Mary Steenburgen 'Would Sign Up for 100 More Lifetimes with' Ted Danson, Her Husband of 23 Years
After 23 years of marriage, Mary Steenburgen is more in love with husband Ted Danson than ever.
The Book Club star gushes about how great of a husband the Good Place actor is in PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive 2018 issue, on newsstands Friday, and about everything that makes him sexy.
“[Our love] just gets more profound and deeper as we go through the blessings and joys, but also the hurdles, of life together,” Steenburgen, 65, tells PEOPLE. “He is my partner in the deepest sense of the word in this life.”
Steenburgen and Danson, 70, married in October 1995 after first meeting on the 1993 set of Pontiac Moon — a time when Steenburgen says they had each gone through their fair share of ups and downs in life.
“We met when we were 40 and 45, and we had lived a bit,” she says. “We met at a time when both of us had stared down some demons within ourselves and that was lucky that we met then.”
The couple’s family includes Steenburgen’s children from her first marriage to Malcolm McDowell — Lilly, 37, and actor Charlie McDowell, 35 — and Danson’s two daughters from his previous marriage to Casey Coates — Kate, 38, and Alexis, 33.
“He is an amazing father, an amazing stepfather and an amazing grandfather,” she says. “We have been grandparents now for six years. We have two granddaughters, and they can’t stop climbing on him. They just adore him. They basically see him as a jungle gym. He is Teddy — that is their name for him, and they just adore him.”
Steenburgen says that their strong marriage and Danson’s loving nature is “really inspiring” to their kids and sets a great example.
“[This] is a marriage where the man in the marriage is secure in both his kindness and tenderness, but also in his strength,” she says. “I definitely feel that he is the result of almost like dreams I had when I was young about someone I would want to spend my life with, and I really cherish that and I think neither of us take each other for granted.”
To Steenburgen, it’s Danson’s small gestures which mean the most.
“He is just kind to me every single day,” she says. “If he has an early call, I try to get up while it’s still dark and make him coffee and send him off and he does the same for me. I think it’s those little kindnesses that completely make up our life that are so appreciated.”
“I could care less about things like Valentine’s Day because literally the appreciation for what I do for him and the way he nurtures me as a woman, as an artist, as an actor, as a songwriter and his celebration of who I am makes me free to fly and be who I am,” she continues. “And I hope I do that for him.”
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Among the other qualities Steenburgen says she loves about Danson are that he’s “a feminist,” he’s passionate about protecting the world’s oceans and that she misses him when he leaves the room — “I would literally sign up for 100 more lifetimes with him,” she says.
Plus, his good looks don’t hurt.
“I love the strong jawbone,” Steenburgen says.
