Talk about your good night and good luck.

George Clooney has had a lot of reasons to thank his agent over the years, but among all the plum roles the Oscar winner has procured with his help, none has meant more than the role of Amal Clooney's husband.

"I have this incredible partner who I couldn’t be more proud of,” George, who was the movie star of the hour even at the 2025 Tony Awards June 8, gushed to E! News about his spouse of a decade, with whom he shares 8-year-old twins Alexander and Ella. “She’s the bravest human being I’ve ever met in my life. I am deeply proud of her and the fact that she’s in any way proud of me...I can’t believe how lucky I am.”

And that's pretty much the happy tune he's been singing ever since fate literally knocked on his door 12 years ago. Though it did call first to let the actor know it was coming.

George's father, Nick Clooney, had previously intimated that his son met his future bride at a dinner, they hit it off and poof. Nowadays we have a fuller picture of how that all came to pass. Dinner was involved, but it came later. 

"I didn't leave the house," George recalled in 2018 on Netflix's My Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman. "No, it's the wildest thing. A mutual friend of ours said, 'I'm stopping by and can I bring my friend?' And I was like, 'Of course.' I got a call from my agent who called me and said, 'I met this woman who's coming to your house who you're gonna marry.'"

Enter Amal (née Alamuddin), an Oxford-educated human rights attorney who was internationally renowned in her own right.

"The funniest thing was my mom and dad were visiting so my parents were there," George told David Letterman. "And we just talked, we stayed up all night talking."

He got her email address (presumably Amal@TheOne.Org) and proceeded to keep her attention. Which seems like a no-brainer, but who knows—Amal had talked to a lot of fascinating, brilliant people in her life before meeting George Clooney.

And he was not ignorant of that fact.

"So we started writing," he said. "I didn't know if she wanted to go out with me—I just thought we were buddies."

Not least because, two-time People's Sexiest Man Alive status aside, he's a bit older than Amal.

“I didn’t really think I’d have much of a chance with her," George told the New York Times earlier this year, “because I was 17 years older and she seemed to have everything she needed.”

And yet isn't the whole point to want George Clooney?

"I thought she was beautiful, and I thought she was funny and obviously smart," he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. But he didn't know right away what she thought.

"She probably thought I was old," he quipped. "Then she sent some pictures from when she was here, and we were writing each other, emailing, talking, mostly about what was going on in each other's lives, and over a period of time it became clear we were more than just friends."

George went to London that October, in 2013, to do post-production work on his film The Monuments Men and invited her to visit him at Abbey Road Studios, after which they went to dinner—resulting in a slew of "Clooney on a date with mystery woman" headlines once the paparazzi caught sight of them.

George stayed in town for six weeks, he recalled, which ended up being plenty of time to get serious. He and Amal spent Christmas together in Cabo San Lucas and then want on safari in Kenya. 

By February 2014, barely seven months after they had met, George was getting ready to propose.

Married once before, to Talia Balsam, but divorced since 1993, he had famously mused in interviews that he doubted he'd get hitched again. But those are usually famous last words.

It took awhile to get the 7-carat diamond ring, worth as much as $750,000 according to one high-end jeweler's estimate, sorted out. But once he'd obtained the bauble, it was full speed ahead.

George cooked a pasta dinner for Amal at his Los Angeles-area home on April 28, 2014, and, over champagne afterwards, he popped the question.

"And I did all the stuff, got down on my knee and did all the things you're supposed to do," he told THR. "I had a playlist with my [late aunt Rosemary Clooney's] songs on it, and I was waiting for this song, 'Why Shouldn't I?' 'Why shouldn't I take a chance when romance passes by? / Why shouldn't I know of love?' It's a really good song about why can't I be in love? And it played, and she's like, 'Holy s--t!'"

No wonder she was surprised. George revealed later that the two hadn't even discussed marriage yet.

"And she just kept staring at the ring, going, 'Oh, my God.' It was 20 minutes of me on my knee, waiting for her to say yes, because she was so shocked," he continued. "She only said yes when 'Goody, Goody' came on, which isn't very romantic— it's kind of mean: 'So you met someone who set you back on your heels, goody, goody.'"

The suspense was worth it.

George and Amal got married at Ca' Farsetti palace in Venice, Italy, in front of family and dear friends, famous and otherwise, on Sept. 27, 2014, in a nondenominational ceremony.

The bride wore Oscar de la Renta, photos from her VIP fitting with her mother, Baria Alamuddin, sister Tala and the late legendary couturier himself making a splash in Vogue.

"George and I wanted a wedding that was romantic and elegant, and I can't imagine anyone more able than Oscar to capture this mood in a dress," Amal told the magazine in a rare personal interview. "Meeting him made the design process all the more magical, as he is so warm and such a gentleman."

The groom wore Armani, Giorgio Armani himself calling it a "privilege and pleasure" to dress his longtime friend and client for the occasion.

"George and Amal radiated love all night," Baria told People after the long wedding weekend full of boat rides, food, wine, dancing and star-gazing was over. "The wedding was so unbelievably special, it was legendary. These three days—the friends, the families, the atmosphere, everything—will stay with me all the rest of my life."

Being married "feels pretty damn great," Clooney added, noting that he and his new wife were, simply, "looking forward to everything."

After legally marrying in a civil ceremony on Sept. 29, a Monday, they reportedly honeymooned in the Seychelles and then were enjoying an extended staycation at their new London home when duty called.

"First, I had to explain that to my wife which didn't play well," he joked on The Graham Norton Show about the order of business, which was a command appearance at New York Comic-Con to promote Tomorrowland. "And then, the whole idea of spending part of your honeymoon with people dressed up like Captain Kirk and Star War scharacters somehow wasn't easy to explain to my new bride…But, I showed up and it was actually fun."

Amal herself went back to work barely a week later, jetting to Greece as part of the team advising the Greek government on their hoped-for return of the contested Parthenon Marbles (aka the Elgin Marbles) from the U.K.

So, their vowed intention to not spend more than a week apart was put into play sooner than they expected. But they've apparently lived happily ever after.

And more than most.

"We're still trying to find something to fight about," George told CBS Mornings' Gayle King in April, dropping the soon-to-be viral bombshell that he and Amal had never had an argument—several years after he first shared that idyllic tidbit with Gayle.

“I think because I started so late with Amal,” he explained, "and I feel so extraordinarily lucky to have met this incredible woman. I feel as if I hit the jackpot. And there isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel like I'm the luckiest man in the world."

Acknowledging that their perpetual tranquility was "madness" to some of their friends, Amal told Gayle in 2022, "I think that it's 99 percent luck just to meet the right person. And I think the one thing we would take is to not be cynical, just to be open, and I was surprised that you were not cynical or guarded at all and things just moved very quickly."

And their marriage has proven to be as lovely as their lavish wedding weekend in Venice suggested it would be. They've since settled down in South Oxfordshire, about an hour's drive outside London, and continue to ply their respective trades—which took George to Broadway for the first time this year to star in an adaptation of his 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck, now in the role of dark-haired CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow.

And, you know, Amal is busy too.

"Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an advisor to Kofi Annan regarding Syria and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award."

So Tina Fey perfectly nailed the irony at the 2015 Golden Globes, when Clooney received the Cecil B. DeMille Award and his global justice-championing wife was applauded for bringing opera gloves back to the red carpet and then meme'd for posterity as George was singing her praises during her speech.

But though the world at large had become more aware of Amal at the time through the lens of her husband, a heartthrob since the 1990s who over the years became the sage celebrity voice of Hollywood, the filmmaking industry, politics and Nespresso, George has remained vividly aware of how lucky he got.

"It's a humbling thing when you find someone to love," George said toward the end of his acceptance speech. "Even better if you've been waiting your whole life. And when your whole life is 53 years...cue [Amy Poehler], start the jokes."

(That was a call-back Tina and Amy's zinger from the 2014 Globes about how, in Gravity, Clooney would "rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.")

But, George continued in 2015, "Amal, whatever alchemy it is that brought us together, I couldn't be more proud to be your husband."

In their case, the alchemist was Clooney's agent.

And at the time, the couple had only just started to talk about adding children to the mix.

"It had never been part of my DNA," George admitted to THR in September 2017 after he became a dad. "We didn't plan on it. We never talked about it until after we were married, which is funny. There was an assumption that we didn't want them. And then, after the wedding, Amal and I were talking and we just felt we'd gotten very lucky, both of us, and we should share whatever good luck we've got. It would seem self-centered to just have that belong to us."

Or as his dad Nick put it to People after his twin grandkids were born, "When George talked about not seeing kids in his future, 'I would listen to him patiently and then finally step in and say, 'George, some astounding woman is going to know your socks off, end of story' And that's exactly what happened."

Julie Chen—a longtime friend of George's—confirmed on The Talk in February 2017 in the most casual of Internet-rocking announcements that the Clooneys were expecting twins.

"We are really happy and really excited. It's going to be an adventure," George said on the French program Rencontres de Cinema a couple weeks later. Since getting the news "we've sort of embraced it all…with arms wide open."

Daughter Ella and son Alexander were born on June 6, 2017, about a month early—in either, depending on who you ask, the Lindo Wing at St. Mary's Hospital, where Kate Middleton has had all of her children, or in the equally exclusive-sounding Kensington Wing at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

All went accordingly and, as George's rep said at the time, Amal and the babies were "healthy, happy and doing fine," while the actor was "sedated and should recover in a few days."

Alexander and Ella Clooney of Los Angeles, London and Lake Como have pretty much been living the high life ever since. (And will continue to do so, thanks in no small part to the roughly $1 billion sale Clooney and his partners in Casamigos brokered for their high-end tequila brand in June 2017, right around when the babies arrived.)

Not putting on any airs about how much work caring for newborn twins would be, George and Amal hired super nanny Connie Simpson to help out early on, perhaps getting the recommendation from former satisfied clients Matt and Lucy Damon. All went so well that the Clooneys wholeheartedly endorsed Simpson's book The Nanny Connie Way: Secrets to Mastering the First Four Months of Parenting.

"If I were a baby, I would want Connie to be my Nanny," George and Amal said in a statement. "I want her to wrap me in a blanket and rock me to sleep. We loved having her as part of our family."

Aside from the usual gotcha shots that have been taken of the couple with their babies when they've ventured out and about, the Clooneys have opted to keep their young family to themselves.

The angling for photos of the twins was pretty egregious right off the bat, though. When a French tabloid published what George said were illegally taken pictures of the kids when they were barely a month old, he vowed to go after everyone involved in the taking, selling and publishing to the fullest extent of the law.

"The safety of our children demands it," he told E! News.

"Every single day there's some crazy sort of infringement," George told THR. "And you go, 'OK, we'll eat it. That's what we have to do.' But when someone breaks the law, that's beyond what we bargained for, beyond the pact I made: that when you're famous, you're going to be followed. I don't know anyone who wouldn't be furious."

He acknowledged that the level of attention paid to him, which shifted when Amal entered his life, was something his partner reluctantly had to get used to.

"It's a little like being in a parade, and it's not easy—particularly for her—because, in general, we live a very private life," George said.

And so it's continued for George and Amal, whose new normal includes work, play and parenting.

Meanwhile, George's playful, pragmatic personality stayed intact, such as when the couple handed out headphones to fellow travelers on a flight to help cancel out the baby noise.

Now the kids are old enough to know their mom is a lawyer and therefore able to help out in a real pinch, and while they know their dad is an actor, they've yet to get acquainted with his filmography.

“I don't want them to for the most part," George told E! News in September 2024. "But they did say to me one day when they came home from school, ‘What's ‘famous?’ Which we didn't want to explain."

They still entertain plenty of VIPs, too, but the kids "want to see Taylor Swift,” George told E! News’ Keltie Knight at the 2025 Tonys. “The funniest part is that they have no idea of references. Robert DeNiro will be at the house and they’re like ‘Who’s that?’ They don’t care.”

Besides, having Mom and Dad around is what matters. (Though if they can call Taylor...)

“We actually both work from home as much as possible, and we try not to spend too much time apart when we're traveling," Amal told E! News ahead of her and George's 10th wedding anniversary last September. "We basically follow each other around the globe. Yeah, we’re lucky.”

Added George, "We’re actually together so much it’s crazy."

But he wouldn't have it any other way, according to that same tune he's been singing all these years.

"Every single day of my life, I just feel lucky," he rhapsodized to THR in 2017. "Lucky in my career. Lucky enough to have found the perfect partner. Sometimes in life it doesn't happen on your schedule, but you find the person that you were always supposed to be with. That's how I feel, and I know that's how Amal feels."

See George and Amal's romance in photos through the years:

The pair continues to astonish on the red carpet with their flawless fashion sense and sizzling love affair.

Amal and George enjoyed spending some down time with their inlaws while hitting the town.

The lovebirds tied the knot with a beautiful and intimate symbolic wedding ceremony in Venice, Italy.

After just seven months of dating, Amal Alamuddin managed to do the impossible: Get a ring from George Clooney!

According to People, who was first to report the engagement news, the pair were first linked in October 2013. The twosome reportedly bonded over dinner in London at Berners Tavern where they discussed a surveillance satellite program over Syria.

George and Amal were spotted exiting NYC's Carlisyle Hotel together in March 2014. 

In mid-March 2014, Amal joined George for a romantic safari in Tanzania.

These two didn't just take in the gorgeous scenery and animals surrounding them!

Back in L.A., the lovebirds grabbed sushi with pals John Krasinski and Emily Blunt.

Need more George?! Check out this gallery with pics of all of Clooney's ex-girlfriends!

(Originally published Feb. 2, 2018, at 5 a.m. PT)