The year was 1984 and Kevin Kline, a Juilliard-trained actor who had appeared in "The Pirates of Penzance" on Broadway, was appearing in Shakespeare's "Henry V" at New York's Public Theater. New York native Phoebe Cates was in the same theater working on another play. Kline wasn't sure if he was right for her at the time, telling Entertainment Weekly, "When I first met Phoebe, I remember thinking, 'She's too happy to be with me. She's too enthusiastic about life.... What'll we talk about?'"
Well, Kline decided to find out and hired her former assistant, asking her to set him up on a date with Cates (via Country Living). Apparently, they had a lot to talk about, because five years later, the pair said "I do." Cates was 25 at the time while Kline was 41, and he said the age difference worked to their advantage when it came time to start a family.
"I was 40-ish when I finally stopped obsessing about acting and thought it would be nice to have a life and actually got married," he told The Guardian in 2014. "If I had married someone my own age, the possibility of progeny would have been very slim. I didn't consciously say: 'Hey, we could make babies; want to get married?' It just happened that way."
