Love Actually

Tie one on: Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, shortly after their wedding. (Photo Getty/AFP)

Romance is no box of chocolates. Asked why he hated playing Romeo, actor Laurence Olivier once snarled, “because Romeo is a jerk.” And if romantic heroes are hard to find, locating an ideal couple is near impossible. Brangelina? Nah, not enough friction. When it comes to pop culture romances, we’re drawn to mismatched, flashing twosomes who flatter and gratify our unspoken, quixotic ideals. For those seeking Valentine’s Day inspiration, here are 10 couples — both real life and fictional — whose stories will last forever, even if their own unions were sometimes fleeting.

Movies

Hearts on fire: Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, in Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Love handle: Hepburn starred with boyfriend Spencer Tracy in nine films, all made enjoyable by evident gruff affection; they were great onscreen pals without ever becoming compelling onscreen lovers. With Grant, however, Hepburn’s delight was always evident. A former acrobat and aspiring sophisticate, Grant was a ready partner for Hepburn’s aristocratic playgirl. They were fabulously alive together, tumbling off sofas in Holiday and chasing leopards in Bringing Up Baby.
Get out the hankies: During Grant’s “you’re lit from within” speech to Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.

Let's get lost: Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Hearts on fire: Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Lost in Translation (2003)
Love handle: Who’da thunk the noogie patrol guy from Saturday Night Live would become our most valuable romantic lead? In Lost in Translation, the amused hipster laid himself bare, sitting stoned in a Tokyo karaoke bar, crooning the Roxy Music weeper, More Than This and believing every word, while the object of his affection (Johansson), a philosophy major in a pink party wig, looked on, wondering.
Get out the hankies: When Murray leaps from a cab on the way back to his wife, finds Johansson in a crowd, and whispers something that causes her to nod and burst into tears.

Hearts on fire: Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Love handle: Lost cowboys Ennis and Jack find themselves on a mountain, laughing, talking and having sex. They understand later that they were in love, but by then the boys can no more go back to Brokeback than Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman could return to Paris in Casablanca.
Get out the hankies: When Ennis ventures to Jack’s parents and finds his old denim shirt, a souvenir Jack kept of their romance.

Television

Hearts on fire: Sam (Ted Danson) and Rebecca (Kirstie Alley) in Cheers (1987-93)
Love handle: Sam was a bartender with a werewolf pompadour and glib self-assurance that, when combined with a potent aftershave, left women powerless. Rebecca was an MBA bar owner who hoped to become a Master of the Universe. What they really wanted to do was nail each other, although it took several seasons to get their mojos in sync.
Get out the hankies: In the show’s last season, Sam demonstrates he wears a toupee.

Hearts on fire: Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) in BBC’s The Office (2001-03)
Love handle: Dawn and Tim survive the grim paddlewheel of days at the Wernham-Hogg paper works by enjoying an intoxicating flirtation, though both lack the courage to force the issue. Perhaps because Dawn’s troglodyte fiancé, Lee, looks like he might rip out Tim’s spleen.
Get out the hankies: When Dawn returns from America to the office Christmas party, and walks into Tim’s arms. He kisses her, right in front of team leader and Territorial Army volunteer, Gareth (Mackenzie Crook).

Music

Hearts on fire: Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (husband and wife, 1951-57)
Love handle: Frank was a band singer who always did it his way. In the 1950s he went solo, refining a fatalistic outsider persona not much different from the Hemingway women Ava, “the most beautiful animal in the world,” played on screen. They loved, drank, quarrelled and made up. Once, Sinatra pretended to shoot himself. Gardner had another drink. Sinatra poured his heart out in the recording studio.
Get out the hankies: Sinatra caressing The Gal That Got Away.

Hearts on fire: Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Vaillancourt (acquaintances, 1966)
Love handle: “I can’t stand to waste moonlight, it’s the merchant in me,” Cohen once told a Montreal audience. His song Suzanne was an account of an “immaculate” encounter with a valued friend’s wife. Vaillancourt lived near a sailors’ church. She bumped into Cohen one night, inviting him to her place by the river. Boats skimmed the St. Lawrence. Suzanne served tea with oranges. Cohen wrote up the encounter, murmuring the song over the phone to Judy Collins. Her version was a 1966 hit. Cohen lost publishing rights somehow. “It’s probably appropriate I don't own this song,” he told the BBC in 1994.
Get out the hankies: “And Jesus was a sailor, when he walked upon the water …”

Hearts on fire: Bob Dylan and Sarah Lowndes (husband and wife, 1965-77)
Love handle: On the second anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Dylan weds Lowndes and enters the Scenes From a Marriage stage of his career, fruitfully celebrating (and anguishing over) their relationship for a decade. Song highlights abound, including the druggy, underwater-slow Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and the pulverizing divorce album Blood on the Tracks.
Get out the hankies: In 1969, Dylan comes home with lovin’ on his mind, crooning the frankly erotic proposition, “Lay lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.”

Canadiana

Hearts on fire: King of the Klondike Joe Boyle and Queen Marie of Romania (lovers and political activists, World War I era)
Love handle: He was a lifelong adventurer, a dashing captain who navigated prospectors down the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush and then, in 1905, managed the Dawson City hockey team that lost to the Ottawa Silver Seven in the Stanley Cup. He later financed his own machine gun company in World War I and attempted to save the Russian royal family from the Bolsheviks. He also had a blazing affair with Queen Marie of Romania, a married woman. The Princess Di of her day, Marie was a free spirit who served as a nurse in the war and ventured into villages without bodyguards to mingle with her people.
Get out the hankies: Queen Marie writes approvingly in her diary about Boyle’s “relentless energy and almost hypnotic power over others — I never saw such a man, such willpower.”

Sugar, sugar: Pierre and Margaret Trudeau attend a maple sugaring party. (CP Photo/Peter Bregg)

Hearts on fire: Pierre and Margaret Trudeau (prime minister and wife, 1971-77)
Love handle: Canada’s Gone With the Wind, as Larry Zolf once observed. She was a beautiful flower child who vowed to be more than “a rose in my husband’s lapel.” He was the prime minister who seemed to validate Laurier’s prophecy that the 20th century belonged to Canada. They were beautiful, shining, inspirational, but as Trudeau once remarked when asked about his political legacy, “What was Thucydides’ lesson to the Greeks: nothing lasts forever.”
Get out the hankies: Pierre and Margaret’s first two sons, Justin and Alexandre, are born on separate Christmas days.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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