The radio and movie star Don Ameche was married for 64 years but it was a troubled union. He did not attend his wife Honore Prendergast’s funeral when she died in 1986, as noted in her obituary:
His son, Don Jr., said his father is currently working on a film with Geraldine Page and Shelly Winters in New Jersey and will not be able to attend the funeral services.
The couple, who had met in Dubuque in the 1930s after he attended Columbia College in that Iowa city, lived apart for the last 20 years of her life. Both were members of the Catholic church, whose teachings include the idea that getting a divorce and marrying someone else puts one in a state of “public and permanent adultery.”