Billy Joel and ex-wife Christie Brinkley have remained on good terms in the years after their divorce.
The former couple tied the knot in March 1985, welcoming daughter Alexa that December. After nearly 10 years of marriage, Joel and Brinkley divorced in August 1994. (Joel also shares daughters Della and Remy with his fourth wife, Alexis Roderick. Brinkley shares son Jack with Richard Taubman and daughter Sailor with Peter Cook.)
Despite their split, the musician and the former model have kept an amicable relationship — and they’ll even cohost Christmas carol singalongs together during the holiday season.
“Many years after our divorce, Billy would still come to my house for the Christmas singalong and play the piano, and all our friends would come over and sing Christmas carols,” Brinkley told Social Life magazine in 2019. “Singalongs are one of my favorite things to do. And you know that’s what makes everybody happy.”
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Keep scrolling for a look back at Joel and Brinkley’s relationship timeline:
Early 1983
While vacationing in St. Barts, Joel and Brinkley crossed paths at an airport.
“I recognized her immediately,” Joel later told Rolling Stone. “She was more beautiful than she was in her pictures — [I thought], ‘Oh, wow, that’s Christie Brinkley. I wonder if she knows who I am.’ So I did what I call an album cover — I tried to look like me on an album cover. I gave it every angle I could. She didn’t recognize me from a hole in the wall.”
Later, they bumped into each other at a bar where Joel attempted to impress her with his music.
“The music was the key to the introduction,” he recalled. “She sat down and started singing, too.”
September 1983
Joel was initially inspired by then-girlfriend Elle Macpherson to write the song that became “Uptown Girl,” which he originally called “Uptown Girls.” When he sparked his romance with Brinkley — who starred in the “Uptown Girl” music video — Joel changed his vision.
“Rather than it [being] about all these different girls, she became the Uptown Girl. I started writing it about one person,” he told Howard Stern in 2010, confirming Brinkley was his inspiration.
March 1985
The then-couple tied the knot on a yacht in New York Harbor before settling down on Long Island.
December 1985
The twosome welcomed daughter Alexa.
1989
Moving away from the city didn’t keep the couple out of the spotlight.
“People think that because you do a job that’s public, you become public property. When you start to get famous, you need a backyard, a place where you can get away from it all,” Brinkley told Sports Illustrated. “I told [Billy] one day that the second-worst thing I could think of would be to be famous and poor because then you couldn’t escape to some island.”
1994
News broke in April 1994 that the pair split after nine years of marriage, with reports that they’d been separated since the previous Thanksgiving. Their divorce was finalized in August 1994.
2001
While it’s unclear what exactly prompted the pair’s divorce — rumors have ranged from Brinkley’s wish to relocate to California to her irritations with Joel’s extensive touring commitments — Brinkley alluded to another potential factor.
“Just because people can express themselves through their art doesn’t mean they are great communicators in person,” she said in 2001, according to Entertainment Weekly.
2011
Joel and Alexa attended Brinkley’s premiere of Broadway’s Chicago at the Ambassador Theatre in NYC.
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2014
A decade after their divorce, Brinkley insisted there was no bad blood between her and Joel. “I’ve always adored him. I just couldn’t live with him anymore,” Brinkley told The New Yorker.
2022
Alexa gushed over her parents in a sweet social media tribute. “They’ll never know you like I do, Mom and Pop,” she wrote, sharing a photo of her famous parents. “You will always be, first and foremost, the true loves of my life. Just seeing you in the same room together every once in awhile [sic] makes my heart whole again, if only for a fleeting moment. You’ve gone above and beyond the highest stars and back to give me galaxies of everything, and then some. I remain eternally indebted to you both… forevermore.”
April 2024
Brinkley was spotted dancing to “Uptown Girl” in the crowd at one of Joel’s Madison Square Garden concerts in New York City.
A fan captured the moment in a TikTok video, writing, “40 years later and your ex man is still grinning at you like that while he sings the song he wrote about how rich and hot you are?”
