Actress Maria Bello, best known to Autostraddle readers for playing Coyote Mommi Lil Lovell in the 2000 lesbian cinematic masterpiece Coyote Ugly, showed up at Elton John’s Oscar party last night with longtime girlfriend Dominique Crenn in tow and announced that they were no longer able to fight the moonlight and got engaged in Paris over the holidays. The couple said they’d been out and about and publicly engaged at foodie events around the world, but this was their big Hollywood debut of the announcement. Bello, you’ll remember, came in a New York Times Modern Love column in 2013. Last night, she told E! News that she finally felt grown up enough to be married.
Crenn is an Iron Chef, a star on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and the only woman chef to earn three Michelin stars, which she did for her San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn. She also one time told a man in an audience at a panel who asked her if she felt like she’d missed out on the “very important role” of being a mother to focus on her career that she was, in fact, a mother of two and that, in her opinion, he should stay home and keep his kids so his wife could go out and be a bad ass woman. And Bello, of course, is known for more than her turn in the queer coming of age tale Coyote Ugly. She was nominated for Golden Globes for The Cooler in 2003 and A History of Violence in 2005 and has starred in dozens of other films and TV series.
Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple!
