Bennifer is over – again. But why does Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s divorce feel so sad?
It was genuinely nice seeing two middle-aged stars reunite 18 years after their wedding was called off. But it didn’t last
All Hollywood stars embarking on a romance secretly hope for just one thing: official condemnation from the Vatican. When it emerged that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were having an affair on the set of Cleopatra, the Holy See issued a letter describing Taylor as “an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands”. (To be fair, she was heading into marriage No 5, with three more to go.)
When news of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s divorce broke today, two years after they married and two decades after they first fell in love, entertainment reporters began invoking Burton and Taylor, another celebrity couple who famously separated and reunited. Baylor – as no one called them – married in 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975 and divorced again less than a year later. But Bennifer – who were never condemned by a pope, but did earn the first ever celebrity couple portmanteau – were far more normal than Burton and Taylor, who both delighted in publicly playing out their torrid, drunken excess. And that was an undeniable part of Bennifer’s appeal.
Affleck and Lopez first dated between 2002 and 2004. Even at their heights, both of them could sell more magazines than tickets. He wrote a couple of very good films and starred in some very bad ones. She was a curious multi-hyphenate: a singer-dancer-actor with enough star power to drive a career in fluffy romcoms, so-so thrillers and a two-minute Pepsi ad. Both of them were beautiful and inoffensive, and seemed to fear and feed on the attention they got. Like many of our most enduring stars, she is now perhaps most famous for being her, JLO, Jenny from the Block. He is mainly famous now for looking sad.