Friendship is the foundation. When Eddie Redmayne first met Hannah Bagshawe, they weren’t even considering getting married — they were simply teenagers at neighboring schools.
Before he was an actor, Redmayne attended Eton College alongside Prince William, and the boys in their class were invited to a local all-girls school to help with a charity fashion show. While the event was awkward, it ended with a meet-cute worthy of Hollywood.
“It was an embarrassing evening,” he recalled to the Daily Mail in 2014. “I had to walk across the stage topless — I was this pasty, freckly guy and when I came on the girls in the audience didn’t take much notice of me, but I was followed by the best-looking boy in the school and all the girls erupted in cheers, which was emotionally scarring!”
Luckily, something great came out of the night — the Fantastic Beasts star met his future wife. “I saw Hannah across the room at a party afterward and she was very beautiful and very funny and she loves the arts and theatre just as I do, so we became friends,” Redmayne explained.
Bagshawe, a PR executive in finance, remained his pal for more than a decade. Everything changed when Redmayne was about to start filming Les Miserables and invited the University of Edinburgh alum to travel to Italy with him.
“Before I went, Hannah and I were on a sort of date — we’d been good friends for 12 years — and we had a wonderful evening and I suddenly said, ‘You don’t want to come to Florence with me next week, do you?’ She said, ‘That’s absurd, you don’t mean it.’ I said, ‘Yes I do!’ So our first proper date was in Florence,” he said, adding that the two “couldn’t be happier” at the time.
After a couple of years together, the Theory of Everything actor asked his girlfriend to marry him in May 2014 while on vacation. “He had been planning on it for a while,” an insider told Us Weekly at the time. “They have a very relaxed and supportive relationship … they seemed to have always known they were going to spend the rest of their lives together.”
The duo wed in an intimate ceremony at the Babington House in Somerset, England, in December 2014, his rep confirmed to Us. The candlelit ceremony had a “Winter Wonderland” theme, but the Oscar winner later revealed that the bride’s track record had many of their guests nervous.
“She has never been on time for anything in her life,” Redmayne said during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show a month after exchanging vows. “She was a good half-hour late. Her grandfather had to be some help from going and summoning her.”
He added, “Everyone else was really stressed, but I was kind of relaxed knowing that she’d never been on time for pretty much anything in her life.” The two enjoyed their honeymoon in The Alps after they said “I do.”
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