25 Fascinating Facts about Wives Behind Popular Men

Marcia Lucas, George Lucas’ then-wife, was the reason for major changes to the Original Star Wars film. Obi Wan’s death, Leia’s good Luck Kiss, and re-editing the trench run to increase tension were all her ideas. She won the Academy Award for editing the film while George did not for directing.

2. Even though Johnny Cash's first wife (Vivian Cash) was Italian-American, black and white photos in the 1960s misled some people into believing that she was black, which led to protests, death threats, and canceled shows.

3. Margaret Grubb, L. Ron Hubbard’s first wife once discovered two love letters the Scientology founder had written, to two different women, in the couple’s outgoing mail. She switched the envelopes and sent them.

4. During the Watergate scandal, Martha Mitchell (then wife of Nixon's Attorney General) was kidnapped, beaten and forcibly sedated by her husband's security detail to keep her from speaking to reporters.

5. Billie Paulette Montgomery, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry's wife didn't know who he or Aerosmith was when they met. He didn't even talk about it and she only discovered it a few years later after finding gold records in some old boxes. This was after songs like Walk This Way, Dream On, and Back in the Saddle.

Buddy Holly's wife María Elena Holly found out about his death while watching TV and suffered a miscarriage the next day due to “psychological trauma.” His mother heard the news on the radio and collapsed. Soon after, authorities adopted a policy of notifying a victim’s family before their name was released.

7. Corazon Aquino was the wife of Benigno Aquino Jr., a staunch political opponent against the dictator of the Philippines. Upon the assassination of her husband by the dictator, she ran for president against him, winning and restoring democracy to the Philippines.

8. In 1914, the wife of the French Prime Minister, Henriette Caillaux, assassinated a newspaper editor to prevent him from leaking that she and her husband had been dating while still married to their previous spouses. She was acquitted for ‘uncontrollable female emotions.’

9. Stephen Hawking's wife Jane Hawking was given the option to take him off of life support after he was placed in a medically induced coma in 1985. She refused, and upon recovering Stephen Hawking finished writing ‘A Brief History of Time.’

10. Sara Northrup Hollister, the wife of L. Ron Hubbard consulted doctors who recommended he "be committed to a private sanatorium for psychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as paranoid schizophrenia." Thereafter, Hubbard criticized psychiatry as a "barbaric and corrupt profession."

Willie Nelson's ex-wife Martha Matthews once sewed him up in a sheet and beat him with a broomstick. He commented: “She was a very classy, ingenious, brilliant lady, and I was a problem at times.”

12. Bob Marley’s wife Rita Marley was shot in the head during his attempted assassination. However, she had dreadlocks so thick, they saved her life.

13. America’s founding father Aaron Burr’s 2nd wife Eliza Jumel was represented in their divorce trial by Alexander Hamilton Jr., the son of the man Burr shot and killed 30 years before.

14. When Joseph Stalin's first wife Kato Svanidze died, he was so overcome with grief that he threw himself into her grave during the funeral. Later, secret policemen arrived at the funeral, looking for Stalin (at the time a wanted fugitive) and he was forced to flee the service early by jumping the graveyard’s fence.

15. Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Chen Jieru wrote a memoir that was suppressed by Chiang from publication until 1993. On their wedding night, Chiang infected Chen with syphilis, leaving her infertile. He later sent her to “study” in the US but never allowed her to return to China.

Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel Jackson was attacked as an adulteress and she died during the 1828 Presidential election after falling into a deep depression. At her funeral, Jackson said, “May God Almighty forgive her murderers. I never can.”

17. Valeria Messalina was a Roman Empress and the wife of Emperor Claudius, who once competed in a sex marathon with Rome’s foremost prostitute and came out on top. She was eventually executed when she married a senator while Claudius was out of town.

18. German auto engineer Carl Benz's wife Bertha Benz was the world’s first motorist. In the summer of 1888, Bertha decided to “test drive” the second prototype of Motorwagen on a journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim, a distance of more than 50 miles in a single day, and left a note for Carl on the kitchen table.

19. When Jane Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s first wife saw the movie script for The Theory of Everything, she deleted all the F-words, saying “Scientists in the 1960s and 70s didn't use the F-word and I’m pretty sure they don't know either.”

20. Albert Einstein’s wife Mileva Maric had a daughter in 1902, one year before they were married. Existence of “Lieserl” was so well concealed that she was only discovered in 1986. It is believed that Einstein never met her and what happened to her is a mystery.

Wife of Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, was killed by her own 12-year-old grandson in 1997. Wanting to return to his mother, who was in treatment as part of a plea agreement for plotting to kill Louis Farrakhan, he set his grandmother’s apartment on fire. She died weeks later of her injuries.

22. Woody Harrelson’s first marriage with Nancy Simon was intended to be a joke and they were going to divorce the next day. The storefront marriage/divorce parlor was closed the next day so they stayed married for 10 months.

23. Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister (Joseph Goebbels), had six children whose names all started with “H” to honor Hitler. When the Red Army entered Berlin, she ordered them all to be knocked out with morphine and then poisoned with cyanide in the Fuhrerbunker.

24. Teddy Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died soon after giving birth to their daughter. His complete entry in his diary for that day was, “The light has gone out of my life.” Besides a privately published tribute, he never spoke of her again, including never speaking about her to the daughter she gave birth to.

25. The funeral of Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, was the first Protestant funeral in England, Scotland or Ireland to be held in English. She is the only royal to be buried in a private residence.