Robert Downey Jr celebrates 18 years of marriage with his wife: ‘Love still in bloom’

‘18 years, love still in bloom!’

Robert Downey Jr has celebrated his 18th wedding anniversary with his wife Susan Downey.

The Iron Man star posted two photos on Instagram commemorating their anniversary on Sunday. The first was a photo from their wedding day in 2005, and the other was a photo recreating it. In each of the photos, Downey is seen nuzzling his wife’s cheek and Susan is smiling and holding a bouquet of flowers. In the modern-day iteration, she’s holding sunflowers and Downey is wearing a T-shirt, but the couple looks just as happy with each other as the day they both said ‘I do.’

“18 years, love still in bloom!!” Downey wrote in his Instagram caption.

Many of their famous friends took to the comments section to extend their congratulations to the longtime couple, including some of Downey’s Avengers co-stars. “These are the best photos Robert! Love you both !!!!” Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner wrote, while Paul Bettany - who played Vision in the franchise - said: “Lots of love dearhearts.”

Will & Grace actor Sean Hayes commented on behalf of him and his husband: “THE best. Scotty and I love you both as much as you love each other. Is that weird?”

Downey and Susan share a production company, Team Downey, and two children together: daughter Avri, eight, and son Exton, 11. The actor also shares a son, Indio, 29, with his first wife Deborah Falconer.

The couple met on the set of the 2003 film Gothika, in which he starred opposite Halle Berry and Penélope Cruz. Silver Pictures was the production company producing the film, and Susan - then Susan Levin - was one of their producers. She’d been a producer with the company since 1999, working on movies like Thir13en, Ghosts and Swordfish. In a 2014 rare joint interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Susan told the outlet that initially she wasn’t sure about dating one of the stars of a movie she was working on partially because he marched to the beat of his own drum.

At the time, the actor said his “exit strategy” from years of drug abuse was “in the process,” according to the outlet.

“We were up in Montreal prepping for Gothika, and we had lunch with the director and Halle Berry,” Susan recalled of the first time she encountered Downey. “Everybody else ordered Japanese, but Robert told us how oatmeal was the ‘superfood.’ He brought his own packets of oatmeal to have at lunch. And he had this box of various herbs and stuff. And then he started doing these yoga moves. I mean, he was interesting but weird.”

Eventually, she gave in and after three months of dating, the Oppenheimer actor proposed to Susan, but she insisted on a long engagement and told him that if he wanted to be with her, he would have to give up drugs completely. Susan, who had a radically different upbringing in suburban Chicago as opposed to Downey’s childhood mired in Hollywood excess, told the outlet that addiction was “foreign” to her. When she first began to date the actor, she said she was “incredibly ignorant of the hold it had on people”.

They married two years later, in 2005, and went on to become what director Guy Ritchie dubbed the most “perfectly symbiotic” marriage in Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter.