Kevin Kline turns 79 on Saturday, October 24. He was born that day in 1947 in St. Louis, and he has spent the better part of four decades married to Phoebe Cates, the dark-haired star of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins who seemed to vanish from movie screens in the mid-1990s. The reason is a quiet arrangement the couple made at home, and Kline has been surprisingly candid about it.
Their story started long before that arrangement, in a casting room for a movie about old college friends.
What Happened At ‘The Big Chill’ Audition?
In the early 1980s, Cates was a teenage model with a hit movie, and Kline was a stage actor fresh from Sophie’s Choice. She read for the part of Chloe in The Big Chill, which went to Meg Tilly, while Kline won a role in the ensemble. Nothing happened between them right away.
Kline remembered his first impression with a laugh. “When I first met Phoebe, I remember thinking, ‘She’s too happy to be with me,'” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2002, a quote People and The List have both revisited. He was more than 15 years older than her, and he wasn’t sure what they would have in common.
Time answered that. A few years later their paths crossed again at the Public Theater in New York, and by 1985 they were a couple. They married privately in New York on March 5, 1989, and just 24 days later, on March 29, Kline walked onstage at the 61st Academy Awards to collect the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for A Fish Called Wanda.
Their son, Owen, arrived in 1991, and their daughter, Greta, followed in 1994. That same year the couple made one more movie together.
How Did ‘Princess Caraboo’ Put Them On Screen Together?
Princess Caraboo reached American theaters in September 1994 with Cates in the title role. Based on a true story, it cast her as a mysterious young woman who turns up in 19th-century England speaking a language nobody understands, and who soon has the local gentry convinced she is a princess.
Kline took the supporting part of Frixos, the Greek butler who suspects the princess is a fraud from the very first scene. There is something sweet about watching a real married couple play a skeptic and the woman he can’t quite figure out.
It turned out to be her last starring role. Cates made only one more film, The Anniversary Party in 2001, and she did it as a favor to her close friend Jennifer Jason Leigh, who directed it. The two had been friends since their days on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. After that she stayed off camera for good, while her husband kept working.
How Did Kevin Kline’s Career Keep Climbing?
By the time he married, Kline already had two Tony Awards, for On the Twentieth Century in 1978 and The Pirates of Penzance in 1981. The Oscar for playing Otto, the vain con man in Wanda, led to Dave and In & Out, and he won his third Tony in 2017 for Noel Coward’s Present Laughter.
He hasn’t slowed down at 78. He starred opposite Cate Blanchett in the Apple TV+ thriller Disclaimer in 2024, and in March 2026 he headlined the MGM+ comedy American Classic with Laura Linney, playing a Broadway actor who retreats to his family’s small-town theater after a public meltdown.
Through all of it, the couple never moved west. Kline told Business Insider in 2024 that theirs isn’t a Hollywood marriage because they have never lived in Hollywood. “If your marriage lasts more than six months, you’re already in the Guinness Book of World Records,” he joked, according to Fox News and Men’s Journal. The reason his wife stayed home, though, goes back to a promise the two made as new parents.
What Was The Pact That Kept Phoebe Cates Home?
Kline spelled it out to Playboy in 1998. “We have agreed to alternate so that we’re never working at the same time,” he said, as People and The List have both reported. One parent would take a job while the other stayed with the children. Then came the part that explains her disappearance from the movies: “Whenever it’s been her slot to work, Phoebe has chosen to stay with the children.”
He never made it sound like a sacrifice. “She loved acting while she was doing it, but she was not driven by it, as I had been,” he said in the same 1998 interview. Cates said much the same thing herself when she sat down with Donny Deutsch on The Big Idea in 2005. “I knew that acting wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t driven to do it again,” she told him, in remarks quoted by The List and HELLO! She knew she had only so many hours in a day, she explained, and they didn’t include 15-hour shoot days.
What she wanted instead was a shop. In the fall of 2005, she opened Blue Tree on Madison Avenue, selling everything from cashmere and costume jewelry to candy and stuffed animals. Kline came up with the name, a nod to the blue trees in Fauvist paintings, and USA Today found her working the register most days until 2 p.m. “I always wanted to have a general store,” she said. “If I could have had a photo booth and sold candy, I would have.” More than 20 years later, the shop is still open, HELLO! reported this summer.
The children the pact was made for grew up creative. Owen Kline wrote and directed the A24 comedy Funny Pages in 2022, and Greta Kline makes indie pop as Frankie Cosmos. When Kline was asked about his wife in that same 2024 interview, he didn’t mention her movies at all. “She’s a great wife, a great mother, great person, and she keeps me honest,” he said.
