Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony call it quits
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, a superstar couple who turned their personal union into a veritable professional brand, announced Friday that they are ending their seven-year marriage.
In a statement to The Associated Press from Lopez's publicist, the pair called the move to end their marriage a "very difficult decision."
They said they have come to an "amicable decision" on all matters and asked for privacy.
It's Lopez's third marriage, Anthony's second. The couple are parents to 3-year-old twins, Max and Emme.
Lopez's last public appearance was at Saturday's BAFTA event in Los Angeles with Prince William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Tongues wagged when the singer/actress/American Idol judge turned up with her mother instead of her husband.
The split comes as a surprise to celebrity watchers. As recently as March, Lopez, 41, told USA TODAY that she and Anthony, 42, "challenge each other in a way that only the two of us could.It's awesome."
Last month, Anthony joked with USA TODAY about the cheeky rapport he and Lopez share with his Hawthorne co-star Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband, Will Smith. And in February, a grinning Lopez told E! Online, in front of her husband, that more kids were likely in the cards: "I think Marc would like to have more kids. We talk about it."
No doubt fans will be combing the lyrics of her latest album, Love?, for clues. (Sample lyric: "I was down for the count, feeling like I've come to the end.") Still, she told USA TODAY in March, "This is not a negative album in any way. It's really a great dance-pop-urban album that talks about all of the different facets of love in all its glory and all its pain."
Last year, Lopez told USA TODAY that the record "is such a big thing for me. The whole examination of love and what that is, the state of that today, I just feel the dialogue for that needs to be open. That's kind of a little bit of my goal with this record."
Back then, she talked about forging a professional identity separate from her husband, after being nearly inseparable from him for the past five years.
"The first two years we were kind of in wedded bliss. The third and fourth year, we just did everything together. He produced my album. We did the movie. We went on tour. We had the babies. We just got to the point, after the babies were born, when we realized that he has a responsibility to his fans and I have a responsibility to my fans," she says. "We still are two individual entities and artists, and we have to go off and do our things again."
