Inside Star Wars Creator’s Marriage to Mellody Hobson

George Lucas is marking a milestone birthday.

The enduring filmmaker behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones turned 80 on Might 14. Whereas Lucas doesn’t steadily work within the movie business anymore (he final obtained an govt producer credit score on 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Future and has not directed a film since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith), he’s spending high quality time together with his spouse of practically 11 years, Mellody Hobson.

Hobson is the president and co-CEO of Chicago-based funding agency Ariel Investments, and he or she has additionally labored as Starbucks’s chairperson of its board of administrators since March 2021 and beforehand was the chairperson of DreamWorks Animation.

Lucas and Hobson met at a enterprise convention in 2005 and started relationship a while after their preliminary assembly, in accordance with a 2015 Self-importance Honest profile on Hobson. After relationship for a number of years, the pair introduced their engagement in January 2013 and later married in June 2013 at a star-studded ceremony at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California.

Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey have been among the many friends at that wedding ceremony, PEOPLE reported on the time.

The couple held a second celebration every week later in Hobson’s hometown Chicago, which Robin Williams, Mark Hamill, Al Roker and Gayle King attended and Prince carried out at, as The Hollywood Reporter reported on the time.

Lucas and Hobson’s marriage got here months after Lucas offered Lucasfilm — the film studio he based and made the primary six Star Wars films with — to the Walt Disney Firm for $4.05 billion. The sale successfully ended his energetic work with the Star Wars franchise since he created the collection with 1977’s A New Hope.

“We’ve got the identical values. Star Wars was written for 12-year-old boys to show them proper and fallacious.” Hobson advised Self-importance Honest of the couple’s relationship in 2015. “By values, I imply what’s proper and what society expects of us.”

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Only a few months after their marriage, Lucas and Hobson welcomed their daughter Everest through surrogate in August 2013. As well as to Everest, 10, Lucas additionally shares daughter Amanda Lucas, 42, together with his ex-wife Marcia Lou Griffin; after their 1983 divorce, he additionally adopted daughter Katie, 36, and son Jett, 31, as a single guardian.

Lucas stays semi-retired from filmmaking after promoting Lucasfilm in 2012. He stays credited as an govt producer on all issues Star Wars. J.J. Abrams, who directed 2015 entry The Drive Awakens and 2019’s trilogy-capping The Rise of Skywalker, mentioned in a 2019 interview with IGN that he and his crew “met with George Lucas earlier than writing the script” to the 2019 sequel.

As for the legendary filmmaker and Hobson, they continue to be dedicated to charitable work. In 2010, the pair signed The Giving Pledge, which was created by Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates and Invoice Gates as an invite for billionaires “to publicly commit to present the vast majority of their wealth to philanthropy both throughout their lifetimes or of their wills.”

“My pledge is to the method. So long as I’ve the sources at my disposal, I’ll search to boost the bar for future generations of scholars of all ages,” Lucas wrote in his 2010 pledge letter.

In 2021, Lucas and Hobson donated cash to New York College to discovered the Martin Scorsese Institute of International Cinematic Arts. The varsity described Lucas and Hobson’s present in a launch on the time as “the most important within the college’s historical past.”