Cassian Vale

Vale of Glamour: Inside the Beautiful, Complicated World of Gabriel and Celeste Vale
By Alena Croix | Feature | Vanity West, April Issue

“We were never chasing the same dream,” says Gabriel Vale, tipping back in his Eames chair. “We just happened to want to arrive at the same myth.”

There’s no mistaking the myth of Gabriel and Celeste Vale. He, the brooding former action hero turned arthouse director, whose films simmer with repressed rage and male fragility. She, the ethereal model with a name like a perfume and the posture of fallen nobility.
Together, they are one of Hollywood’s most enduring enigmas — married for nearly three decades, still photographed at Cannes holding hands (always the right distance apart), still murmured about in the velvet hallways of European villas and Los Angeles fundraisers.

Their Bel Air home is all soft light and sharp edges. The interview takes place in “the reading salon” — Celeste’s phrase, not mine — where she sits like a painting in motion, all silk and spine. She greets me with her signature smile: intimate, unreadable.

“People always want to know why we stayed married,” she says, brushing back a strand of her wheat-gold hair. “But they never ask why we married in the first place. That was the harder choice.”

She was born Celeste Sterling-Ashcroft, descended from a French line with a ruined estate somewhere outside Lyon. Raised in Northern California interrupted twice by boarding schools in Europe, she broke into modeling at sixteen. Gabriel Valentin, on the other hand, grew up working class. He moved to Hollywood to chase the same dream everyone does, only he made it. He rose to fame in the 90s as a rugged, sharp-jawed action star — the face of gritty franchises like Shadow Protocol and Steel Justice. His first film as a director, Before the Snow Falls, was booed at Venice and then quietly declared a masterpiece three years later.

They met, predictably, at a gala. The story changes depending on who tells it — sometimes it was Paris, sometimes it was Sundance. Either way, they married fast. “It was war, immediately,” Gabriel says, not unkindly. “A very elegant war.”

Theirs is a marriage that has endured cheating rumors, public silence, and one very expensive-looking open letter in The New Yorker (Celeste: “Art should not be confused with confession”). They’ve raised one son, Cassian, a former child model who has recently reemerged as an actor with a steadily simmering career — not to mention a few headlines of his own.

When asked about Cassian’s early roles, Gabriel smirks: “He was luminous. In a soft-focus kind of way. Celeste made sure of that. I just kept the cameras out of his bedroom.” Celeste, for her part, defends her son’s early visibility as “a kind of necessary exposure therapy” without any self reflection on the prices paid by such exposure. “Cassian was always beautiful,” she adds. “I thought, better he learn early what the world does to beautiful things.”

They say they don’t read the gossip. “But we do read the footnotes,” Gabriel adds.

There’s a moment — rare and brief — where she places her hand lightly on his.

They’re still together. Still talking in riddles. Still impossible to look away from.