George Clooney has said his wife is ‘homely’. Was that really wise?

Of all the words actor George Clooney could have chosen to describe his showstopper wife, this one is unfortunate. Does he know what it means?

George and Amal Clooney, pictured in December 2023, have been married since September 2014. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

Well, that does it. Thank heavens I’m not married to George Clooney. Here I’ve been, wasting my life wishing it were otherwise, but now it turns out he’s an idiot. Relief is coursing through me that I never met him at the altar and said I do, or indeed met him at all. Why? Because Clooney has described his wife, Amal, as “homely”.

Promoting his latest film on morning TV, he waxed lyrical to the host Lorraine Kelly about his homely wife, and I choked on my tea. Homely? What does George think it means? Has he really got to the age of 62 without realising that, in American English, homely means plain as a pikestaff?

That meaning has long since crossed the Atlantic, coexisting with, maybe even supplanting, our use of the word “homely” to mean simple, cosy, warm.

My print version of the Collins English Dictionary goes further, saying that in America it means “ugly”. For context, George’s full quote is “she is a force of nature and so homely”.

As Amal may have pointed out as she chased him round the kitchen with a frying pan, context doesn’t make it any better. The man’s called his wife a munter on national TV. Duh.

Amal with husband George Clooney at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Picture: Getty Images

Amal and Clooney in New York City in 2019.

The couple in 2021, posing on the red carpet for the UK premiere of The Temple Bar. Picture: AFP

Elisabetta Canalis and George Clooney attend the Giorgio Armani Spring/Summer 2011 fashion show. Picture: Venturelli/WireImage

To recap, Amal Clooney is a showstopper. She was a showstopper when he met her in 2013, a stunningly beautiful Oxford-educated human rights lawyer.

“I knew fairly quickly that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Amal,” he said later, and I note that he did not add “even though she’s a munter”.

She was a showstopper when they got married in Venice the year after, where Amal had more wardrobe changes, all of them fabulous, than Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She’s such a showstopper now, aged 45 and the mother of his six-year-old twins, that George joked to Lorraine that he gets cropped out of red-carpet photos.

The irony is, he’s not wrong. He does. Who would want to look at George when you could look at his oh-so-homely wife?

What makes it more bizarre is that George has form with the H word, but evidently no one has ever corrected him. Before he got married, he went out with an Italian actor called Elisabetta Canalis. He described her as homely too. Look her up, see if “plain as a pikestaff” are the words you would use. I’m guessing not.

George also told Lorraine that the opening section of his film, The Boys in the Boat, is shot on a stretch of the Thames where he and Amal walk every morning. Careful, George, she might push you in.

The Times