Nine marriages. That record belongs to one person in Hollywood history, and she wore each marriage like a badge of honor rather than a mark of failure. Below her, a cluster of stars racked up seven and eight trips down the aisle, some marrying the same person twice, one marrying a 13-year-old cousin, and another keeping the whole enterprise going for nine decades of life and eight decades of acting.
Fame accelerates everything. The initial rush of attraction that leads to a Las Vegas ceremony at 2am. The slow corrosion that follows when the cameras keep rolling but the intimacy doesn’t. Some of these marriages lasted decades. Some lasted 100 days. One lasted a single afternoon before being annulled before sundown the next morning.
Here are 15 celebrities who have been married the most times, ranked by the number of ceremonies they walked through.
1. Zsa Zsa Gabor – 9 Marriages
Hungarian-American actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor wed a total of nine times, though she claimed to have had only eight different husbands. The list reads like a directory of mid-century power: Turkish diplomat Burhan Asaf Belge (1937 – 1941), hotel magnate Conrad Hilton (1942 – 1947), actor George Sanders (1949 – 1954), Herbert Hunter (1962 – 1966), Joshua S. Cosden Jr. (1966 – 1967), Jack Ryan (1975 – 1976), Michael O’Hara (1976 – 1983), Felipe de Alba (1983, annulled a day after), and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt (1986 until her death).
Her longest marriage was to Prinz von Anhalt. That final marriage lasted 30 years until her death in 2016. Her shortest was to de Alba. Seven of Gabor’s marriages ended in divorce and one was annulled. The annulment happened because her divorce from O’Hara hadn’t been properly finalized, which makes the whole episode less romantic and more administrative.
One of three famous sisters, Gabor came from a marrying family. Her sister Eva took five trips down the aisle herself. Gabor was famously quotable on the subject. “You never really know a man until you have divorced him,” she once said, which, at nine marriages, she had ample opportunity to test.
2. Jennifer O’Neill – 9 Marriages
Actress and model Jennifer O’Neill holds one of the longest marriage records in Hollywood, with nine marriages to eight different men. O’Neill, best known for her role in the 1971 film Summer of ’42, married her first husband at age 17 and continued walking down the aisle well into her adult life.
Unlike Gabor, whose marriages kept her in the tabloids as a matter of glamorous performance, O’Neill has spoken openly about her search for stability and her Christian faith as the anchor that eventually grounded her personal life. She has described her early marriages as symptoms of trauma and unresolved pain rather than a love of ceremony.
3. Mickey Rooney – 8 Marriages
Mickey Rooney, the actor known for his career spanning nine decades, was married a total of eight times. His first marriage was to fellow Hollywood star Ava Gardner in 1942, and the couple divorced in 1943 after just over a year together. Rooney went on to marry seven more women, including models, actresses, and a singer. Gardner cited mental cruelty, reportedly linked to Rooney’s gambling and infidelity. She would go on to marry bandleader Artie Shaw and then Frank Sinatra.
Mickey then married Barbara’s best friend Marge, though their marriage only lasted 100 days. His final and longest marriage was to Jan Chamberlin, which lasted 34 years until their separation in 2012, two years before his death.
Rooney’s self-awareness about his marital history was at least darkly funny. He quipped, “When I say ‘I do’, the Justice of the Peace replies, ‘I know, I know,’” and described himself as “the only man in the world whose marriage license reads, ‘To Whom it May Concern.’”
4. Elizabeth Taylor – 8 Marriages
Elizabeth Taylor wed seven men in eight ceremonies. Her husbands included hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr., producer Mike Todd, singer Eddie Fisher, and actor Richard Burton, whom she married and divorced twice.
At 18, Taylor married hotel heir Conrad “Nicky” Hilton on May 6, 1950. That first and shortest marriage lasted approximately 205 days, according to TIME Magazine. Her full list, beyond the two Burtons, included Michael Wilding, Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, John Warner, and Larry Fortensky in 1991. The Burton marriages are the ones history gravitates toward. Their dynamic was so volatile and so publicly combustible that their second wedding, in 1975, struck observers at the time as either romantic or delusional depending on which newspaper they read.
Taylor’s marriages were not just romantic events but cultural ones. Each one reflected something about the era she lived in: the 18-year-old starlet locked into a studio contract marriage, the widow who married her dead husband’s best friend within months of the funeral, the twice-divorced woman who went back to the man everyone said was wrong for her. Her personal life was lived at a volume that matched her screen presence.
5. Lana Turner – 8 Marriages
Actress Lana Turner was married and divorced eight times between 1940, when she took her first husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, and 1972, when she divorced her seventh husband, Ronald Pellar. Her husbands were Artie Shaw, Joseph Stephen Crane, Henry J. Topping, Lex Barker, Fred May, Robert P. Eaton, and Ronald Pellar.
Turner’s personal life existed in the shadow of a famous tragedy: in 1958, her teenage daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed Turner’s abusive boyfriend, mobster Johnny Stompanato, to death in their home. Crane was acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide. Turner’s marriages before and after that event were consistently turbulent, and she was known to fall hard and fast, only to discover that the men she chose rarely deserved the loyalty she gave them. She remained an enduring symbol of studio-era glamour right up until her death in 1995.
6. Larry King – 8 Marriages
Like Elizabeth Taylor, late talk show host Larry King was married eight times, to seven different people. He married his first wife at 18, and the marriages that followed covered more than six decades of his life. In 1952, he married his high school sweetheart Freda Miller, but their marriage was allegedly annulled as their parents disapproved.
King’s most recent marriage was to singer Shawn Southwick, whom he wed in 1997. The union survived a separation and divorce filing in 2010, when the couple reconciled, though they eventually separated again in 2019. King died in January 2021. His marriages spanned such a long arc of American cultural life that his early unions were nearly forgotten by the time his name became synonymous with the suspenders-and-microphone image of late-night cable television.
7. Jerry Lee Lewis – 7 Marriages
Singer Jerry Lee Lewis was married seven times, a life punctuated by erratic behavior, alcohol and drug problems, and marriages more than one of which involved allegations of abuse. His string of marriages began when he was 16, with Dorothy Barton, a preacher’s daughter. His third marriage, to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown, caused a scandal that abruptly ended his British tour after her age was revealed.
His fees collapsed from $10,000 a night to $250. The career that had seemed to rival Elvis’s was effectively over, at least in its first incarnation. In 2012, he married Judith Brown, who had previously been married to Myra’s brother Rusty Brown. Jerry died on October 28, 2022, at the age of 87.
8. Richard Pryor – 7 Marriages
Comedian Richard Pryor was married seven times, but to five spouses. He married two of his wives twice. Pryor’s wives were Patricia Price, Shelley Bonus, model and actor Deborah McGuire, interior designer Jennifer Lee, and actor Flynn Belaine.
Pryor was married to Belaine from 1986 to 1987 and then again from 1990 to 1991. He was also married to Lee from 1981 to 1982, his fourth marriage, and he then remarried Lee in 2001. They were married at the time of his 2005 death. The remarriages say something about Pryor that a straight count doesn’t capture: he wasn’t simply restless or serially romantic, he was returning to people. Whether that reflects genuine depth of feeling or an inability to let go is probably both, depending on the marriage.
9. Billy Bob Thornton – 6 Marriages
Actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton has been married six times and divorced five, with the last divorce resulting in him saying it was “likely he would not marry again.” He did, to Connie Angland in 2014. His marriages trace an arc from a brief first union in 1978 through to his current one. Toni Lawrence was wife number three, marrying Thornton from 1986 to 1988. Actress Cynda Williams was up next, from 1990 to 1992. Pietra Dawn Cherniak was number five, with their marriage ending in 1997.
Then the relationship with Angelina Jolie occurred, lasting from 2000 to 2002. That marriage is the one most people remember, partly for the matching vials of each other’s blood they reportedly wore as pendants and partly for the sheer improbability of the pairing. Jolie and Thornton met on the set of Pushing Tin in 1999, eloped in Las Vegas within months of meeting, and were divorced three years later. Thornton’s current marriage to Connie Angland, by comparison, has been the longest and lowest-profile of his romantic life.
10. Pamela Anderson – 6 Marriages
Pamela Anderson has been married six times. Her marriages include her union with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in 1995, which lasted four years and produced two sons. She later married and divorced Kid Rock in 2006 (the marriage lasted four months), then married Rick Salomon twice: once in 2007 (annulled five months later) and again in 2014 (divorced in 2015).
Anderson’s sixth marriage, to her longtime bodyguard Dan Hayhurst in 2020, was announced on Christmas Eve and conducted in a private ceremony at her Vancouver Island property. She has been publicly philosophical about her pattern of marriages in a way that neither apologizes for them nor romanticizes them. In 2023, her memoir and the accompanying documentary presented her own account of a life shaped by relentless public scrutiny of choices that, in a different decade and with a different person’s name attached, might have attracted far less commentary.
11. Cher – 2 Official Marriages
Cher has been legally married twice: to Sonny Bono from 1964 to 1975, and to Gregg Allman from 1975 to 1979. Cher filed for divorce 10 days after her 1975 wedding to the Allman Brothers rocker, but their union lasted on paper until 1979 and produced a child, Elijah Blue Allman. The Sonny marriage is the one that defined a generation of television viewers, the duo performing their way through a decade of mainstream American culture before their divorce, and then continuing to work together and maintain a friendship until Sonny’s death in 1998.
Cher’s presence on this list comes from the quality of the romantic history: multiple long-term relationships that had the emotional intensity of marriages without the legal paperwork, and a public life defined by romantic reinvention across five decades. The number two undersells the actual story considerably.
12. Joan Collins – 5 Marriages
Dynasty star Joan Collins first married in 1952, at age 19. In 2002, she tied the knot for the fifth time with Percy Gibson, a man 32 years younger than her. The marriage has lasted, and the couple renewed their vows in 2009.
Collins has been refreshingly blunt about her marriages over the years, framing them not as failures but as stages of a life fully lived. Her husbands across five decades included actor Maxwell Reed, music producer Anthony Newley (with whom she had two children), businessman Ron Kass, Swedish pop star Peter Holm, and Percy Gibson. The Newley marriage was the most artistically significant. He wrote several songs for her, and their social circle in the 1960s included the Rolling Stones and the Rat Pack. It was also the most painful, ending after his infidelities became impossible to ignore.
13. James Cameron – 5 Marriages
Director James Cameron has been married five times. His second wife, Gale Anne Hurd, produced his hits The Terminator and Terminator 2, while his fourth wife, Linda Hamilton, starred in both films. Cameron wed Sharon Williams, producer Gale Anne Hurd, fellow director Kathryn Bigelow, Terminator star Linda Hamilton, and actor Suzy Amis.
Multiple relationships began as professional collaborations, suggesting that the intensity of his filmmaking environment was also the environment where his romantic life ignited. His fifth wife, Suzy Amis, is a former actress he met on the set of Titanic in 1997. They married in 2000 and remain together. Cameron is reportedly the first to acknowledge that he was a difficult partner during his filmmaking years, describing his obsessive approach to production as something that left little room for the ordinary rhythms of domestic life.
14. Martin Scorsese – 5 Marriages
Director Martin Scorsese has been married five times: to Laraine Marie Brennan, writer Julia Cameron, actor Isabella Rossellini, producer Barbara De Fina, and book editor Helen Schermerhorn Morris. His marriage to Julia Cameron, who went on to write The Artist’s Way, lasted from 1975 to 1977, a period during which Scorsese was making some of his most viscerally intense work. His marriage to Isabella Rossellini from 1979 to 1983 overlapped with the release of Raging Bull, which remains one of cinema’s most unsparing portraits of masculine self-destruction.
With his fifth wife, Helen Morris, Scorsese appears to have found a lasting union. The pair have been married since 1999. That’s now over 25 years, easily his longest. Whether his directorial career mellowed him, or whether he simply found the right person, is the kind of question Scorsese would probably answer with a long story involving a film reference.
15. Kenny Rogers – 5 Marriages
Kenny Rogers’s first marriage was to Janice Gordon between 1958 and 1960. He had a similarly short second marriage to Jean Rogers from 1960 to 1963. Rogers married a further three times after that: to Margo Anderson, Marianne Gordon, and finally Wanda Miller, whom he wed in 1997 and who was by his side when he died in March 2020.
Rogers has said in interviews that he married young and often before he understood what he actually needed from a relationship. His fifth and final marriage to Wanda Miller, 28 years his junior, lasted over two decades and produced twin sons born in 2004. By the end of his life, Rogers was open about the fact that he’d wasted years searching for something in the wrong places, and that the relative calm of his later marriage was worth the long route to get there.
What the Record Actually Shows
The names on this list span nine decades of celebrity culture, from classic Hollywood to reality television, from rock-and-roll to the Rat Pack. Fame accelerates everything, including the initial rush of attraction that leads to a Las Vegas ceremony at 2am and the slow corrosion that follows when the cameras keep rolling but the intimacy doesn’t.
Some of these marriages were love stories by any reasonable definition. Mickey Rooney’s 34-year final marriage. Kenny Rogers staying with Wanda Miller until his last breath. Joan Collins, in her seventies, still married to the same man she chose in 2002. Others were clearly products of impulse, youth, loneliness, or the particular madness of meeting someone on a film set and confusing professional intensity for the real thing.
The public has always consumed celebrity marriages as entertainment while the people inside them were living something else entirely. Zsa Zsa Gabor turned that into a performance. Richard Pryor kept circling back to the same people. Jerry Lee Lewis seemed genuinely unbothered by the wreckage he left behind. None of them were living for the count. The count is just what the rest of us kept.
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