Bo Derek opens up about his 18-year romance with John Corbett - and why he didn't make any plans to get married
Though they have been together for nearly 20 years, Bo Derek and John Corbett have no plans to marry any time soon.
“I think when you’re beginning a young family and you’re going to have children and set up this new family tree branch, it’s obviously a wonderful commitment and it’s meaningful,” the 10 actress said in a recent interview with Fox News. “But for us in our lives, it hasn’t been yet.”
Derek, 63, and Corbett, 59, first began dating in 2002. “It was just an attraction, a comfort,” she said of their meeting.
“He makes me laugh all the time. He’s full of life, full of joy. I became attracted to him and I still am. We take things day by day and I think we are still there,” she added of the former Sex and the City star. “We’re starting to get a little more settled.”
On Friday, the 63-year-old star spoke exclusively to Variety from her home in Santa Barbara, a Southern California neighborhood also occupied by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Bo shares the home with her boyfriend of 18 years John Corbett, who is known for playing Aiden on Sex and the City.
No subject seemed off-limits to Derek, who stars in the Aug. 16 Reelz documentary In My Own Words. Particularly the time she worked with President Trump on the 1989 film Ghosts Can’t Do It, directed by her ex-husband John Derek, who died in 1998 from heart failure. Trump made a cameo, earning a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor.
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Corbett has echoed Derek’s views on marriage in the past, telling the Huffington Post in 2016 that the secret to a successful relationship is not getting married at all.
“Don’t get married,” he said. “I have a lot of friends that get divorces. It becomes this whole thing. I think the secret is just enjoy being together.”
Derek also opened up to Fox News about losing her husband, John Derek, in 1998 to congestive heart failure after the couple had been married for 22 years. Derek said she “didn’t expect to end up with anyone again.”
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“I’ve always been a fairly optimistic person, but it was a huge change, an enormous loss,” she recalled. “The air just gets sucked out of the room when you lose your partner. So I wallowed in that for a while.”
“I didn’t expect to end up with anyone again,” Derek continued. “Some women want to pair up again right away. I didn’t. I remember consciously fashioning myself after some girlfriends that I have [who] are single and led very full, fantastic lives with friends and family and projects that they do. And that gave them happiness.”
The interview also explored a famous seaside scene from 10, in which Bo wore cornrows, a traditional Black hairstyle. Calling the moment in time “life-changing,” Bo said the look, which her late husband suggested, would not be acceptable in 2020.
“I get in trouble for it now,” she told Variety. “I get a lot of criticism for being a culture vulture, that I’m being insulting and even worse, hurtful to African American women that I copied their hairstyle. But at the time, the reaction was very different. I can’t tell you how many African American women came up to me and said things like, ‘Thank you so much. I work at a bank and my boss would never let me have that hairstyle at work but now I can.’”
These days, Bo keeps a low-key schedule with Corbett, 59, and without the pressure of marriage. “...Right now, if I’m home, I wake up, make coffee, feed the horses, feed the dogs, feed myself, go to my computer, work in the garden, swim in the pool for exercise and then feed horses, feed dogs, feed ourselves,” she told Variety. “John and I watch Jeopardy while we eat and then we watch movies all night.”
