Actors Who Had Ridiculously Short Marriages

The love lives of actors have always captivated audiences for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, it humanizes stars and makes us realize they are often just as interested in finding someone to spend the rest of their lives with as we are. But there's also the guilty pleasure of watching the wild ways they can start relationships — such as the actors who fell in love with an on-screen family member in real life — and the explosive manner in which celebrity relationships often end. 

A seemingly common aspect of actor marriages is how brief they often are. If an actor stays with their spouse for even 10 or 15 years, they are praised as one of the more impressive Hollywood marriages. It's not unusual to be able to count how many years an actor stays married on one hand, but even that puts most of the marriage lengths on this list to shame. The longest that any actors here stayed married is about a year, with most of them far less than that — some mere weeks, and a few, literally just a matter of days. Some of these partnerships consist of two actors, but they all have at least one within the failed pairing.  

Some celebrity couples claim to have had amicable divorces, saying that they remain friends with their ex-spouses — if they make any statements on the matter at all. But in 2014, three years after "Mad Men" actor Elisabeth Moss got divorced from comedian and musician Fred Armisen — a marriage that only lasted about a year — Moss was both outspoken and also unwilling to sugarcoat how she felt about Armisen.

Moss described her marriage to Armisen as "awful and horrible" in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. She also didn't mince words about her thoughts on Armisen specifically, saying, "He's so great at doing impersonations. But the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person." For his part, Armisen accepted all of the blame for the breakdown of his relationship with Moss. In a 2013 "Howard Stern Show" appearance, Stern read the above quotes to Armisen, and the "Saturday Night Live" alum didn't disagree. "I think I was a terrible husband," Armisen told Stern (via ET! Online). "I want to be married [...] and then somewhere around a year, two years, I get freaked out." 

As of this writing, Armisen has been married to musical comedian Riki Lindhome for nearly two and a half years, so maybe he's finally got things figured out in that area.

Jennifer Lopez has been married four times — and with the August 2024 announcement that she has already filed for divorce from Ben Affleck, it looks like she's also soon to be four times divorced. The "Out of Sight" star's longest marriage was her third one, to fellow actor and singer Marc Anthony, which lasted from 2004 to 2014. As for the shortest, that distinction belongs to marriage number two, between Lopez and backup dancer Cris Judd.

Lopez met Judd when he worked on the music video for her hit 2000 song "Love Don't Cost a Thing." They were engaged for just one month before getting married in September 2001. The marriage only lasted nine months. In a 2014 US Weekly interview reflecting on the marriage, Judd said that while being in such a tabloid-scrutinized relationship was hard, that wasn't what ultimately did them in. "Unfortunately, it just didn't work out," he told the magazine. Given that Lopez had just recently divorced Anthony, Judd also weighed in on Lopez's rocky history with love, saying, "I can't give you the answer as to why her relationships don't work. I think that it's that it is work. It's whether you want to work on it or not." 

While filming "The Last Song," her first starring movie role that wasn't voice acting or Hannah Montana-related, Miley Cyrus met — and began a relationship with – Liam Hemsworth. The pair spent a few years on-again and off-again, but in 2012, Hemsworth decided to stay with Cyrus when he proposed to her in May of that year. But it wasn't meant to be, as the couple never went through with the marriage, instead calling the engagement off the following year.

Fast forward another three years, and Cyrus revealed to Ellen DeGeneres that she and "Hunger Games" star Hemsworth had gotten re-engaged after months of media speculation. Seeming to not want to rush things this time, their second engagement lasted over two years before they finally got married in December 2018. Nevertheless, they were separated by the following summer, and their divorce was finalized in January 2020. They were legally married for 13 months, but the divorce was first filed just shy of their eight-month anniversary.

Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush met, dated, and eventually got married while co-stars on the WB-turned-CW drama series "One Tree Hill." But considering that the two of them also became TV friends who couldn't stand each other in real life on that same show, it's clear that things between them went very sour, very quickly.

Playing fictional couple Lucas Scott and Brooke Davis got pretty complicated when Murray and Bush officially divorced in December 2006 — just eight months after they got married. While short marriages are rarely the result of amicable splits, it was especially nasty between Murray and Bush, with Bush trying to get the marriage annulled on the grounds of fraud. The request was denied, but Murray surely felt vindicated when Bush later admitted to Andy Cohen on his Sirius XM show "Radio Andy" that marrying Murray "was not a thing [she] actually really wanted to do."

Most people think of "Starship Troopers" star Denise Richards as the woman that finally got infamous Hollywood bad boy Charlie Sheen to settle down in 2002 — at least for a few years. But what tends to get forgotten is that Sheen's marriage to Richards was actually his second. The "Two and a Half Men" star had already done the marriage thing back in 1995 when he wed a model named Donna Peele only six weeks after they met. It's possible that the reason the marriage was forgotten is that it was quickly overshadowed by a much bigger news story involving Sheen that same year — that he was revealed to have been one of the clients of so-called "Hollywood Madame" Heidi Fleiss. 

Not surprisingly, Sheen's marriage didn't survive that revelation, as he and Peele were divorced in 1996 about five months after getting married. Sheen claimed at the time that the reason for the divorce was that he had become a born-again Christian. As for Peele, that seems to have marked the end of her having any sort of public life. Virtually nothing is known about what she's been up to since she became the first ex-Mrs. Charlie Sheen. 

While actor Shannen Doherty's more infamous short marriage was to championship poker player Rick Salomon — who also later married Pamela Anderson two separate times — Doherty had another one that was a bit longer, but involved a fellow actor. Eight years before marrying Salomon, Doherty ended her marriage to Ashley Hamilton after about a year. Doherty blames Hamilton's struggles with addiction for the divorce. But for a brief period, being married to Hamilton made Doherty the daughter-in-law of actor George Hamilton.

When the "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "Charmed" actor died at 53 in 2024, Hamilton made a statement to Today expressing all that Doherty had meant to him. "Shannen was not only my wife, she was my guardian angel. 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," Hamilton's sweet statement read. 

Most people point to 2005's "Wedding Crashers" as Bradley Cooper's breakthrough role — and it remains one of his biggest movies of all time. He had previously starred in "Wet Hot American Summer," but he was an unknown at the time, and that movie took some years to find its audience as a cult classic. Nevertheless, it didn't take long for Cooper's career to take off in the mid-2000s, and he was a certified A-list leading man shortly after. 

But just before that happened, he had gotten married to — and subsequently divorced from — actor Jennifer Esposito, who was already a well-established presence in both film and on television at that point. It's a marriage that few people noticed and even fewer remember, in part because Cooper wasn't a big star yet when they wed in 2006 and Esposito wasn't involved in any particularly noteworthy projects around that time. Even though they were only married for four months, it was said that they had already been separated for some time — begging the question of how much of their quick marriage they actually spent together.

When thinking about Drew Barrymore and short marriages, one might go straight to her 15-month marriage to comedian Tom Green — the one that resulted in her also making a cameo in the infamous "Freddy Got Fingered," a major comedy flop that ruined Tom Green's career. But as fun as that wild union is to talk about, that actually isn't even Barrymore's shortest marriage by a longshot.

In 1994, when "Boys on the Side" star Barrymore was still a teenager, she married a Los Angeles bar owner named Jeremy Thomas — at his bar, no less, despite her only being 19 years old at the time. And speaking of 19, that's the number of days that Barrymore and Thomas spent married before the couple separated. Barrymore filed for divorce a couple months later. She later claimed that Thomas, who wasn't an American citizen, only married her to get his green card. Barrymore told People magazine in 2020 that she is determined to never get married again, meaning that Chanel heir Will Kopelman became her third and final husband when the couple divorced in 2016. 

The younger generations mostly know Mario Lopez as a host of news and reality shows. But those who grew up in the '80s and '90s still remember him as A.C. Slater, the token jock on iconic teen comedy series "Saved by the Bell." Similarly, whether you know of Ali Landry as an actor ("Eve," "Sound of Freedom") or remember her when she was primarily a model and beauty pageant contestant also depends on your age. And it's when Landry was transitioning out of her pageant days and Lopez was transitioning into his hosting era that the two met, during production of the Miss Teen USA competition in 1998. 

They dated until 2003, when Landry went from Lopez's girlfriend to his fiancée. Despite waiting so long to get married, the 2004 wedding lasted a whopping two weeks. Landry heard rumors of Lopez being unfaithful mere days before their wedding, but went ahead with the ceremony anyway when he denied the allegations. But she must have eventually found some type of concrete proof, as she was able to successfully have the marriage annulled on the grounds of his infidelity. It wasn't until 2011, during an appearance on "The Howard Stern Show," that Lopez finally publicly admitted to cheating on Landry during his bachelor party. 

There was a glut of forgettable horror movies in the 2000s, such as the panned 2008 slasher "Prom Night." But two of the stars of that movie, Johnathon Schaech and Jana Kramer, will always remember working on it, because that's the film where they met, eventually getting married. Reports vary as to just how long the marriage lasted, with articles at the time saying it was about a month, while Schaech said on Twitter in 2021 in a throwback photo of the wedding day, "@kramergirl and I lasted a week." Either way, it was brief.

In 2022, Schaech appeared on Kramer's podcast, "Whine Down," to discuss their relationship. In an episode titled "That Thing You Do with Johnathon Schaech" in a nod to the actor's most well-known role, the two reflected on their failed marriage and seemed willing to share the blame for what went wrong — admitting that neither of them were in the right place emotionally at the time to get married. Luckily, they were at least able to remain friends. 

In 1998, two of the biggest stars on the planet were Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman — she had just come off her stint as a series regular on "Baywatch," and he was in the middle of helping the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive championships while also working on two big Hollywood movies as a headliner. It was tough to imagine more of an "it" couple for that particular moment in pop culture to come together and get married.

But that's exactly what the two did on November 14, 1998, when they got married in Las Vegas. It was Electra's first marriage, and Rodman's second. Rodman filed for an annulment just nine days later, but cancelled that when it seemed like the couple were going to try and make it work. It didn't. The divorce was made official by spring 1999. The couple's whirlwind courtship was mentioned during the 2020 documentary "The Last Dance," about the final seasons of the Bulls' historic 1990s championship run, revealing that Michael Jordan once had to fly to Vegas to drag Rodman from the hotel room he was in with Electra and force him to return to Chicago for team practice. 

No, we're not going to discuss Nicolas Cage's brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. That 107-day run from wedding day to initial divorce filing was basically an eternity compared to how short his March 2019 marriage was to a woman named Erika Koike. And it was literally just a March 2019 marriage, as it began on March 23 and Cage had already filed for an annulment on March 27. 

The short wedding came after the couple had only been dating for about a year. Koike actually contested the annulment request, arguing that their marriage was in fact legitimate. Normal divorce proceedings happened, and Koike would officially become Cage's fourth ex-wife shortly thereafter. But one of the untold truths of Nicolas Cage is that he's now been married five times, as of his marriage to Riko Shibata in 2021. The "Face/Off" star was married to Alice Kim between Presley and Koike, and his first marriage was to "Boyhood" actor Patricia Arquette from 1995 to 2001. Although, shockingly, it was revealed that Cage and Arquette had been separated since January 1996, meaning they only actually spent about nine months together as a couple. It's unclear why the divorce didn't come for another five years. 

This one is complicated. There was indeed a wedding ceremony between "Beverly Hills Cop" star Eddie Murphy and film producer Tracey Edmonds on January 1, 2008. Friends and family were in attendance. Vows were exchanged. It had all the elements of a wedding, and multiple media outlets reported it as such. For a couple of weeks, the world assumed that Murphy had indeed married Edmonds, who had been previously hitched to legendary musician and producer Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. 

Then came January 16, when the couple released a surprising announcement to TMZ: "After much consideration and discussion, we have jointly decided that we will forgo having a legal ceremony as it is not necessary to define our relationship further. While the recent symbolic union in Bora Bora was representative of our deep love, friendship and respect that we have for one another on a spiritual level, we have decided to remain friends." 

In other words, they hadn't — nor did they plan to — actually make the marriage legal. So they were only symbolically "married" for a few weeks, and in the eyes of the law, they never actually were.