Eric McCormack, star of the sitcom “Will & Grace,” and his wife, Janet Leigh Holden, are headed for divorce after 26 years of marriage.
Holden, 69, filed for divorce from McCormack, 60, last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, citing the usual “irreconcilable differences,” according to the petition for dissolution obtained by The Times. The pair married on Aug. 3, 1997, and have one child together, Finnigan Holden McCormack, 21.
Representatives for Holden and Eric McCormack did not immediately respond to The Times’ requests for comment.
McCormack, who recently appeared in the Hulu series “The Other Black Girl,” first met Holden in 1994 on the set of the CBS TV series “Lonesome Dove,” which had Holden as an assistant director and McCormack as an actor. He described her as “different” from other women in the industry: “She wore jeans, drove a pick-up truck.”
They kept their affair a secret while shooting the series, McCormack said in an essay he penned for the Guardian in 2007.
“At first she wasn’t too keen,” he wrote. “She knew actors are a lot of work: it would be like taking your work home with you. But I managed to convince her. We had a secret affair the first season. I mean, dating crew! Actually, it was much worse for her, because she wasn’t supposed to give any of the actors preferential treatment.”
The pair married in 1997, five months after McCormack was cast in NBC’s “Will & Grace” as Will Truman, a gay lawyer who is best friends with straight interior designer Grace Adler, played by Debra Messing. The show ran until 2006 and had a revival for several seasons between 2017 and 2020.
“I think I was very lucky that I didn’t get well-known until my early thirties,” McCormack wrote, crediting Holden. “If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along.”
