1998
The couple (who had met at her 21st-birthday party) embraced in Manhattan’s Central Park while filming the drama Cruel Intentions. Photo by: Lawrence Schwartzwald / Splash News |
No one has ever doubted Phillippe’s charm. Witherspoon first fell for her husband nearly a decade ago, when he came to her 21st–birthday party and she famously said, “I think you’re my present.” After a five–week courtship, they began dating and never looked back. They had, as Phillippe has said, an “intense emotional connection” despite divergent backgrounds: Witherspoon is a determinedly upbeat Nashville debutante who believes in church on Sundays, favors monogrammed napkins, abhors bare midriffs and whose parents, Dr. John Witherspoon, 64, a surgeon, and Betty, 58, a nursing professor, nicknamed her “Little Miss Type A” for her drive. Phillippe is proud of his working–class background – his father, Richard, 59, clocked in at a DuPont chemical plant; his mother ran a daycare center out of their family home – and is prone, as he has said, to moodiness. But both saw their differences as an asset. As he told the
Edmonton Sun in 1999, “Reese is a happy, lighthearted person. I tend to be considerably darker. She keeps me from getting dark and depressed, and that’s so essential in a business that’s based on uncertainty and insecurity.” Their mutual devotion to each other and to family seemed solid enough to handle life’s challenges. They took pride in their hands–on parenting, agreed that only one of them would work at a time and took marriage as seriously as movie roles, seeking couple’s counseling with exactly the same pragmatism that led Witherspoon to take intensive music lessons to prepare for
Walk the Line. “In what capacity is working on yourself or your marriage a bad thing?” the actress told Oprah Winfrey last year. “What marriage isn’t a journey? . . . Nobody’s perfect. . . . We all have our own set of problems.”
Until now, Phillippe’s mother seemed confident that those problems could be overcome. “Marriage is an ongoing task,” she told
People in August. “It’s always going to be a lot of work. But they seem to me to be happy people – kind and supportive toward one another.” Witherspoon’s colleague Pascoe agrees. “They seemed like the perfect Hollywood couple,” she says. “This is so sad.”
By Karen S. Schneider. K.C. Baker, Lesley Messer and Jeffrey Slonim in New York City, Howard Breuer and Amy Longsdorf in Los Angeles, Rita Farrell in Wilmington, Alicia Dennis in Austin, Zack Medicoff in Toronto and Erin Miller in Sydney
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