While Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman have been separated since 2017, they have no plans to formally end their marriage.
“We’re always over at her house,” DeVito, 81, told AARP magazine in an interview published on Wednesday, July 29. “We see the grandchildren together, that kind of stuff. So that’s a good relationship.”
The Matilda star added, “No matter what happens in your life, the most important thing is having family and friends. Reliable people in our lives who we can talk to, who we can open up to, who we can rely on to be there. I’m very fortunate.”
Elsewhere in his interview with AARP, DeVito gushed about the start of his romance with Perlman.
“We hit it off. We liked off-Broadway stuff,” he recalled. “We went to movies all the time. We made little movies together — short films. We had a lot in common, and we fell in love. A nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn and an Italian from New Jersey: I cooked and she ate.”
DeVito and Perlman, 78, met in 1971 when she saw the Batman Returns star perform in an off-Broadway play. The pair moved in together just two weeks later. After more than a decade of dating, they tied the knot in 1982. They welcomed their first child, daughter Lucy, in March 1983, followed by daughter Grace in October 1985 and son Jacob in October 1987.
DeVito and Perlman announced their split after 30 years of marriage in 2012. The exes briefly reconciled before calling it quits permanently in 2017.
“We’re separated … but I’m not getting a divorce,” Perlman said on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live in May 2019. “We do live separately. But we see each other a lot!”
The Barbie actress admitted at the time that her relationship with DeVito improved after they separated.
“It’s much better because all of the tense stuff is gone, it’s not in your face, I’m not in his, he’s not in mine,” she quipped. “Everybody’s got a good relationship with Danny and with me and with each other and that’s all we care about.”
Perlman also said she and DeVito have “always loved each other.”
“We have three amazing children together, and we really agree on almost everything important. … We were together for 40 years, 40 years is a long time,” she noted.
Later, in 2023, Perlman shared that the split was “very difficult at first.”
“It took time for us to come to this, somehow, pretty decent understanding and relationship with each other,” she said on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ “Wiser Than Me” podcast at the time.
