Beverly D’Angelo turns 75 on Sunday, November 15. She was born that day in 1951 in Columbus, Ohio, where her grandfather designed the Ohio Stadium, and the girl from Columbus grew up to become Ellen Griswold, the calm center of Clark’s chaos in National Lampoon’s Vacation. She played Ellen on and off from 1983 to 2015, but the role that changed her life most came with no script at all.
It started on an airplane, ran through a marriage to an Italian duke and a Manhattan courtroom, and arrived at a sentence about Al Pacino that she has repeated more than once. To understand why she says it, you have to go back to the man she married first.
How Did A Married Woman End Up Starting A Family With Al Pacino?
In 1981 D’Angelo married Lorenzo Salviati, an Italian duke, and the two kept an unusual arrangement. She told People in 2022 that they eloped with an understanding that each could live their own life, and that “if there were any crises or anything, we’d come back together.” It worked for years, until she met Pacino in 1996 and fell hard. When she explained her “little deal” to him, she said, Pacino’s answer was simple: “Well, that’s crazy.”
So she called her husband. Salviati was not jealous, she recalled, but he did have one objection. “He went, ‘An actor? No, no, not an actor,'” D’Angelo told People. He stepped aside anyway, and the marriage ended in divorce in the 1990s. She joked that the divorce finally won over her mother-in-law: “It took her 15 years to understand that I wasn’t in [the marriage] for a title of wealth or for privilege.”
Then Pacino asked her something no one had asked before. In a 2023 Instagram video she remembered him saying, in 1997, “I want you to be the mother of my children.” She had avoided that role her whole life, she admitted, but she was deeply in love and “one hundred percent in.” The couple turned to in vitro fertilization, and on January 25, 2001, D’Angelo gave birth to twins, Anton James and Olivia Rose. She was 49 years old. That happiness would not stay simple for long.
Why Did It End Up In Manhattan Family Court?
By 2003, the relationship was over, and the twins were barely two. What followed was not a quiet parting. Pacino went to Manhattan Family Court seeking more time with the children, and D’Angelo opposed his request for overnight visits. In July 2003, UPI reported, citing the New York Post, that Judge Helen Sturm ruled “there are no safety or health reasons to bar overnight visitations” and ordered the pair to work out the details themselves.
They did, privately, and the custody terms were never made public. Money was a separate fight, and it took until May 2004 to settle. According to Reuters, both parents answered “Yes, your honor” when a magistrate asked whether they agreed to the child support deal of their own free will. “It feels terrific. I’m very happy,” D’Angelo said as she left the courtroom, a line UPI also carried. The headlines faded after that, and she turned her attention to two toddlers and a career she was about to slow down on purpose.
What Did She Give Up While Raising The Twins?
By then D’Angelo already had a résumé most actresses would envy. She starred as Sheila in Miloš Forman’s Hair in 1979, and a year later she played Patsy Cline opposite Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter, doing her own singing on “Sweet Dreams” and “Walkin’ After Midnight” and earning a Golden Globe nomination. In 1983, she climbed into the Family Truckster beside Chevy Chase, and an Emmy nomination followed for her Stella in a 1984 TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
The 1990s brought harder work, including a mother caught in her son’s hate in American History X. Fans of The Simpsons know her voice as Lurleen Lumpkin, the country-singing waitress Homer briefly managed. Later she turned up as the tough agent Babs on Entourage and as the steely family matriarch Gertrude in Violent Night in 2022.
Still, she has been honest that motherhood came first. “Maybe I would have had a bigger career,” she told People in 2025, explaining that having the twins so late changed her priorities: “Well, been there, done that, let’s do this.” She chose to keep them away from the business, too. “I did not raise my kids in that culture,” she said. Her advice to anyone thinking of following her path was a single dry line: “Don’t try it at home.” So where did all of this leave her and Pacino?
What Does She Call Al Pacino Now?
Not an enemy. In that 2023 Instagram video, which Fox News reported, she summed up nearly three decades in one long breath: “We lived together for seven years, had two children, broke up, but continued steadily on our journey as co parents.” Today, she wrote, “It is a unique and profound friendship between two artists that endures to this day.”
The friendship is not just talk. On April 25, 2026, when Pacino turned 86, HELLO! magazine reported that he and D’Angelo were photographed together on a low-key birthday outing, two decades after the court dates. The twins, now 25, have grown up with both parents in their lives.
And the courtroom fight never changed the answer she gives when people ask what Pacino meant to her. It was never the fame, or the films, or the bigger career she might have had. “The greatest gift that Al ever gave me,” D’Angelo told People, “was to make me a mother.”
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