Although Steven Spielberg has been happily married for over 30 years to actress and model, Kate Capshaw, he had a marriage before that resulted in him losing $100 million due to an illegitimate prenuptial agreement he made with his first wife, Amy Irving.
Steven and Amy first met in 1975 when she auditioned for his sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Although she didn’t earn a role in the movie, the two hit it off and started dating. They dated on and off for the next ten years before marrying in 1985.
Throughout their relationship, Irving struggled to maintain her public identity as herself rather than “Mrs. Steven Spielberg”.
“I do not ever want to be known as ‘Steven Spielberg’s girlfriend’. First I want to be Amy Irving,” she told Femme Fatales in 1977.
This is what ultimately led to their divorce in 1989. In a 1994 interview with the LA Times, Irving said, “During my marriage to Steven, I felt like a politician’s wife. There were certain things expected of me that definitely weren’t me.”
Prior to their divorce, the couple had written up a prenuptial agreement that protected each other’s monetary earnings if they should ever split up. However, they reportedly wrote up the document on the back of a cocktail napkin without any attorneys present.
Irving eventually took Spielberg to court to delegitimize the prenup they had agreed on because of the fact that no lawyers were present, resulting in her obtaining half of Steven’s total earnings from the time they were married, which amounted to nearly $100 million.
Despite a rocky end to his first marriage, Steven remarried to Kate Capshaw two years after his divorce.
The pair met when Capshaw auditioned for and earned the supporting role in Spielberg’s 1984 sequel film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Being in an action-adventure film wasn’t something she was used to, but she was excited to roll with it.
“One thing that was really lovely is that nobody made me feel bad for being afraid,” she told PM Magazine. “They didn’t go, ‘Oh gosh, she’s being a girl.’ In these movies, the girl always gets the worst stuff. An action-adventure movie is always difficult by nature because there’s a sense of urgency. I call them ‘whoosh’ movies. You start out and you just whoosh your way through to the end.
Capshaw also was a divorcee prior to meeting Spielberg. Both Steven and Kate brought kids from their previous marriage into their new family which grew by four more throughout their relationship.
Unlike Irving, Capshaw didn’t experience an issue being “Mrs. Steven Spielberg”, telling The Spokesman-Review in 1995 it “neither hurt nor helped” her acting career.
“If someone is so insecure that it would be frightening to them to have Steven read a page of their script,” she continued, “or hear the experiences of the set or watch the experiences, if that’s threatening, that is a ticket to disaster. A director has to be confident. The people I’ve worked with are thrilled to share the making of the movie with Steven, who is one of the more generous directors in the community we live in. He’s quiet, he sits back, he doesn’t answer a question unless a question’s been asked. You feel his support.”
Not only has Steven contributed to the projects she’s done, but she often gives her insight on things Steven is pursuing, even if it’s a harsh truth for Steven to hear from his wife.
“My wife says I’m not funny enough!” Steven told Total Film in 2004, regarding the fact that Kate had talked him out of directing comedy movies. “I was preparing to direct Meet The Parents when she read the script. She said, ‘You’re not directing this movie — give it to a director who does comedy well.’”
“She doesn’t mind when I have comic moments in my movies,” he added, “like when Tom Cruise chases his eyeballs towards a drain in Minority Report, but I’m not allowed to do an outright comedy! Still, I produced Meet The Parents and we did very well with it.”
As Spielberg has continued to make movies, most recently his semi-autobiographical historical fiction flick, The Fableman’s, Kate has put most of her focus on their large, blended family.
“He operates his jet — a camera and a story. My jet is the family,” she told The Spokesman-Review in the same interview. “I might not be comfortable pushing the limits in film the way he does, and he might not be as comfortable pushing the limits of our family. But I get to be the frontierswoman here, and he gets to be the frontiersman there.”
“Steven and I are partners, and our life together is our production, so to speak. If I want to do something that affects that production, I want to have his support. If he doesn’t understand the piece, then I have to help explain it. Sometimes, in explaining it, I realize I don’t understand it. Then everybody’s saved a lot of work.”
Sources:
https://bestlifeonline.com/steven-spielberg-amy-irving-divorce-news/
