Former Melrose Place star Courtney Thorne-Smith has reportedly filed for divorce from her husband, Roger Fishman, after 18 years of marriage.
According to court documents acquired by TMZ, Thorne-Smith, 57, revealed that she and Fishman, 66, separated in September 2021 but are now officially headed for divorce. The reason provided for their split was cited as “irreconcilable differences.”
The couple tied the knot on New Year’s Day in 2007 and had a son named Jacob Emerson Fishman in January 2008. In the divorce filing, Thorne-Smith expressed her wish for joint legal and physical custody of their 17-year-old son and opted out of receiving spousal support.
Us Weekly has reached out to Thorne-Smith for comment.
Thorne-Smith’s current marriage to Fishman was her second marriage. She was previously married to geneticist Andrew Conrad in June 2000, but their relationship came to an end just six months later in January 2001.
Thorne-Smith dated her Melrose Place costar – and onscreen love interest – Andrew Shue at the height of the Fox primetime soap’s success in the 1990s.
The actress spoke exclusively to Us Weekly in July 2024 about reliving her on and offscreen romance with Shue while rewatching Melrose Place for her “Still the Place” podcast, which she hosts with costars Laura Leighton and Daphne Zuniga.
“It was so sweet watching the pilot and, at first, [my character] Alison was so rude to Billy [Shue] and I’m thinking, “Can you not see him? What are you blind?’ I must have been to not be nice to him,” Thorne-Smith admitted to Us. “He’s so charming, and I’m charmed by him. [When watching the episodes,] I get to remember falling in love with him at that time. Because he and I dated [and] it was too sweet to watch and go, ‘Oh my God, I remember me, Courtney, watching Andrew do that as my character is watching him.’”
Shue and Thorne-Smith reunited for an August 2024 episode of “Still the Place,” where they discussed how their real-life breakup impacted their work. Shue remembered that there was a “little bit of time” where it was “rough” on set, yet Thorne-Smith insisted that the whole ordeal was “shockingly not weird.”
“Do you remember me having to talk with you because the characters were still dating and you and I weren’t dating?” she asked Shue. “We’d been broken up for two months and then we had to kiss. You remember me saying, ‘Okay, now we’re professionals, no tongue?’”
She went on, “We were dating before we were dating on the show, then we were dating on the show after we broke up in real life. But you and I segued into friendship really well. I don’t remember a lot of tension.”
Shue agreed with Thorne-Smith’s recollection of their split, though he stressed how important their romance was during a “very intense time.”
“The show got a lot of attention. I know you had already been fairly well known, but we were dealing with a lot of, we’ll call it Fox celebrity craziness,” he joked. “I remember just feeling safe knowing we were together guiding each other through it.”
Shue’s current relationship with Marilee Fiebig started under very unusual circumstances, after their previous partners, Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, started dating each other while they were GMA3 coanchors.
Robach has maintained that her marriage to Shue was over by the time she started seeing Holmes and she subsequently filed for divorce in December 2022. Holmes filed for divorce from Fiebig that same month. Robach and Holmes were dropped from GMA3 in January 2023 and now host the “Amy & T.J.” podcast.
