Actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen have been together for over 30 years, and they somehow seem more in love every day. Take, for instance, the two posing on the red carpet at the 2025 SAG Awards. The iconic Hollywood couple has managed to support one another throughout their careers after acting brought them together in the first place. They initially met as co-workers while already living established lives with other people, including long marriages and children. A decade later, at just the right moment, they came together again and an epic romance began.
On March 28, Netflix announced Steenburgen would be joining season two of Danson’s show A Man on the Inside, so the pair will be working together again. In the show, Danson plays a widowed retiree named Charles who goes undercover for a private investigator at a senior living facility and finds his life transformed. His wife will be playing a “former musician who factors heavily into the case Charles is trying to solve.”
Here’s everything to know about Mary Steenburgen and her relationship with Ted Danson so far.
Who is Mary Steenburgen?
Mary Steenburgen is originally from Newport, Arkansas. There, she was raised by her parents Nell and Maurice Steenburgen, who worked respectively as a school board secretary and freight train conductor, per her Hollywood Walk of Fame biography. She started acting in high school, but moved to New York City to pursue it as a career in 1972. Her break out role in 198o’s Melvin and Howard as Lynda Dummar won her an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
In a 2023 interview with Role Recall and Yahoo Entertainment, Steenburgen discussed how she broke through with the help of actor Jack Nicholson.
“It was pretty extraordinary. I had been in New York for about six-and-a-half years. I was a waitress,” she explained, saying she’d been taking classes with famous acting teacher Sandy Meisner, but had “gotten really nowhere.”
That is, until she was called into a general meeting with a casting agent.
“On my way out, I said, ‘Are you casting anything in particular?’ And she said, ‘I am, and I’d love to get you a meeting, but at this point, I’m only supposed to [look at] well-known actresses or really beautiful models,’” Steenburgen remembered. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go sit out [in the lobby] and wait until maybe you’ll think about it give me a chance to look at the script.’ Now, I had never been that pushy ever in my career. It was just that moment. To this day I believe something besides what I had right there was with me.”
Steenburgen went to the lobby and saw “three gorgeous models” holding scripts.
She continued, “And I start going, ‘Oh my God, I just blew it with the most important person I know in New York....I’m going to go in there and I’m going to apologize for being so pushy. And formulating my apology and I see these two feet and I heard this voice saying, ‘Are you waiting to see me?’ And it’s Jack Nicholson. I said, ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t have a script.’ He goes over, gets it, hands it to me.”
She went home to work on the script and met Nicholson the next day to read it over. She was then invited to screen test for the film and got cast across from Nicholson as a lead. Steenburgen has gone on to have an absolutely prolific career in film and television, and is a well-known face to almost every generation, appearing in everything from dramas like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? to beloved comedies like 30 Rock and Elf.
According to her bio in the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame, Steenburgen is also a songwriter for Universal Music Publishing Group, and has worked on music for the animated film The Underneath and wrote a song for the film Wild Rose. On her IMDB page, she is also credited for a song on Valley Inn.
Steenburgen and Danson also have a long list of credits for projects they’ve worked on together, including Pontiac Moon, the 1996 miniseries Gulliver’s Travels, the CBS sitcom Ink, the 2004 TV movie It Must Be Love, and Steenburgen has popped up on Danson’s shows in guest roles, including Mr. Mayor, The Good Place, and Becker.
They also appeared on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm as themselves, except that version of the couple got a divorce on the series. They ended up having to tell friends it was a fictional plot line and they were still happily married.
How did they meet?
They first met in 1983, while married to other people. Danson was married to Casey Coates and Steenburgen was married to Malcolm McDowell. Danson was auditioning to play a role on the film Cross Creek that he didn’t land. He told People in 2021, “I was a hot mess back then.”
“I was married. He was married. That was not our moment,” Steenburgen added.
Then, in 1994, they were both cast in the movie Pontiac Moon, and each had recently split from their long-term partners.
“We both had sworn off relationships,” Steenburgen joked. She also told People in 2018, “We met when we were 40 and 45, and we had lived a bit....We met at a time when both of us had stared down some demons within ourselves and that was lucky that we met then.”
In an interview with The Jess Cagle Podcast in 2021, Steenburgen said meeting Danson again made her rethink her original impression of him.
“Every single thing surprised me because I was pretty sure I knew who he was,” she shared. “This is annoying, but I thought he was sort of a slick, breezy person....He was very soulful and of course devastatingly funny, which is a major turn-on for me.”
While talking with Role Recall, Steenburgen reflected on Pontiac Moon and how she gradually warmed up to her future husband.
“I had just broken up with somebody and it had been a really difficult relationship. And I just said, ‘I’m done.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not good at relationships, it’s my fault. I hereby exit all romantic life forever.’ And my friends love to remind me of this moment,” she joked.
“I didn’t instantly fall in love. He was going through a whole lot of stuff in his life and I was like, ‘Wow, that dude's complicated,’ she continued.” “But I thought he was really sweet. And then little by little, we’d all go out to dinner and he might not be there. And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not as much fun when he’s not here.’ You know? And little by little I went from just becoming friends with him to realizing inside that something huge was happening to me. And I have to say, it just has been one of the gifts from my angels that I got to meet him and spend my life with him.”
In 2022, on The Drew Barrymore Show, Danson recalled the same time period. He eventually invited Steenburgen on a canoe trip with friends, saying, “By the time we came back, I’d say both of us were in love.”
Do they have any children?
Danson and Steenburgen have a blended family; each of them have two children from previous relationships. Danson and Coates share two daughters, Kate and Alexis. Steenburgen has a son, Charlie, and a daughter, Lilly, with McDowell. Steenburgen told People in 2021, “It is a remarkable, remarkable thing to blend a family and have it work the way it does work with our family.”
What else have they said about each other?
In her interview with People, Steenburgen gushed, “Not to sound corny, but I would sign up for a hundred more lifetimes because he makes me a better person....He’s a truly beautiful human being, a great, big soul.”
In 2020, they celebrated their 25th anniversary, and the actress captioned a selfie of them together with the tribute, “Thank you for making me laugh today and every single one of the last 9,125 days. You are the goofiest, wisest, kindest, dreamboat in the world.”
