Octogenarian billionaire marries young model for love
There will be those who wonder what first attracted 24-year-old playboy model Cathy Schmitz, to 81-year old construction boss and billionaire Richard Lugner. However, they explained before their extravagant wedding that 'Love knows no age'.
Lugner is no stranger to the aisle: Schmitz will be his fifth wife. However, this time the couple chose to do things in impressive opulence at their Vienna wedding. The bride arrived in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing a jewelled dress with a chiffon skirt (which dramatically transformed from white to purple at the start of the ceremony). Crowds came to watch the unusual couple release a pair of doves from an open-topped carriage after they were married.
He's also no stranger to appearing in public with attractive women a fraction if his age. He famously pays high-profile celebrities to attend the annual opening of the Vienna Opera House with him. Previous guests have included Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton. However, as the Daily Mail reported, his choice of Kim Kardashian backfired this year, as she insisted on filming at the event, which he found annoying.
According to the Mirror, Schmitz said in an interview before the ceremony: "We did not intend to fall in love. It just happened. Love knows no age." It's a wonderful romantic ideal, and cynicism aside, who would wish anything but the best for the couple?
Does age matter?
There are plenty of very happy celebrity couples with fairly large age differences, who don't notice their age at all. Director Sam Taylor-Wood, for example, is happily married to actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is 23 years younger than she is. Calista Flockhart and Harrison Ford, meanwhile, have been together for more than a decade, with no concern for the 22-year age gap; and Rod Stewart is said to have found his true match in model Penny Lancaster - 26 years his junior.
Perhaps the only difference that comes into play with a 57 year age gap is the prospect of what will happen if one of the couple was to die significantly before the other. Most famously when J. Howard Marshall II married Anna Nicole Smith, they were carried along on a wave of romance. However, when he died a year later, he left no provision for her in his will, which spawned law suits which have been rumbling on for more than 20 years. They weren't even halted by his wife's death seven years ago.
Perhaps what this story tells us is that age doesn't matter in relationships - as long as you consider the consequences. But what do you think?
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