If you were around in 1999, you probably remember when Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie got married out of nowhere. The news was surprising for a few reasons. For one, Billy Bob and Angelina have a 20-year age difference. For another, they were both theoretically in relationships with other people at the time.
But perhaps no one was more shocked than Billy Bob's fiancée, actress Laura Dern. As she tells it, she found out the man she planned to marry had married someone else at the same time the rest of us did.
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Billy Bob and Laura met in 1997. She had recently broken up with Jeff Goldblum, and Billy Bob was in the middle of divorcing his fourth wife, Pietra Dawn Cherniak. They got engaged and were ostensibly planning a wedding when Billy Bob and Angelina met in 1999.
Billy Bob and Angelina met on the set of Pushing Tin. They ended up getting married in Las Vegas in May 2000, which was news to Laura Dern, who later explained, "I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again."
She also said, "It’s like a sudden death. For no one has there been any closure or clarity."
For his part, Billy Bob has never seemed to admit that he did anything wrong. The closest he came was in a 2001 interview with The Guardian, when he said, "Others may say that you left our girl and married someone else. But it made me happy and somebody else happy. I'm sorry it caused pain."
To make matters a little stranger, Laura and Angelina knew one another as kids, and Laura even babysat Angelina once. As her dad told Yahoo Movies, "Jon Voight's a friend of mine, so I remember Laura babysat one night for Angelina when Angelina was 2 and Laura about 8 … because Jon and I were doing 'Coming Home.' They were staying over at [director] Hal Ashby's house, so they asked [Laura] to come over [to watch Angie]."
Singer Melissa Etheridge is a friend of Laura's, and she helped the actress following the split. As Melissa later told Andy Cohen, "I was around when Angelina was not doing nice things with Billy Bob to Laura Dern. I helped Laura move out of her house with Billy Bob – I like broke into their home to get their stuff out because it was so nasty."
Eventually, everyone moved on. Laura married Ben Harper and had two children before they divorced, and she has most recently been linked to former NBA player Baron Davis.
Billy Bob and Angelina divorced in 2002, and he stopped dating celebrities. As he put it, "I found celebrity to be difficult just because of privacy issue." He married a puppeteer in 2014.
