Lisa Kudrow Met Her Future Husband, Michel Stern, When He Was Dating Her Roommate
Friends star Lisa Kudrow has been with her husband Michel Stern for 30 years, but they are very careful about what they share in public. The French advertising executive has mostly hung back and allowed his wife to take the spotlight, though he has been at her side during some key red carpet moments.
They were photographed in 2005, at the premiere of her hit HBO's series The Comeback, at the 10th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, the 58th Emmy Awards, and other big events.
Here's everything there is to know about Lisa Kudrow's husband, Michel Stern.
Michel Stern is French and was born and raised there, per an interview Kudrow did with The New York Times in 1995. He worked in advertising and then expanded his career in the United States. Very little is known about him publicly, but he is apparently a fan of Friends, too. When the show had their reunion special in 2021, Kudrow said of seeing her old episodes with her husband: 'Michel and I started watching some of season 4, which I thought I had watched, it's as if I didn't. He enjoys them more than I do. Because I'm mortified with myself.'
They first connected years before they started dating, as he was her roommate's boyfriend.
'I was living with [a] French girl, and he had just moved here, and they were dating when we first met. But I'm freakishly polite, so I saw him and went, 'Well, he's the perfect man, and it's all ruined because now they're together and I can't [make a play for him],'' said Kudrow, according to a 2015 report from The Daily Mail. 'I thought that that's not nice, to flirt. But the minute I saw him I went, 'Well, that's it, there he is.''
Stern and Kudrow's roommate broke up six months later, but she and Stern didn't reconnect for years.
'Six years later, I met him again at her birthday party, and we just never stopped [talking],' she explained.
The couple got married in 1995. In May 2020, in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel Live, she explained they were celebrating their 25-year anniversary apart because of complications with lockdown.
'We were all together in the desert because we have a house there. And then there was the lock-in, so we just stayed put,' she shared. 'But that house needed work....And then what happened was, it got to be hotter, as it does in the Palm Springs area, right? So, it was too hot for me.'
She continued, 'We are so used to not actually being able to be together on our anniversary that we were like, 'Oh, well. Does it matter? I love you. You still love me? Yeah. Great. We're good.''
Stern and Kudrow have a son, Julian Murray, whom they welcomed in 1998. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2021, which Kudrow celebrated online.
She shared some adorable family snapshots on his most recent birthday, in which Stern can be seen holding him as a baby.
Kudrow's pregnancy was famously written into the show, with her character Phoebe offering to be a surrogate for her brother Frank. In 2018, she told People that the cast was super supportive of her pregnancy.
'The six of us would do a huddle backstage and just say, 'All right, have a good show, love you love you love you love you,'' she said. 'And when I was pregnant, then they would say, 'Have a great show, love you love you love you, little Julian!' 'Cause we knew it was a boy, and that was his name.'
Kudrow shared relationship advice with Glamour in a 2014 interview.
'When [Michel and I] decided to get married, we understood: We're not promising to love each other forever, because you can't do that, but we are promising to work on whatever problems come up,' she began. 'We're committed to our marriage working. It turns out, after you have a history, there's such a bond, and love takes another shape. But, oh, I don't want to jinx it—I'm superstitious!'
She added, '[Michel and I] respect each other's independence, and I don't mean that as a euphemism. I don't mean relationship-wise outside the marriage. Clear? But I don't like to travel. So if he wants to go on a golf trip, he goes. I think people get in trouble [when they assume they're] supposed to be one unit, in sync about everything. [Marriage] is like being on a team. Each teammate is different, but you have the same goal.'
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