The endless string of actresses couldn’t tame him. The cocktail waitresses were told, “Check, please!” Even the professional wrestler couldn’t pin him down.
But now, a London-based lawyer named Amal Alamuddin has done the impossible. She’s gotten the world’s most infamous bachelor, George Clooney, to propose.
No word on the wedding day, but chances are, it will include many of Clooney’s dashing A-list friends, as well as 10 billion of the planet’s worst-dressed paparazzi.
The most shocking part of the engagement — besides the fact that Clooney said just last December in an interview that he’d probably never get married again — is how it seemingly came out of nowhere.
One minute, Clooney is dating wrestler Stacy Keibler, the next he’s getting hitched to Alamuddin, a completely unknown quantity to almost everyone, outside of die-hard readers of Cambridge Law Review.
(The good news is, as a lawyer, she should be well-positioned to take half his stuff in three years when the relationship goes belly up.)
So who is this woman? Here are seven facts you should know.
She’s a Tina Fey joke come to life
At January’s Golden Globes, Fey joked that “Gravity” was “the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.”
Alamuddin is 36, Clooney, 52. The age gap is similar to the actor’s previous relationships. Vegas waitress Sarah Larson was 29 when she dated Clooney in 2008.
She speaks three languages
Arabic, French, and English
Her mother is also quite the looker
Mom Baria, a foreign editor of “Al Hayat” newspaper, is so stunning, she’s been likened to Liz Taylor. The Lebanese poet Said Akl was so struck by her beauty, he wrote a poem for her.
She’s tight with Julian Assange
Alamuddin works as a human rights lawyer for firm Doughty Street Chambers, and one of her most high-profile clients is WikiLeaks founder Assange. She’s defending him in his extradition case with Sweden.
She was born in Beirut
The family left the war-torn city when Amal was a child and settled in Buckinghamshire, England. Amal’s father, Ramzi, later returned to Beirut, working as a business professor at the American University of Beirut.
She’s got New York connections
Alamuddin graduated from NYU School of Law and worked as a clerk for now-Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which includes New York.
Alamuddin also worked for three years at Sullivan & Cromwell, a Broad Street firm.
She’s been to the White House
Clooney took her to a private screening of his film “Monuments Men” in February. Despite Clooney’s publicist saying at the time that his relationship with Alamuddin amounted to “one dinner with George and four others,” things must have been serious.
Clooney’s parents also attended the screening.