Fairy-tale romance! Longtime bachelor George Clooney finally met his match in the stunning, accomplished human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. Still, it took Amal a little bit to accept that their romance was the real deal.
“We never talked about marriage when we were dating, and I asked her out of the blue,” George told CBS in November 2020. “[It] took her a long time to say yes. I was on my knee for, like, 20 minutes. I finally said, ‘Look, I’m gonna throw my hip out.’ We told that story to her parents, and they’re like, ‘There’s something wrong with his hip?’”
Five months after the actor proposed, the two got married in a fantasy wedding at the Aman Canal Grande Hotel in Venice, Italy, on September 27, 2014.
“Staff were preparing bouquets, table arrangements and other floral designs well into the night,” a hotel source told Us Weekly at the time. “Everything they were using was white with green flourishes, lots of roses and peonies being used.”
The pair first met while in Lake Como, Italy, in July 2013. Later that year, they had their first date in London.
“I thought she was beautiful and I thought she was funny and obviously smart,” the Ocean’s Eleven actor told The Hollywood Reporter in September 2017. “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.”
After a whirlwind romance and a couple vacations, the pair returned home to Los Angeles. It was then — while reminiscing on a trip to Kenya — that George decided he wanted to stay with Amal forever.
“I had a picture of her, looking back, smiling at these giraffes,” he told THR. “And I said, ‘I think I’m going to ask her to marry me.’”
While the couple didn’t initially plan to start a family, Us confirmed in February 2017 that they were expecting. The first-time parents soon welcomed their twins, Alexander and Ella, in June 2017.
Today, the family lives a charmed life together — despite the normal hiccups any relationship goes through.
“Like any marriage, they’ve had their challenges and needed to adapt to certain situations and challenges,” a source told Us in April 2021. “It’s taken compromise, establishing boundaries and a lot of patience to keep the relationship on track but they’ve done just that.”
Scroll to see how George and Amal’s love has bloomed over the years: