answer would be: "Of course. Why not? She’s beautiful."'
She mused: 'Would you want a man who doesn’t look? Who doesn’t feel inspired by the beauty or the curves of a woman’s body? Or the way she is? I mean, come on. We’re human beings. There is, I guess, an elasticity to the relationship. Otherwise it’s going to break, just like a rubber band.'
Despite their decades together, they never married, with Goldie quipping on Loose Women in 2015 that 'we've been married before, it didn't work, so why do it again?'
She reasoned that 'marriage ends up being a business deal because at the end of a marriage, no matter how long or short it is, somebody owes somebody money.'
The next year she went on Loose Women again and vamped: 'I would have been long divorced if I had been married.'
In a more reflective mood, she remarked that 'there's something psychological about not being married, because if gives you the freedom to make decisions one way or the other. So for me, I chose to stay, Kurt chose to stay and we liked the choice.'
Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann, 23 years
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is not only one of the most successful TV shows ever - it also produced a rare example of a sterling Hollywood marriage.
Its leading lady Mariska Hargitay, the daughter of tragic Old Hollywood sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, met her husband of 21 years Peter Hermann on set.
While Mariska leads the show as NYPD detective Olivia Benson - a character so widely beloved she became the namesake of one of Taylor Swift's cats - Peter guest-starred on the show in 2002 as high-powered criminal defense lawyer Trevor Langan.
Mariska was swept off her feet at the sight of him, thinking: 'Who's that Clark Gable, Superman guy that I need to marry today?' she said on The Drew Barrymore Show.
Thanks to the intensity of her attraction, she got so 'nervous' that she tried to strike up an on-set conversation about his German background by saying: 'So, you're a Kraut,' to which she got a stone-faced: 'That's funny.'
Nevertheless, he asked her out and took her to church on their first date, during which she became so emotional that she burst into tears.
'Peter thought I was crying because I was so moved by the service. No, it was because I was just overwhelmed, realizing he was the one,' she told People.
Mariska married Peter in Santa Barbara in August 2004, and two years later she gave birth to their firstborn son, who shares his name with her wedding month.
In 2011 they adopted two more children - a daughter called Amaya, whom they brought home that April, and a son called Andrew who joined the family in October.
Peter has continued guest-starring as Trevor Langan on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, having appeared on 35 episodes of the series to date.
'I'm at a point in my life where it just keeps getting better with him,' Mariska rhapsodized about her marriage on the Today show last year.
She remarked that Peter likes to quote a bit of Jack Gilbert's 1994 poem Tear It Down that reads: 'We can break through marriage into marriage / By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond / affection and wade mouth-deep into love.'
Meanwhile Peter shed light on the secrets to his long-lasting bond with Mariska in an interview for the 2020 book What Makes a Marriage Last, which was written by Marlo Thomas and her late husband Phil Donohue.
'I never thought that I would laugh this much in my marriage. That is such a fundamental ingredient of who you are, this insistence on joy. And I think what sustains our marriage is that I know you love me in spite of who I am, and that is the definition of grace,' said Peter.
After they fight, one of them will 'test the waters with a joke - about the very thing we were fighting about,' the Younger star divulged.
'It's like one of us says: "I'm not saying I was wrong, and I'm not still insisting I was entirely right, but can we at least inch our way back toward the place where we caught at stuff together?" Once that happens, it's a pretty good sign that things are on their way to getting patched up.'
Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr., 25 years
Freddie Prinze Jr. once said he and Sarah Michelle Gellar 'really didn't dig each other' when they first met in the late 1990s.
They were making the 1997 teen slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer when they were introduced to each other and failed to get along.
'She was from New York City and I am a SoCal kid, so we were night and day, and it was just our philosophies on life just never clicked,' he told Entertainment Tonight.
A rapport eventually developed when 'one day I gave her a ride to the gym. We talked on the way up, and she was a cool chick,' Freddie shared with People.
He 'didn't think she ate enough so I made sure I cooked for her,' on top of which he became her 'chauffer' owing to the fact that at the time when they were shooting their movie, she had yet to acquire a driver's license.
Nevertheless, their friendship was purely platonic for three years until they went on their first date in 2000, completely by accident.
She has explained that they 'were supposed to have dinner with a mutual friend from out of town. That friend missed her flight, but we decided to still meet and catch up.'
At the restaurant she and Freddie 'were just two people at dinner catching up. We had a long car ride and a long dinner and things just happened,' she told People.
Freddie was hooked immediately, to the point he 'didn't go on dates with other girls, nor did I even want to pursue dates with other girls,' he shared.
As their romance flowered, they acted together again, playing Fred and Daphne in the live-action 2002 Scooby-Doo movie, alongside Linda Cardellini as Velma, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Neil Fanning as the voice of the title character.
Sarah and Freddie tied the knot in Mexico and 2002 and are now the proud parents of a 16-year-old daughter called Charlotte and a 13-year-old son called Rocky, whose birthdays happen to be one day apart.
Over the past 23 years, the couple have become a beacon of hope for their longstanding celebrity marriage - and earlier this year she shared their secret.
'Separate bathrooms,' the Cruel Intentions star told Jenna Bush Hager on an episode of Today with Jenna and Friends this April. 'It's really that simple.'
Sarah previous extolled the virtues of having a different bathroom from Freddie in 2017, on an episode of Harry Connick Jr's short-lived talk-show Harry.
'I feel like there are certain things that should just be kept your own and they never need to know,' Sarah explained to the crooner.
'Also, maybe, possibly, a separate shopping credit card; or if you are a guy, maybe a separate gaming card so I don’t have to see how much video games cost.'
Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, 27 years
Ever since their romance burst into the public eye in the 1990s, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones have been derided for their yawning quarter-century age gap.
But in spite of the naysayers, Michael, 81, and Catherine, 56, have soldiered through personal crises to emerge as one of the most enduring couples in Hollywood.
They met the Deauville Film Festival in 1998, after he took a shine to her while watching her in The Mask of Zorro and asked his publicist to arrange a meeting.
When they had a drink at their hotel bar, he asked: 'By chance do you want to come back and have a nightcap?' he said on The Jonathan Ross Show.
But later that evening, he told her: 'You know, I'm going to be the father of your children,' and she shot back: 'You know I've heard a lot about you, and I've seen a lot about you, and I think it's time that I say goodnight.'
Michael was undeterred, and when she flew off to Scotland shortly thereafter to film Entrapment, she was greeted with the sight of roses he had sent her.
Catherine was won over, and she and Michael started dating, leading up to his proposal on New Years Eve 1999 during a holiday in Aspen.
News leaked early the next year that she was pregnant, and Catherine gave birth to the couple's son Dylan in August 2000, three months before she and Michael exchanged vows at New York's iconic Plaza Hotel.
Their daughter Carys, whom Catherine was heavily pregnant with when she danced at the Oscars and accepted an acting award for Chicago, arrived in April 2003.
In 2018, Carys shared that when her father would do the school run 'People would be like: "Your grandpa’s here to pick you up,"' to Town and Country.
The following year, Michael revealed in an interview with Closer Weekly that his daughter had decided to start attending boarding school.
Michael and Catherine have retained their sense of humor about their age difference, as he revealed to Jonathan Ross a few years ago.
'We joke about when I reach my 80s and she’s wheeling me around and I’m saying: “Whoa, where are we going?” And she will say: “Cartier darling, Cartier. It’s your favorite store,"' Michael told the late-night host.
The marriage was not without its rough patches, particularly in the early 2010s as Michael battled throat cancer and Catherine was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.
In an interview that instantly went viral, Michael said his 'particular cancer is caused by HPV, which actually comes about from cunnilingus.'
However he further stated that 'if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it,' joking that the sex act 'giveth and taketh,' to the Guardian.
The couple briefly separated in 2013, but quickly reconciled later that year, with Michael explaining he and Catherine were 'working things out.'
A few years later, Catherine said: ‘I’m very blessed. I have a husband who listens to me and I’m a wife who listens to him. That’s why - though every marriage goes through ups and downs - we’ve come to a place where we couldn’t be better.’
Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin, 33 years
Harry Hamlin was instantly taken with Lisa Rinna when they met in 1992 and she gushed about how 'sexy' she found the circus she had been to the night before.
He recalled later that 'the only circus I’d ever been to was Ringling Brothers, but she was talking about Cirque du Soleil, which is very sexy, but I didn’t know that.'
Harry shared: 'I had not seen Cirque du Soleil at that point so I thought: "If this girl can be turned on by elephant dung and whatever, I’m good with her." I was enchanted right away,' in an interview on The Jess Cagle Show.
By that time, he had already led the cast of L.A. Law and been voted People's Sexiest Man Alive, while Lisa was just beginning her star-making turn on Days of Our Lives.
Harry was freshly single, just days off his split from his second wife Nicollette Sheridan, whom he had married only the previous year.
Lisa and Harry have both publicly maintained that Nicollette cheated on him with Michael Bolton, although Nicollette has dismissed the claim as 'FAKE NEWS!'
At any rate, Harry and Lisa started dating soon after they met, but the TV heartthrob had already been divorced twice, including from Falcon Crest star Laura Johnson, and was not particularly keen on the idea of going down the aisle a third time.
'It took five years, which is kind of a long time when you're waiting for it. I'd never been married,' Lisa said on Live! with Kelly and Ryan a few years ago.
Harry finally proposed to Lisa over dinner in Canada by remarking, apropos of nothing: 'I think we should get married. What do you think?'
She agreed at the time but nevertheless 'made him, afterward in the bathroom, I said: "You have to get down on your knee and propose for real-for real."'
They exchanged vows in a backyard ceremony in 1997, with Lisa decked out in a white Vera Wang dress as she and Harry made their union official.
The couple have since welcomed two daughters, Delilah Belle, 27, and Amelia Gray, 24, both of whom followed their parents into the public eye and become models.
Harry and Lisa's marriage remained firm through their family problems, including Amelia's past battle with anorexia and Delilah's former Xanax dependency.
Nevertheless, when Lisa was first offered her best-remembered job on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Harry initially said: 'Nope, I'll divorce you if you do it.'
However a couple of days later he said: 'You know, I’ve thought about it. I’ve done some research - I’ve changed my mind. I think it might be a good thing for you.'
Lisa recalled: 'Harry being a really, really good businessman said: "It’s a good thing. It’ll work for you. You should do it,"' on an OWN special a decade ago.
Harry later exclusively told the Daily Mail: 'We've always had a great relationship, it wasn't even tested during the Housewives thing.'
A few years ago, Lisa revealed that one of the ways she and Harry keep their romance exciting is by watching porn together, although she clarified that she has a preference for 'nice porn' over 'dirty porn,' on BravoTV.com's After Show.
Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, 38 years
Kevin Bacon has no memory of the first time he met Kyra Sedgwick, when he was a 20-year-old stage actor in New York and she was his 12-year-old fan back in 1978.
She had just caught him in a matinee of Marsha Norman's off-Broadway play Getting Out, and she was so taken with Kevin's acting that she and her older brother approached him at a deli while he grabbed a meal before the evening performance.
'I liked you in your show!' she chirped, nearly a decade before they became an item.
By 1987 Kyra had also become an actress and was working on a PBS movie of a play called Lemon Sky opposite Kevin, who became smitten with her on the set.
When they shot a scene in which he gave her a massage, he observed that her muscles were 'really tight' and urged her to see the 'great' masseuse at his hotel.
The advice was a tee-up to ask her on a date, inasmuch as the spa was in the gym and if he wrapped up his exercise routine around the time her massage let out, they could go for dinner afterwards as a twosome.
'And I'm thinking: "Yeah, sure, that's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna tell him when my massage is,"' Kyra recalled on Conan last year.
But when she emerged from her appointment, he was there waiting for her after his workout, in what she believed at the time was pure coincidence.
'Years later he told me he'd actually called downstairs and asked when I was getting massaged, which is kinda creepy but whatever,' she quipped.
The dinner date was a roaring success with hours of laughter, and when she woke up the next morning she had the striking sense that he was the one.
'I remember waking up and going: "I feel like home,"' she recalled a couple of years ago in an interview with People. 'I realized: "Oh, that was him."'
By 1988, they had gone down the aisle, beginning a marriage that has now lasted for 37 years and produced their children Travis, 36, and Sosie, 33.
Notwithstanding hiccups in their personal lives, such as when they lost a reported $30 million to the Bernie Madoff scam, their marriage has stayed rock solid.
They have also enjoyed a consistent professional relationship, working on a string of movies together like the 1991 sex comedy Pyrates and the 2005 drama Loverboy, not to be confused with the 1980s Patrick Dempsey comedy of the same name.
Fans of their pairing received a mild jolt when the couple went on Finding Your Roots and discovered they are in fact distantly related - ninth cousins once removed.
When Kevin was asked about the secret to their long-lived marriage, he joked: 'The secret is don't ask a celebrity on how to stay married,' on the Today show.
Kyra meanwhile has observed that a 'sense of humor is crucial' to their relationship, adding: 'He is very freaking funny.'