This is the third part in a four-part series profiling four best friends – Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Serena Williams, Amal Clooney, and the Duchess of Sussex (the former Meghan Markle) – all of whom married at the same age, 36, long after they thought love had passed them by. Click here to see Part 1 about Priyanka Chopra Jonas and click here to see Part 2 about Serena Williams.
In July 2013, the then Amal Alamuddin had, as she told Glamour, resigned herself to the idea that she was going to be a spinster. She was 35, an internationally successful human rights lawyer, beautiful, brilliant, and the antithesis of boring. Love, she said, had just never happened for her.
“I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making,” she told Vogue. “It’s the one thing in life that I think is the biggest determinant of happiness, and it’s the thing you have the least control over. Are you going to meet this person? I was 35 when I met him. It wasn’t obvious that it was going to happen for me. And I wasn’t willing or excited about the idea of getting married or having a family in the absence of that.”
Moments before Amal met the man who would become her husband – the self-proclaimed “bachelor for life” George Clooney, who vowed after a failed attempt at marriage in 1989 that he would never marry again, and was quite vocal about it – Amal wanted love, though thought it out of reach; George, 52, knew he could have any woman he wanted, but he wasn’t interested in any of them.
“If you know anything about my crazy life, you know that I’d pretty much committed to the idea of never marrying again,” he told Vogue. “But I started dating Amal, and I immediately knew that something was very different.”
For her part, Amal instantly knew as well: “It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” she told Vogue.
The woman had resigned herself to singleness, refusing, bravely, to never settle until it felt just that way.
In just over a year, in September 2014, the self-proclaimed “bachelor for life” would marry again, for the final time.
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It used to be, before Amal broke the mold, that a celebrity like George Clooney either ended up with another celebrity – think, say, a Jennifer Aniston or a Julia Roberts – or they ended up with someone completely outside of the limelight, a complete unknown interested in remaining that way. Then, in walks Amal, who is not a celebrity, per se – though, in the legal profession she is nothing if not a shining star – but yet also not an unknown. Add into the mix that George seemed to be quickly getting quite serious about this woman after very publicly declaring he had no intentions of getting serious about anyone, ever, and the media didn’t know quite what to do with Miss Alamuddin, a striking beauty born in Beirut, Lebanon and educated at Oxford and New York University School of Law.
“If the standard model for Hollywood marriage is either celebrity pairing or quiet consortship (a spouse outside the limelight, a supportive partner on the running board of the career), Amal Clooney quickly flouted such customs,” wrote Vogue. “She was not a celebrity, yet she rose to fame’s conventions and constraints. At the same time, she remained carefully herself, heralding a subtle, welcome change in social expectation on the way. Once, a high-achieving working woman would have been trapped in the shadow of her leading man. Now you go out evenings and expect to find women outshining, in their brilliance and accomplishment, whoever dangles on their arm – even George Clooney.”
Fluent in English, French, and Arabic, when the 35-year-old Amal Alamuddin met the 52-year-old George Clooney, she was a lawyer – or barrister – specializing in international law and human rights. She handled, with brilliance, several high-profile cases in international courts, including the defense of former Ukranian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange. Beyond her criminal defense work, Amal has also held several important advisory roles, including working with Kofi Annan for a United Nations commission on Syria and acting as counsel during a 2013 inquiry into the use of drones in counter-terrorist activities. She has also contributed to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict initiatives, which works to defend the rights of women in war zones, and in early 2015 she announced that she would represent Armenia in the European Court of Human Rights during its case against Turkey for the denial of the Armenian Genocide, according to her official biography on biography.com. Much of her work centers on the mistreatment of women, and “she gets into the granular detail,” said Philippa Webb, one of two fellows with whom Amal shared a Peace Palace office in The Hague. “But she also has a deeper reflection on what this is doing to the development of the law. Fortunately, I haven’t been against her yet. I really wouldn’t want to be on the other side.”
(This makes George’s work as a heartthrob doctor on the 1990s hit television show ER or his turn as Danny Ocean in Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen seem pretty lame in comparison. Even he said to Vogue “she’s the professional, and I’m the amateur. I get to see someone at the absolute top of their game doing their job better than anybody I’ve ever seen.”)
“What distinguishes a really great barrister in international law practice is creativity,” said Geoffrey Robertson, a cofounder of Doughty Street Chambers, the firm where Amal works. “She’s been a leading intellectual thinker on the concept of fairness – in a trial where you don’t have a jury and where, sometimes, you don’t have a defendant. That set her apart even before she met George.”
Yes, it’s true – Amal was absolutely top-notch even before she wooed and wowed an A-list movie star, even before she wore Oscar de la Renta at her Venetian wedding, and even before she landed the cover of Vogue. And it took a special type of man, someone like, say, George Clooney, to not only realize that but feel confident enough to go after it. The night he met her, he told Vogue that, upon meeting her, “of course she was beautiful, but I also thought she was fascinating, and I thought she was brilliant. Her life was incredibly exciting – the clients she was taking on and the superhuman work that she was doing. I was taken with her from the moment I saw her.”
When they married, the headlines poked fun at George and Amal’s dissonance: “Internationally Acclaimed Barrister Amal Alamuddin Marries an Actor,” screamed one. New York Magazine quipped “just look at what she’s done to George Clooney, reducing our American prince to the status of adorable sidekick.” At the Golden Globes in 2015, Tina Fey joked “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.” George laughed harder than anyone else in the crowd.
“George Clooney is lucky to have a girl like Amal,” said Rafeh Khodr, a restaurant owner from Amal’s ancestral hometown of Baakline in the mountains outside Beiruit, in an interview with NBC News. “She is very well-educated, and a very well-esteemed person around here.”
Jamil Rajah, Baakline’s deputy mayor, agreed, telling NBC News “Amal is an outstanding person and we are very proud of her. Quite aside from her marriage to George, she has made a name for herself as a talented lawyer.”
After George was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2006, he said, bluntly, he’d never marry again. “I haven’t softened my position,” he said. He told Esquire that, when it came to marriage, he wasn’t very good at it. Yet, after they met in July 2013, George told Ellen DeGeneres that “it was one of those funny things,” he said. “From the minute we met, we just hit it off. And from the minute we met, we just sort of felt like we were going to be together.”
Isn’t it funny – and a little sad – that a woman like Amal, successful, driven, focused, ambitious, would have everything she wanted and yet nothing she needed all at once, a no doubt success but yet lacking all she felt really, truly mattered.
Until…
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Scene: George’s famed home at Lake Como, Italy, July 2013. En route to Cannes, a mutual friend of both George’s and Amal’s stopped by George’s house with Amal in tow.
“I got a call from my agent who said ‘I met this woman who is coming to your house, who you’re going to marry,’” George told David Letterman on Letterman’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. “It really worked out that way.”
Also at the home that evening? George’s parents, whom Amal met the same night she met the man who would become her husband.
“The funniest thing was my mom and dad were visiting, so my parents were there,” George said. “We stayed up all night talking and then I got her email address because she was going to send me some pictures of my parents.”
She sent the photos, and the two began an email relationship that lasted for weeks. Amal was a keen emailer – one of her favorite forms of communication – and George became one, too, responding to her emails in the voice of his dog, Einstein, who kept continually getting trapped in various locales and was constantly in need of legal rescue.
“I thought she was beautiful, and I thought she was funny and obviously smart,” George told The Hollywood Reporter about their early courtship. “I don’t know [what she thought of me]. She probably thought I was old. Then she sent some pictures from when she was here, and we were writing each other, emailing, talking, mostly about what was going on in each other’s lives, and over a period of time it became clear we were more than just friends.”
Their first date didn’t come until three months later, in October 2013, when George invited Amal to visit Abbey Road Studios in London – yes, that Abbey Road – where he was supervising the recording of the score of his latest movie, Monuments Men.
“That was a good first date,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Then we went for dinner. She said ‘Let’s go to this place.’ It was one of those places that was incredibly hip and chic. And when we came out, there were 50 paparazzi there. But she handled it like a champ. And pretty quickly, things escalated once I was in London.”
George spent six weeks there, then the couple spent Christmas together in Cabo San Lucas. Then they went on a safari in Kenya, where Amal was up close and personal with her favorite animal – giraffes. They went to a place where the giraffes stick their heads through the windows of the safari and kiss tourists. In February 2014, after George had finally arrived back in Los Angeles after his whirlwind few months with Amal, he looked at a photo of her smiling at the giraffes, showed it to a friend, and said “I think I’m going to ask her to marry me.” The friend agreed – she was the one.
He began ring shopping. He had no doubts, except “my only doubt was if she thought maybe it was too soon,” George told The Hollywood Reporter. “But there was no doubt that we were the right couple and that we were the right team. And we were a team from right off the bat. Immediately, we felt we were just happy, and we have been happy ever since.”
Six months after they began dating and nine months after they met, on April 28, 2014, George proposed at his home in L.A. That night, he cooked dinner: “I’m the cook in the family,” he said, smiling. “Believe me, Amal makes reservations. I did pasta of some form, not that impressive.”
“I plotted the whole thing out,” he told Ellen DeGeneres on her eponymous television show. “I had the ring hidden. I had music playing – my aunt Rosemary [Clooney]’s song, ‘Why Shouldn’t I?’ I’ve cooked dinner. And she comes in and she’s just come back from London. And she’s like, maybe we’ll just order in, and I go ‘No, no, no, I’ve made dinner.’ I’ve got it all set up, timed out, and the song is coming and [Amal] gets up to go wash the dishes, which she’s never done. And I’m like ‘What are you doing?’ and she comes back in. And finally I said ‘I blew out the candle and I think the lighter’s in the box behind you.’ And she pulls [the ring] out, and she looks at it, and she’s like ‘it’s a ring,’ like as if somebody had left it there some other time.”
As George recounted in a separate interview to Marie Claire, “and I got down on my knee and I said ‘I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life without you.’ And she kept looking at the ring and she was looking at me and she was like ‘Oh my God.’ And we now know because there was a playlist, so we know how long it actually took, and it was like 25 minutes. Finally I literally said ‘Look, I hope the answer’s yes, but I need an answer ‘cause I’m 52 and I could throw out my hip pretty soon.’ And she said ‘Oh, yes’ and it worked out really well.”
(The ring, perfect for the ever-socially conscious couple, features an ethically mined emerald-cut diamond estimated at over seven carats and two tapered baguettes set in platinum, according to People.)
A love like this? It was worth waiting for.
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Nearly five months to the day after their quiet proposal, George and Amal became husband and wife on September 27, 2014 at Venice’s city hall, with Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, officiating.
“We met in Italy,” George told People. “We have a home there. We knew that was where we wanted to get married.”
This civil ceremony followed a more romantic nondenominational ceremony, also in Venice, two days prior at the Aman Canal Grande Venice, in front of 100 close friends and family, including Matt Damon, Cindy Crawford, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Ellen Barkin, Bill Murray, Bono, and, of course, Anna Wintour – who, sources say, coaches Amal on what to wear.
The bride, 36, wore Oscar de la Renta, cementing her status as a style icon.
“George and I wanted a wedding that was romantic and elegant, and I can’t imagine anyone more able than Oscar to capture this mood in a dress,” Amal said. “He is so warm and such a gentleman.”
The couple tried to keep their wedding a secret, but that, of course, didn’t last.
“We didn’t tell anybody else that we were going to do it, but eventually somebody figured it out,” George told The Hollywood Reporter. “Oh my God! Once people got wind of it, it became an event. We took a bus from here to Venice, then we got on a boat, and once we got on the boat, there were so many paparazzi and so many people standing there waiting. We were sitting down in the boat, and I was like ‘You know what? Why are we hiding? Why are we ducking? We shouldn’t be ashamed of this.’ And we got up and waved.”
Right at a year after their email friendship turned romantic, Amal, 36, was what she always longed to be – wed to the right person, not just anyone. She knew, almost immediately after they met, “it felt like no matter what happened, I would never want to be with anyone else,” she told Glamour. She was smitten from the beginning, she said, remembering she “couldn’t sleep when [they] were apart” and had a “particular grin and head-tilt when reading his text messages or the letters he would hide in my bag.”
“Every single day of my life, I just feel lucky,” George told The Hollywood Reporter. “Lucky in my career. Lucky enough to have found the perfect partner. Sometimes in life it doesn’t happen on your schedule, but you find the person that you were always supposed to be with. That’s how I feel, and I know that’s how Amal feels.”
And, also words from George’s mouth that Amal very might well have said herself: “I thought if you had a successful career that you weren’t really going to be able to have one great love in your life. And then Amal walked in.”
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Amal hasn’t changed since her high-profile marriage five years ago, friends and family of the bride say. “She was,” Vogue wrote, “a woman with a fully realized adult life who, almost overnight, became a celebrity of inordinate privilege.”
“If you drew a Venn diagram of what the world wants from a feminist superhero – and by the world, I mean feminist scholars, People readers, fashion bloggers, and guys who buy Maxim – the middle circle would include Amal and Amal only,” said New York Magazine’s Heather Havrilesky. “This is a circle that, for decades, we’ve been told, or told ourselves, was a null set – impossible to enter.”
Amal, who now goes by Amal Clooney, remains a human rights lawyer and is the president of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, cofounded with George in late 2016 to advance justice in courtrooms, communities, and classrooms around the world. The Amal Clooney Scholarship will send one female student from Lebanon – Amal’s home country – to UWC College, an international, mixed boarding school in Armenia, which currently teaches 190 students from 64 countries – so that she can complete a two-year international baccalaureate program. At a keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women, Amal encouraged women to perform “everyday acts of feminism”: “The worst thing that we can do as women is not stand up for each other, and this is something we can practice every day, no matter where we are and what we do – women sticking up for other women, choosing to protect and celebrate each other instead of competing or criticizing one another,” she said. “Women’s rights are human rights. Holding back women is holding back half of every country in the world.”
Philosophies like this make Amal a natural friend to fellow feminist Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, a close friend of hers and a fellow 36-year-old bride. (Amal was in attendance at Meghan and Prince Harry’s wedding in May 2018.) Amal and Meghan initially met through their husbands; George has long been a supporter of William and Harry and has staunchly criticized the paparazzi’s treatment of their mother, the late Princess Diana – he strongly believes paparazzi are responsible for her death.
“When he started getting serious with Meghan, Harry introduced her to George and Amal, and the couple quickly started hanging out regularly,” a Kensington Palace source said. “It was a natural friendship from day one,” another insider said. When Meghan moved to London, Amal introduced her to her hairstylist, Miguel Martin-Perez; the Sussexes have visited the Clooneys at their Lake Como villa and, though the couples are close friends, Amal and Meghan’s friendship has eclipsed that of George and Harry’s, with Amal even cohosting Meghan’s baby shower in New York City in February 2019.
“Amal has been a wealth of knowledge on so many things and helped Meghan settle in,” a source told E! News. Especially since Meghan moved to London, “Amal’s given her advice on celebrity and living in the public eye. They’ve enjoyed sharing stories of travel and humanitarian causes. They often bounce ideas off of each other. Meghan goes to Amal for many things and really trusts her instincts. Amal adores Meghan and is thrilled to see her become a mother. They will be living very close to one another and hope to see each other often. They have an understanding and common ground that has really helped Meghan and provided her with support.”
Amal and Meghan bond over feminism, human rights, and their shared humanitarian work, but also over fashion and style. Since her emergence into the spotlight, Amal is “well on her way to becoming one of the great style icons of our day,” said Bergdorf Goodman fashion director Linda Fargo, in a piece for Vanity Fair. “And not just because of what she chooses to wear, but because underneath the clothes, we admire her intelligence, activism, globalism, and her clear confidence in her own skin.”
Her fashion sense is so apt even George recognizes it: “She’s always had this insanely…it’s eccentric but it’s a fun sense of fashion,” he told Entertainment News. “How she does it while she’s got 11 cases she’s working on, and she was teaching at Columbia, and she’s still like ‘I want to wear that dress.’ It’s crazy. It has been sort of fascinating to watch, because she has such great taste.”
But, for all of her accomplishments, her greatest occurred on June 6, 2017, when she gave birth to twins Ella and Alexander.
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When George and Amal were dating, they never discussed children, George told The Hollywood Reporter. “It had never been part of my DNA,” he said. “After the wedding, Amal and I were talking and we just felt we’d gotten very lucky, both of us, and we should share whatever good luck we’ve got.”
Still, Amal’s pregnancy – especially with twins – was a shock. After they were told they were expecting, George said the two of them “just sat there, staring at that piece of paper they give you, and I kept thinking there was a mistake.” He continued “I really didn’t think at 56 that I would be the parent of twins. Don’t make plans. You always have to just enjoy the ride.”
Amal told The Hollywood Reporter that Ella and Alexander were it for them: “I’m 39. I already had them quite late,” she said. She is continually amazed at “what a great father [George is]” and told the crowd assembled at the American Film Institute’s 2018 Life Achievement Award Gala Tribute, in an emotional speech, “My love, what I have found with you is the great love I always hoped existed. And seeing you with our children, Ella and Alexander, is the greatest joy in my life. You fill our home with laughter and happiness, and that’s even before the children have worked out that ‘Da-Da’ is Batman, a talking fox, and friends with Mary Poppins [referencing some of his iconic film roles]. I’m proud of you, but I also know that when our children find out not only what you have done, but who you are, they will be so proud of you, too.”
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It was a love neither saw coming. For all intents and purposes, they never should have met. He, a confirmed bachelor, a Hollywood movie star. She, a London-based lawyer, seemingly far too cerebral for red carpets and movie premieres. Yet: “I have someone who I can talk to about anything, and someone who I care more about than I’ve cared about anybody,” George told Harper’s Bazaar. “I felt that I’d met someone who I would absolutely trade my life for. I’d met someone that her life meant more to me than my life, and I had never had that experience before, and I had some lovely people in my life, but this was different.”
When they met, Amal was a fully self-actualized woman, accomplished in her own right, lacking nothing. And that was incredibly attractive to a man who seemingly could not be caught. “She’s an amazing human being,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “And she’s caring. And she also happens to be one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And she’s got a great sense of humor. There’s a number of reasons why.”
Amal needed to be single deep into her mid-thirties to be a fully formed person, with her own work and her own interests, where love was just the icing on an already delicious cake. George needed to be single into his fifties to realize how special having a partner really is and how to never take it for granted: “I’m a much happier person [than I was when I was single] and we have a very happy life,” he told Harper’s Bazaar. “We enjoy many of the same things and I very much enjoy the projects that she takes on because they have real consequence. I have someone who I can talk to about anything, and someone who I care more about than I’ve cared about anybody.”
Amal, at 35, felt love had forgotten her. Maybe you really could only have a career you loved and not the love of your life, too – maybe there was only room for one. Yet love being love – always seeking the seeker of it, and always, if it is not there, well on its way to arriving – just took a little longer. It was always en route. Maybe not on Amal’s schedule, but better, greater, grander than she ever could have expected. Love was right on time, after all, not a minute late. Love doesn’t forget those who seek it – it merely wants us to love ourselves first, and love lives that we build in earnest, before it is ready to arrive so we may share it with another, and, in the case of the Clooneys, the world.
“Love changes you in every way that every person who’s fallen madly in love changes,” George said. “Suddenly, the other person’s life becomes more important than your own. That’s not unique to us; that’s unique to all people who are lucky enough to find the perfect partner. I’m sorry I was 50-something when it happened, but only because I could have spent even more time with her.”
The next (and final!) “And the bride was 36” installment will drop later this month, and it’s about the woman who connects this circle of friends who were all 36-year-old brides, the Duchess of Sussex, the former Meghan Markle.