Amy Irving, star of 1976’s Carrie, 1983’s Yentl and 1988’s Crossing Delancey, is opening up about her romantic history — and admits she has a type: directors.
“I grew up with a father for a director,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast, referring to her late dad Jules Irving, co-founder of San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. “I have done nothing but marry directors, so I have a thing for directors. I’m kind of in awe because I can’t do that. Actors don’t impress me as much — just because I can do that, too.”
Her current husband is documentary filmmaker Kenneth Bowser. Prior to that she was married to Brazilian auteur Bruno Barreto. And before Barreto, she was married to Steven Spielberg.
“I don’t know how long I was married to [Steven,]” Irving, 71, says. “But we were together for 14 years — with three years off for good behavior. I ran away for a little while, and then we got back together.”
Irving first met and began dating Spielberg in 1976, around the time she auditioned to play Princess Leia in an upcoming sci-fi film called Star Wars.
“[Star Wars director] George Lucas and [Carrie director] Brian De Palma had joint casting calls. They would be in one room and all the young people in Hollywood came through. And they were both watching and picking who they wanted,” Irving explains.
De Palma cast her as Sue Snell, whose well-meaning if misguided plan to send outcast Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) to prom with her jock boyfriend ends in a gymnasium of horrors.
But Lucas requested a screen test for Leia — which exists on YouTube — and De Palma helped Irving prepare.
“Can you imagine being handed that script?” Irving says. “If you’ve never seen Star Wars before, which none of us had, and then [saying] ‘C-3PO’ and ‘R2-D2?’ It was like having to read a script in Greek.”
In the end, the part went to Irving’s pal Carrie Fisher — and she accompanied Fisher to an industry screening to see Star Wars for the first time.
“She nearly broke my hand holding my hand,” Irving recalls. “It was it was a tense experience for her, but we got to watch it together.”
While Leia was not meant to be hers, another iconic role — Marion Ravenwood, the tough-as-nails love interest to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark — was. But then Irving left Spielberg, and the role was hers no longer. (It famously went to Karen Allen.)
“I guess real life meant more to me than my career,” says Irving. “I moved out, and I think when you walk out, you don’t get the part. That’s all there is to it.”
But their love story was not yet over. Three years later, Irving was in India shooting the TV miniseries The Far Pavilions.
“I was in Jaipur, and Steven was scouting locations for [Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]. He was in Sri Lanka, I believe, at the time, and somebody told him that I was in India, and he said, ‘Let’s just stop there on our way back.’”
She continued, “I remember I was on a palanquin being taken to marry [Italian screen star] Rossano Brazzi. I was playing a half-Russian, half-Indian princess. And as I got off the palanquin to go back to my dressing room, there was Steven, and it just kind of sparked up again.
“I think we were meant to make Max,” she says, referring to their son, now 39.
It was Spielberg who helped get a greenlight for Crossing Delancey, a romantic comedy that has aged remarkably well and has recently joined the Criterion Collection. Irving was visiting the set of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun in Spain with baby Max at the time.
“Suddenly, [Delancey director] Joan Micken SIlver, got in touch with me saying she’d like to come to Spain,” she recalls.
Irving loved the project. “So I showed the script to Steven who fell in love with it, as well. He showed it to Steve Ross, who was the head of Warner Bros. at the time and pretty much the surrogate father to Steven. And he fell in love with it.
“And that’s how it ended up getting financed — because Joan had been having a lot of difficulty getting it off the ground, because it was a Jewish-themed romance. And for some reason, that was a hard one to get past. But she thought after Moonstruck, with the Italian, there was an ethnic thing there, you know, maybe this would go.”
The film was a minor box office hit and remains an enduring 1980s classic. As for her relationship with Spielberg, the two divorced in 1989 but remain on good terms, having raised Max together.
“We’ve always communicated and been close,” Irving says. “He and Kate [Capshaw, Spielberg’s wife since 1991 and star of Temple of Doom] and my husband and I, we try to double-date now and then.”
Irving will soon release an album of Willie Nelson covers, Always Will Be. The country music icon was her screen partner in 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose, which led to an off-screen romantic entanglement. So maybe she doesn’t only fall for directors.
For more from Irving, including her experience making out with Barbra Streisand in Yentl, listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood and be sure to subscribe.
