The Most Iconic Celebrity Couples Of The 1970s, Ranked

When it comes to celebrity couples, one can never tell just how long a celebrity pairing is going to last. In the long run, though, it's not necessarily the longevity of a relationship that matters to pop culture, it's how famous the pairing is. The '70s was a decidedly colorful decade, and the same can be said of the couples that proliferated during it. In some cases, the power of these pairings was so substantial that they're still remembered 50+ years after coming to a conclusion. Indeed, sometimes it only takes a single photo op to turn a twosome into a couple for the ages, no matter how their relationship ultimately turned out to be. Here are the 10 most iconic couples of the '70s.

When one of the most famous football players in America starts going out with one of the most beautiful women in the world, not only are sparks going to fly, but tabloids are going to pay very close attention. Such was the case when Joe Namath and Raquel Welch were initially spotted out on the town. It also didn't hurt that their first time being spotted together was at 1972 Academy Awards. 

According to Tim Secor in Mark Kriegel's book "Namath: A Biography," the date had been arranged by MGM Studios in an effort to help promote Welch's then-upcoming new film, "Kansas City Bomber," in which she starred as a roller derby star. But beyond this high-profile outing together, exactly how much of a relationship did the twosome actually have? That's up for debate.

In Welch's memoir, "Beyond the Cleavage," she makes a point of saying, "I'm not the kiss-and-tell kind, but to save you racking your brain over which of my leading men I spent personal time with, I'll narrow it down for you. Let's see if you can guess which ones made me weak in the knees." At that point, she lists 18 names — including Namath — and then proceeds to discuss specifics about a few of the others. She doesn't says anything else about Namath, which would seem to suggest that he wasn't one of the ones she fell head over heels for. Even if their "personal time" wasn't the fieriest, it was enough for photos from the '72 awards show to be among the key shots used to remember Welch after her heartbreaking death in 2023. That's pretty darned iconic.

When one of the "it" girls of the 1970s, Ali MacGraw, was offered a role in the 1972 film "The Getaway," she was a star on the rise, thanks to the one-two punch of 1969's "Goodbye, Columbus" and 1970's "Love Story." She was also very much married to film producer Robert Evans, but that wasn't enough to shield her the charisma of her co-star, Steve McQueen.

"I knew I was going to get in some serious trouble with Steve," MacGraw wrote in her 1991 memoir, "Moving Pictures: An Autobiography" (via Vanity Fair). "I was obsessed with Steve from the moment he stepped into my world," she continued. "There was never enough air for me to breathe to change that feeling. ... For the next three months of filming I walked the nasty razor's edge between occasional moments of sanity and remorse on the one side and, on the other, feverish excitement." 

Unsurprisingly, MacGraw and Evans divorced on the heels of her affair, and she and McQueen married in July 1973, just over a month after her divorce from Evans was finalized. Their relationship, however, was not one destined to last for the long haul. McQueen was, in MacGraw's words, "a combination of incredible darkness and anger and mystery and almost child-like vulnerability. His mood swings were incredible." He was also prone to having affairs, which is one of the reasons – along with an increasing absence of sobriety – that the McQueen-MacGraw marriage ultimately only lasted for five years, with the couple divorcing in 1978. "He was incredibly attractive most of the time but there was also danger, there was bad boy there," she told People in 2018. "I wish we had both grown old sober."

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton can quite credibly be considered one of the most iconic couples of the '60s. Burton was, after all, the only husband Taylor married twice. The couple first divorced in 1974 after 10 years of marriage. They remarried about a year later, only to get divorced less than a year after that. And, well, that's certainly iconic couple behavior!

The twosome first encountered each other at a Hollywood party in 1953, with Burton writing in his diary of the moment, "A girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud." It would be nearly a decade before they crossed paths again, at which point they were co-stars in the 1962 film "Cleopatra," and all it took was their first love scene together to kick off the chemistry that would transform them into a couple — despite both of them already being married. Their relationship was infamous for its volatility, which is what ultimately led to their divorce. However, it was strong enough that when Taylor thought she might have lung cancer, she decided that she wanted to remarry Burton, which is what she did (via BBC). The second marriage ended when Burton began drinking again, but the twosome remained close until his death in 1984.

"In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time," Taylor told Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, the authors of "Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century" (via Vanity Fair). "From those first moments in Rome, we were always madly and powerfully in love."

It was a relationship that America had literally never seen before: the widow of a U.S. president getting remarried in the wake of her husband's extremely public death. On top of that, it was the marriage of one of the most famous women in the U.S. to one of the richest men in the world. The sheer number of headlines spawned by the nuptials of Jackie Kennedy and her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, on the latter's private island of Skorpios on October 20, 1968 is darned near incalculable. That said, the wedding was one done under much secrecy, to the point where even Jackie's mother didn't know about it until the day before, so the headlines didn't come out until after the vows were exchanged.

For as much as the couple was in the headlines, the relationship between them was reportedly less about romance and more about money. Jackie even endured Aristotle's lengthy affair with opera singer Maria Callas, but they were still a couple whose photographs together regularly appeared in publications around the world. It was also an expensive relationship for Onassis, who was based in Greece because of his businesses, with Jackie spending much of her time – and his money – in New York, leading him to consider divorce.

The divorce never happened, however. Onassis died in 1977 from bronchial pneumonia caused by myasthenia gravis. "Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows," Jackie said in a statement after her husband's death (via History News Network). She continued, "We lived through many beautiful experiences together ... for which I will be eternally grateful."

To say that Warren Beatty spent the majority of his acting career with a reputation as a Hollywood lothario would be an understatement. In 1991, when it appeared that he was on the cusp of settling down with Annette Bening (as he ultimately did), EW recapped his past relationships. The one that lasted the longest in his pre-marriage days was with actor Julie Christie. Beatty and Christie were a couple from the late '60s through 1973, and even after they began seeing other people, they continued to star in films together, including "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Shampoo," and "Heaven Can Wait."

"[Warren] gave me a political perspective, which I am very grateful for," Christie recalled in a 2007 interview with The Guardian. "I loved the way, say, that he would go to baseball matches and stand up in the interval and talk about getting rid of guns. He would be this little tiny figure in this big baseball stadium, and I would be looking down at him, I thought he was wonderfully courageous for doing that."

Beatty, who dedicated his 1981 film "Reds" to Christie, described his relationship with Christie as "very respectful," telling People in 2016, "When she and her husband come to Los Angeles, they stay in our guest house. We're very close and she's a remarkable person."

When Priscilla Beaulieu first met Elvis Presley, he was 24 and stationed in West Germany, and she was all of 14 years old, living with her mother and stepfather, a U.S. Air Force officer who was stationed there as well. It would be seven-and-a-half years before the twosome got around to tying the knot, but by then she'd been living at Graceland for several years. Elvis And Priscilla's relationship became legally official on May 1, 1967 at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas.

The couple's daughter, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, precisely nine months after the wedding. Elvis was so concerned about how fatherhood would affect his career that he asked for a trial separation when Priscilla was seven months pregnant, but he soon rescinded that request. That said, their relationship remained contentious after Lisa Marie's birth. "He had never been able to make love to a woman who'd had a child," Priscilla wrote in her memoir, "Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis." "He had put his mother on a pedestal, and after Lisa was born, he put me on one, too. It is impossible to make love on a pedestal."

Finally, in 1972, Priscilla realized that the marriage wasn't sustainable. "He wasn't faithful, not that he had someone special, but when you're in the entertainment business there is always that and I tried to turn my back to that, but I just didn't want to share him," she said in a 2018 interview with Sunday Night. "Simple as that." However, she added, "We never lost our friendship and our care for each other."

In the '60s, the Rolling Stones were second only to the Beatles in terms of the biggest band to emerge from the U.K. during the so-called "British Invasion." Not unlike the Beatles, whenever one of the members of the Stones started dating someone new, let alone married someone, it was huge news. As such, one doesn't actually need to have been around at the time to imagine the flurry of headlines that occurred when Mick Jagger and Blanca Pérez-Mora Macías tied the knot on May 12, 1971.

Dressed in a Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit rather than a proper wedding gown, Bianca was pregnant with the couple's daughter, Jade, at the time of their nuptials. The Jaggers made the scene together whenever the opportunity presented itself, although his touring schedule with the Stones meant that Bianca made plenty of solo appearances as well, including regular visits to Studio 54 and the Met Gala in New York City. The couple ultimately split in 1978, when Bianca filed for divorce on the grounds of Mick's affair with Jerry Hall.

"I was joking with [Rod Stewart's ex-wife] Alana Stewart the other day about writing a cheek-in-tongue book on How to Survive Marriage and Divorce to a Rock 'n' Roll Star," Bianca told Vanity Fair in 1986. "We were saying what are the qualities required: submission. It's probably the most male-chauvinistic-oriented society. A rock star is the worst husband a woman could have."

The relationship between Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood is one that spanned the decades, albeit inconsistently. The couple was married on December 28, 1957, only to announce their separation in June 1961 and finalize their divorce in April 1962. By January 1972, the twosome started dating again, and on July 16, 1972 they married again. In an interview with Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show," Wood called the period apart their "zeitensprung," which literally translates as "leap in time."

By the time Wagner and Wood remarried, Wood had effectively stepped away from her acting career, having not made a film since 1969's "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." That changed once she and Wagner were reunited as husband and wife. During the course of the '70s and into the early '80s, Wagner and Wood usually appeared to be happier than ever, working together in a few TV projects (1973's "The Affair" and the 1976 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), and viewers of Wagner's TV series got a kick out of seeing Wood pop up in one-off cameos in the final season of "Switch" and the pilot episode of "Hart to Hart." 

Alas, their second marriage came to an infamously abrupt conclusion in November 1981 when, during the filming of the motion picture "Brainstorm," Wood drowned under circumstances which have remained mysterious enough to keep people asking questions to this day. For his part, Wagner has continued to honor his late wife's memory. On July 20, 2025, he posted a photo of himself with Wood on Instagram with the caption, "Happy Heavenly 87th Birthday, Nat."

It's inarguable that Sally Field and Burt Reynolds were one of the most famous couples of the late '70s and early '80s, thanks to their onscreen chemistry as Frog and the Bandit in "Smokey and the Bandit" extending into their personal lives. He was already one of the biggest sex symbols of the decade, and she was just starting to come into her own as a film actor after spending the first part of her career on such TV series as "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun." Once they teamed up on the silver screen, the sparks flew, and moviegoers flew into theater seats to see them together.

The couple's relationship technically lasted for five years, although according to Field, they were on-again, off-again for two of them. As Field's career started to take off in 1980, thanks to her Best Actress Oscar for playing the titular role in "Norma Rae," Reynolds' jealousy was such that he refused to attend the Academy Awards with her.

In a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair, Reynolds called Field "the love of my life," revealing that he missed her terribly and adding, "I don't know why I was so stupid. Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person, and then you do everything you can to screw it up." Several years after his death, Field, who hadn't been in touch with Reynolds for 30 years at the time of his passing, dismissed his description of her. "He had somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn't," she told Variety in 2022. "He just wanted to have the thing he didn't have. I just didn't want to deal with that."

She was one of "Charlie's Angels." He was "The Six Million Dollar Man." Together, they were the very definition of a Hollywood power couple. There's no question that Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors were the pop culture couple of the '70s.

Majors' publicist introduced him to Fawcett, which led to a coffee date, which turned into a relationship that lasted for more than a decade. Unfortunately, it was also one that was going on while both of them were two of the biggest stars in the world as well as full-time working actors. "There was a year or so when I think I saw her two weeks in one year," Majors told People in 2019. "It's very difficult with careers like that. This business is tough. Working 14 hours a day, both of you, and the days went by."

The couple initially separated in 1979, with Fawcett making the announcement in the midst of press for her then-upcoming film "Sunburn," telling People, "I don't know if we will ever get back together again, and that scares me." Despite their eventual divorce in 1982, the pair remained on good terms, as best exemplified in Fawcett's appearance in the pilot episode of "The Fall Guy," which finds Majors saying, "Well, I guess I'd better let you go," after which Fawcett tells him, "You be careful." He replies, "You, too," and kisses her hand before turning to leave. 

This ranking of the most iconic couples of the '70s is subjective. However, each was chosen after a number of search inquiries regarding popular celebrity couples over the 1970s. The names included in this list were among the ones that recurred in search results and articles with considerable frequency.