One of James Cameron's four ex-wives, actress Linda Hamilton, is opening up about their troubled marriage--which failed, she said, because Cameron's only committed relationship is to his work.
"Titanic was the mistress he left me for," Hamilton told UK's Daily Sun. "He was the kind of man who really would rather be at work with the mistress than at home with the wife. That was hard to come to terms with."
Hamilton, now 53, started dating Cameron in the early 1990s when he directed her in the first two 'Terminator' films. They had a daughter in 1993. While filming 'Titanic' in 1997, Cameron took up with Suzy Amis, who had a small part in the movie. He came back to Hamilton, married her and left her eight months later for Amis.
Cameron and Amis are still married, but Hamilton is willing to bet he will leave her.
"The woman he can't get is always his dream girl," she said in an apparent interview with UK's Daily Mail. "Work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know."
Here are a few of the reasons it is difficult to be married to Cameron, according to Hamilton:
- When filming 'Terminator' Hamilton asked Cameron to see her playback and he refused. She got mad and he apologized and plied her with a bottle of champagne. "Then he told the crew that he'd made me work up that rage to get a better performance from me. Bull! So the apology didn't mean a thing. I thought: 'You creep!'"
- Cameron shouts 'Take a number, take a number,' when people want to talk to him.
- He would put his own family up in a hotel when they came to visit.
- When they were fighting Cameron would repeatedly move out and back in have his assistant move his home gym with him. "It got to the stage where I said: 'Let me at least keep your gym because this is really getting expensive.'"
- "His parenting techniques: Jim would go away for three years to do a movie then come back and treat her like a one-year-old and think she was going to be stolen in the playground."
- His mantra: "He used to say to me: 'Anybody can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I'm going for that.'"