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This December, Star Wars star Mark Hamill and his wife, Marilou, will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. But the longtime couple didn't meet at a star-studded party like many Hollywood couples. Instead, they met at a dentist's office.
According to People magazine, Marilou York was working as a dental hygienist in Westwood—and Hamill was a patient—when they met. For Mark, at least, it was lust at first sight. “She came into the waiting room in jeans, white coat, breasts like melons, looking like a Vargas painting,” he told the magazine. “I said, ‘They let you dress like that at work?’ She said, ‘Yeah. Next.’”
But the pickup line worked (not that we'd recommend trying it these days), and they started dating. On one of their first dates, they saw an early screening of Star Wars, and Marilou couldn’t help noticing the “bad caps” on the teeth of a minor character.
But their relationship didn’t take off from there. Mark admits the fame from Star Wars got to his head, and they broke up for a while. “I had to taste groupies and fame,” he told People. “I went to Las Vegas to date 38-year-old showgirls. I wanted to scale all these women. That was exciting for about the first 10 minutes. Eventually, I wanted something to hold onto—and a family.”
Mark also learned he couldn’t be with a fellow actor, after a tumultuous relationship with his General Hospital costar, Anne Wyndham, in the 1970s. “You become competitive in a way, which is crazy, because I’m not going to take parts away from her, and vice versa,” he told the Australian Daily Telegraph. “But I thought, ‘Well, she’s not the one, because I do want to have a family, and I’m not going to ask her to give up a career to raise the kids. And I’ll know when it’s right, I’ll find the right one.’ And luckily for me I did.”
Mark and Marilou got back together, and got married in December 1978 in a small ceremony in the backyard of their home in Malibu. They have three children together: Nathan, born in 1979; Griffin, born in 1983; and Chelsea, born in 1988. Nathan is an artist and illustrator and Griffin is an artist and martial-arts teacher. Chelsea works in public relations at Amazing Invisible Inc., Mark’s company, where Marilou serves as CFO, according to their LinkedIn accounts. All three of the Hamill kids made brief cameos as resistance soldiers in The Last Jedi.
Mark returned to the role of Luke Skywalker in 2015, when he (briefly) appeared in The Force Awakens. But despite his small part, he got back into fighting shape for the role. He said he worked out constantly and went on a strict diet, losing around 40 pounds. “My wife was thrilled,” he joked to the Daily Telegraph. “Not only was I getting in better shape, but I was out of the house.”
All joking aside, Mark often takes the time to gush over Marilou. “She makes the ordinary seem extraordinary and I just want to thank her for being my everything,” Hamill wrote on Twitter in February.
In an “ask me anything” session on Reddit, a fan asked Mark what his secret to a successful marriage was. He responded, “Well, I just was lucky I found the right person. if you’re lucky enough to find your soulmate, you have to keep your fingers crossed,” he wrote. “A really short manual would read ‘Don’t cheat,’ because that seems to be where people break up. When you go through tricky periods you have to work on it and having children helps because you know you’re trying to find a way to make everyone happy.”
This past December, Mark celebrated their 39th anniversary on Twitter with a series of photos of the happy couple, noting, “And they said it wouldn’t last.”
It’s clear the doubters have been silenced for good.
