Ethan Hawke, 51, has been a celebrated actor for over 30 years. After captivating audiences in the beloved coming-of-age film Dead Poets Society, Ethan has been an entertainment mainstay. He’s gone on to many more critically acclaimed and beloved roles, including in movies like Reality Bites and Gattaca. Through his career, he’s also been nominated for four Academy Awards. He’s received Best Supporting Actor nominations for his performances in Training Day and Boyhood in 2002 and 2015, respectively. He’s also gotten nods for the Best Adapted Screenplay category in 2005 and 2014 for Before Sunset and Before Midnight, respectively. Throughout his career, he’s been married twice. Find out more about his wife Ryan Shawhughes, 40, and his ex Uma Thurman, 51.
How did Ethan meet Ryan?
Ethan married Ryan in 2008. About three years after his divorce from Uma was finalized. The second marriage drew tons of attention, because before the pair had gotten romantically involved, Ryan had been a nanny to Ethan and Uma’s kids. Even though it seemed scandalous, the Training Day star said that the pair hadn’t gotten romantically involved until long after she’d been a nanny, in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. “After a short period of working for me, Ryan went back to Columbia to get her degree. There were never any scandalous thoughts or actions back then. In the years that followed, my marriage disintegrated due to many pressures, none of which were remotely connected to Ryan,” he said. “I know people imagine some kind of Sound Of Music type love affair, but the truth is by the time Ryan and I were falling in love, it had been a long while since I had employed her.”
With Ryan being his second marriage, Ethan has gushed over his wife. He admitted to not wanting to get married again, but that he and Ryan were “incredibly compatible” and he loved her “tremendously,” via The Guardian. He also opened up about his decision to remarry in a 2013 interview with Elle. “Through the failure of my first marriage I learned a lot about myself. Until you know yourself, you don’t know how to share your life with another person,” he said.
Ryan is a producer
Even though Ryan was a nanny when she and Ethan met, she’s gone on to a successful film career of her own, except she mostly works behind the camera. She’s worked with Ethan on a number of projects, where she is a producer. She worked with him on the films First Reformed and Blaze. She was also an executive producer on the TV series The Good Lord Bird, per IMDb.
Ethan has two daughters with Ryan
A month after Ethan and Ryan tied the knot, they had their first daughter together Clementine Jane Hawke, 14. Three years later, Ryan gave birth to the pair’s younger daughter Indiana Hawke in 2011. Ethan admitted that motherhood came naturally for Ryan in his 2009 interview with The Guardian. “She has been a wonderful, happy new mother, a great step-mother, a real instrument of healing in our family, and a much-needed partner for me,” he said.
Ethan’s first marriage was to Uma Thurman
Before he and Ryan hit it off, Ethan married the Pulp Fiction star in 1998 after working together on Gattaca. The pair split up in 2003, and their divorce was finalized two years later. Ethan admitted that getting married when he was 27 was an attempt to get a hold on his life as an actor. “Success when you’re young is really overwhelming. The world felt out of control. And I wanted to stop it from spinning so fast. I thought marriage would decrease my variables or something. I was absolutely wrong,” he told Elle.
The divorce also had a huge negative impact on the actor, saying that as it came around the time he received his first Oscars nomination. He said that the split made it difficult to enjoy the high point in his career, he told GQ in a 2018 profile. “I got divorced and my personal life fell apart,” he said. “When you’re depressed, it’s really easy to see everything that is fake about other people and life, and I just started seeing all that. How phony celebrity was, how phony everything is.”
Ethan and Uma have a son and daughter
Even though the marriage didn’t work out, Ethan and Uma had two beautiful children. Their daughter Maya, 23, has followed in her parents’ footsteps and struck out on an acting career of her own. Their son Levon, 20, also seems to be beginning a career as an actor, and he was seen on-set for Stranger Things, which his sister is also a star of.
Other than Stranger Things, Maya has had roles in a wide variety of movies and shows, including Little Women, Fear Street, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Ethan celebrated his daughter’s breakout performance in Stranger Things after it premiered. “But Ladies & Gentleman, get to know MAYA HAWKE. She’s the real thing,” he wrote in an Instagram post at the time.