5 Celebs Who Married The Same Person Twice

Although it doesn't happen very often, sometimes people meet, fall in love, marry, and then divorce, just to eventually get married again. Because many breakups are so contentious, it's often a surprise to see couples who put their bad blood behind them and decide to give their relationship another go. Marriage isn't easy, and there are endless reasons why two people might divorce, only to turn around and get married again a few months later, or several years down the road. When it comes to matters of the heart, it's safe to say all bets are off.

While Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton may be the most famous couple who married, divorced, and then remarried, they're certainly not the only celebrities to have done so. From Dionne Warwick realizing a few days after her first marriage that she'd made a mistake, to Sophia Loren being labeled a concubine during her first marriage to Carlo Ponti, the reasons why people divorce and remarry really run the gamut. It turns out that some love stories are just simply more complicated than others.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton met on the set of "Cleopatra" in 1963, while Burton was married to Sybil Williams, and Taylor was married to her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher (whom she basically stole from her best friend, Debbie Reynolds, a Hollywood scandal of epic proportions). Unlike some stars who have kept their infidelities private, Taylor and Burton did not. Their affair was such an international spectacle that the Vatican condemned their behavior, declaring it "er*tic vagrancy" and Taylor an "avaricious vamp." Despite this, as soon as the two were able to divorce their partners, Taylor and Burton were married in 1964 in an Old Hollywood wedding that was beyond captivating. 

For 10 years, the couple had a famously lavish, yet volatile marriage. When they called it quits, divorcing in 1974, they were barely apart a full year before marrying again in 1975. In 1997, during an interview with Barbara Walters on "20/20," Taylor said of her relationship with Burton, "I think we were so passionately in love with each other that the highs were too high. It was almost like everything was too much, we loved each other almost too much ... it was so intense that it was almost abnormal ... but it was great." Although Taylor and Burton divorced again in 1976, the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" star told Walters that had Burton not died in August 1984, she thinks they would've married again at some point.

Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera also had a relationship that was dubious from the start, but that didn't stop these two either. Although Kahlo and Rivera wouldn't marry (for the first time) until 1929, they first met in 1922 when she was just 15, and he was 36. Seven years later, after Kahlo's bus accident that left her bedridden for months, giving her time to pursue painting, the two married in 1929. She was 22, and he was 43.

While age-gap relationships are no biggie to most daters these days, during their marriage, there was a power imbalance due to Rivera's international fame, something that Kahlo wouldn't achieve until after she died. There were also other contributing factors, most notably infidelity by both of them, that added to the turmoil in the relationship. In 1939, after Kahlo realized one of Rivera's many affairs was with her younger sister, Christina, the two divorced. But the two couldn't stay divorced, remarrying in 1940.

Although the second marriage would last until Kahlo's death in 1954 at the age of 47, she did have some choice words for her husband. In 1953, Kahlo wrote a letter to Rivera from a hospital before going into surgery to have her leg amputated. "If there is anything I'd enjoy before I die, it'd be not having to see your f**king horrible b*stard face wandering around my garden... Goodbye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you." In other words, locura de amor, to say the least. 

Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson first met on the set of the 1973 film, "The Harrad Experiment," when she was 14, and he was 22. The film also starred Griffith's mom, Tippi Hedren, who had no problem with the relationship, telling People in 1976, the year before the two married, "No two people were ever more in love in the world." While that may have been the case at one point, Griffith and Johnson divorced just six months into their marriage. 

After 13 years apart, in which Griffith and Johnson matured and became successful in their own right, they gave marriage another go in 1989. "There was always this connection. I can't explain it," Griffith told People (via InStyle) the year she got remarried. "It's almost like soulmates ... I didn't want it to be like that sometimes, and sometimes I wanted not to love him ... Now it's different. It's like it was in the very beginning, but there is so much more." Three years into their second marriage, the couple had a daughter, Dakota Johnson. Not only did Dakota Johnson inherit her mom, Melanie Griffith's, megawatt smile, but she also caught the acting bug that runs in the family. However, round two wasn't meant to be either, and Griffith and Johnson divorced again in 1996.

Although they ended their romantic relationship, Griffith and Johnson became one of the celebrity couples who have co-parenting down to a science, having raised Dakota together while separated. "It's foolish to denigrate or have any animosity with their mother," Johnson told The Daily Telegraph in 2019 about his relationship with Griffith. "Children model you more than they listen to you."

When Dionne Warwick first met drummer William Elliott, she knew two things: he was quite the ladies' man, and she was immediately smitten. But she let the latter feelings lead the way, writing in her 2011 memoir, "My Life, As I See It" (via Hollywood Life) that Elliott was quite a catch. "So I made up my mind to catch him (or so he thought) and to everybody's surprise — including mine — he asked me to marry him," Warwick wrote.

In 1966, despite the fact that Elliott was several hours late to his own wedding, the two married. It didn't take long for Warwick to realize that she'd made a mistake, so in 1967, just a few months into her marriage, she hopped a plane to Mexico to get a quick divorce. Not long after their divorce was finalized, Elliott showed up at one of Warwick's concerts with the intention of getting her back. Apparently, Warwick didn't need much convincing, because the couple remarried just two days later, also in 1967, in Italy.

During their second marriage, the couple had two sons and managed to stay together for eight years before divorcing again in 1975. "I was the major earning power in the family, and that is very difficult for the male ego," Warwick told the Atlanta Black Star in 2020. "It just got too much to bear for my husband, and we decided that it would be best for us to part ways." Warwick never married again, and Elliott passed away at 49 in 1983.

According to Sophia Loren, when she first met her husband, film producer Carlo Ponti, in 1950, their connection was immediate — despite the 20-year age gap. "It was love at first sight for both of us," Loren wrote about Ponti in "The Northeastern Dictionary of Women's Biography" (per Hello). "We met at a beauty contest in Rome when I was 16, and he was on the jury ... he sent me a note asking me to join the contest."

Although the two had feelings for each other, it wasn't until they worked together in 1954's "La Donna del Fiume" that things started to get serious. The kicker was that Ponti was already married, and divorce didn't become legal in Italy until 1970. But that wasn't enough to stop Loren and Ponti, the latter of whom went to Mexico to obtain paperwork for an annulment. Ponti and Loren were married in 1957. When the Vatican found out, Ponti was charged with bigamy and Loren with concubinage. "I was being threatened with excommunication, with the everlasting fire, and for what reason? I had fallen in love with a man whose own marriage had ended long before," Loren has said of her first marriage to Ponti, via Fox News. The marriage was annulled in 1962, as Ponti sought ways to legally divorce his first wife.

Ponti and Loren eventually found a solution, becoming French citizens in 1964, which allowed the film producer to finally secure a divorce. In 1966, Ponti and Loren got married for a second time, and this one was fully legal. Loren and Ponti remained married until his death in 2007.