Actress Maria Bello, best known to Autostraddle readers for playing Coyote Mommi Lil Lovell in the 2000 lesbian cinematic masterpiece Coyote Ugly, showed up at Elton John’s Oscar party last night with longtime girlfriend Dominique Crenn in tow and announced that they were no longer able to fight the moonlight and got engaged in Paris over the holidays. The couple said they’d been out and about and publicly engaged at foodie events around the world, but this was their big Hollywood debut of the announcement. Bello, you’ll remember, came in a New York Times Modern Love column in 2013. Last night, she told E! News that she finally felt grown up enough to be married.
Crenn is an Iron Chef, a star on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and the only woman chef to earn three Michelin stars, which she did for her San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn. She also one time told a man in an audience at a panel who asked her if she felt like she’d missed out on the “very important role” of being a mother to focus on her career that she was, in fact, a mother of two and that, in her opinion, he should stay home and keep his kids so his wife could go out and be a bad ass woman. And Bello, of course, is known for more than her turn in the queer coming of age tale Coyote Ugly. She was nominated for Golden Globes for The Cooler in 2003 and A History of Violence in 2005 and has starred in dozens of other films and TV series.
Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple!
OK she is very good in Coyote Ugly but for she first stole my heart in Duets, a movie literally no one but me saw, where she plays a hardened member of the for-profit karaoke (??) circuit (?????)
I feel like you made that up.
lol! it was such a weird little time capsule https://youtu.be/wFZh1vtbotk
omg QG I remember Duets!! Not because I saw the movie, but because of the Huey Lewis/Gwyneth Paltrow cover of “Cruisin,’” which dominated the airwaves of my local easy listening radio station in the year 2000:
https://youtu.be/YHVhTFvhCMM
Duets is great! I watched it when it first came out because I had a crush on Maria from ER, and was also a huge fan of Andre Braugher from Homicide: Life on the Street.
Maybe love isn’t a lie… this week anyway.
[Praise Merciful Inana]
I have a shame ridden confession to make, AND I might need to go on Lez-Bro probation…
A [now retired] moto-cross racer who I have followed the career of since she was sixteen, is queer, out [not flag-waving out, but out], and engaged to her partner OF FOUR YEARS. HOW DID I MISS THAT MEMO‽‽‽‽
I… am so disappointed in myself. If you simply MUST exile me… I understand. [Ugly-cries]