Hugh Jackman: My wife’s ban on acting together keeps marriage strong
Hugh Jackman said he would love to work with his wife again on screen — but that she had ruled it out to keep their marriage stronger.
The Wolverine star was 26 and fresh out of drama school when he met Deborra-Lee Furness, then 39, on the set of Australian TV series Correlli in 1995. They married a year later.
Jackman, 50, said Furness, now 63, was “one of the greatest actors” he had ever worked with, but that she had always insisted it would not happen again.
He said: “I’d love to work with her again, but she made a rule in the beginning — and it was a wise one — that she and I wouldn’t work at the same time. She’d done about 20, 25 movies when I met her and she’d seen a number of marriages go whew-whew [whistles softly between teeth]. She said, ‘You’re both working at the same time, it’s hard.’ So we don’t do it. Simple as that.”
Jackman, who is 6ft 2in, also revealed that he was warned he was too tall to become a movie star when he arrived in Hollywood in 2000. He told Hello! magazine: “I’d walk into people’s offices and they’d go, ‘Oh, man!’ and list all the big actors — and all of them were shorter than me.
Hugh Jackman concedes he is 'too thin-skinned for politics'
“To make it worse, my first movie in America was X-Men, where I played Wolverine, who in the comics is short. I met Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman and he said, ‘There’s a problem — Wolverine is only 5ft 5in.’
“I squatted down and said, ‘That’s no problem at all.’ I spent my first five years in town doing a squat on the screen.”
He added: “When you get your first Hollywood job, you do what anyone asks. I got used to it after a while — anyway, it’s good for the legs.”
In June the star is coming to London for a tour based on music from his film The Greatest Showman. He will play six nights at the O2.
