Devastating Facts About Hollywood's Most Tragic Love Stories
No one knows heartbreak like Hollywood. There's a reason that Los Angeles is known as the City of Broken Dreams, and it's not just because of failed auditions.
With the highs and lows that accompany fame and fortune, it's no wonder that Hollywood stars are so prone to heartbreak, tragedy, and loss.
From mysterious plane crashes to bitter divorces to lives spent mourning, these stories prove that being rich and famous doesn't spare you from the devastation that comes from lost love.
Grab a tissue and get ready for these 42 devastating facts about Hollywood's most tragic love stories.
1. Finished at the Bottom
Dorothy Dandridge was one of Hollywood’s first black sex symbols and the first black actress to be nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars. Unfortunately, her love life was much less illustrious; in 1959, she married a club owner named Jack Denison. He turned out to be abusive, including financially abusive, as he mismanaged her finances into bankruptcy.
He then had the audacity to divorce Dandridge in 1963. This story doesn’t have a happy ending: unable to get more acting roles, Dandridge died penniless from an apparent drug overdose in 1965 at the age of just 42.
2. He’ll Always Be With Us
After the tragic suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994, his wife Courtney Love kept part of his ashes in a teddy bear.
The rest of Cobain’s remains were scattered to other places, including the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in New York, where they were blessed and mixed into the clay to make memorials.
3. Til the End
John Travolta was in the middle of filming Saturday Night Feverwhen he got horrible news: his partner Diana Hyland had only a few days to live. The couple had been together for a year, but Hyland had been diagnosed with breast cancer just three months into their relationship. Not one to abandon her, Travolta immediately moved in and looked after Hyland’s son as his own.
She passed away in Travolta’s arms in 1977, and the actor would not pursue a serious relationship again for 15 years.
4. Third Would Have Been the Charm
The chaotic romance of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor could fill a list of its own. The couple had married and divorced each other twice. At one point, Burton married someone else out of pure spite against Taylor’s alcoholism. But despite it all, Taylor would say that had Burton not died one year later at the age of 58, she would have married him again.