Coyote Mommi Maria Bello Is Engayged to Superstar Chef Girlfriend Dominique Crenn

Actress Maria Bello, best known to Autostraddle readers for playing Coyote Mommi Lil Lovell in the 2000 lesbian cinematic masterpiece Coyote Ugly, showed up at Elton John’s Oscar party last night with longtime girlfriend Dominique Crenn in tow and announced that they were no longer able to fight the moonlight and got engaged in Paris over the holidays. The couple said they’d been out and about and publicly engaged at foodie events around the world, but this was their big Hollywood debut of the announcement. Bello, you’ll remember, came in a New York Times Modern Love column in 2013. Last night, she told E! News that she finally felt grown up enough to be married.

Crenn is an Iron Chef, a star on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, and the only woman chef to earn three Michelin stars, which she did for her San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn. She also one time told a man in an audience at a panel who asked her if she felt like she’d missed out on the “very important role” of being a mother to focus on her career that she was, in fact, a mother of two and that, in her opinion, he should stay home and keep his kids so his wife could go out and be a bad ass woman. And Bello, of course, is known for more than her turn in the queer coming of age tale Coyote Ugly. She was nominated for Golden Globes for The Cooler in 2003 and A History of Violence in 2005 and has starred in dozens of other films and TV series.

Congratulations and best wishes to the happy couple!

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. OK she is very good in Coyote Ugly but for she first stole my heart in Duets, a movie literally no one but me saw, where she plays a hardened member of the for-profit karaoke (??) circuit (?????)

  2. Maybe love isn’t a lie… this week anyway.
    [Praise Merciful Inana]
    I have a shame ridden confession to make, AND I might need to go on Lez-Bro probation…

    A [now retired] moto-cross racer who I have followed the career of since she was sixteen, is queer, out [not flag-waving out, but out], and engaged to her partner OF FOUR YEARS. HOW DID I MISS THAT MEMO‽‽‽‽

    I… am so disappointed in myself. If you simply MUST exile me… I understand. [Ugly-cries]

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