John Mcenroe Ex Wife

If you reckon your own relationship has had the odd heated rally, spare a thought for John McEnroe's ex-wife. Tatum O'Neal was an Oscar-winning actress well before she married the most volcanic man ever to pick up a tennis racquet, and together they produced a marriage that was equal parts red carpet, screaming match and front-page yarn. She was only ten years old when she won an Academy Award for Paper Moon back in 1973, which is around the same age most of us were still trying to figure out which end of a cricket bat to hold. Then she met McEnroe, and the drama relocated from the cinema straight onto centre court.

Tatum O'Neal: The Ex-Wife With the Best Seat in the House for Every Tantrum

Smart TV box Android streaming device sitting beneath a television, the sort of setup you would want for binge-watching celebrity marriage dramas and tennis replays

The pair tied the knot in 1986, which anyone who remembers that decade will tell you was a fairly bold move on both sides. They went on to have three kids together, Kevin, Sean and Emily, and for a while it looked like a proper Hollywood-meets-Wimbledon fairytale. Yeah, nah. Being married to McEnroe meant living with a bloke who could turn a polite disagreement about a line call into a theatrical production with a full cast and an intermission. The man's famous "You cannot be serious!" is one of the great catchphrases of the era, and you have to assume Tatum heard a variation of it over who left the milk out of the fridge. They separated in 1992 and the divorce was finalised in 1994, which in celebrity marriage years is roughly a decent test innings. She later wrote a rather candid memoir, A Paper Life, that left very few stones unturned and probably had a few publicists reaching for the flat whites. McEnroe, for his part, married Patty Smyth in 1997 and has been happily settled ever since, proving that even the most combustible of characters can find a bit of calm once the tantrums are left behind on the court. Tatum, meanwhile, has kept working, kept talking and kept giving it a decent crack, which is more than plenty of us manage after a tough break-up. She'll be right, as they say.

So there it is: the ex-wife who was a bigger star than her husband long before he ever picked up a racquet, and who handled one of the most public divorces of the nineties with more dignity than the bloke having a meltdown over a baseline call. Marriage, like tennis, is mostly about keeping your cool between the big moments. Only one of them was properly good at that.