Actors Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor have called it quits after 17 years of marriage.
The shock split was reported on Friday, with the pair announcing the news in a joint statement.
'With
tremendous love and respect for each other, and the 18 years we spent
together as a couple, we have made the decision to separate,' Stiller
and Taylor told
ET.
Our priority will continue to be raising
our children as devoted parents and the closest of friends. We kindly
ask that the media respect our privacy at this time.'
Ben, 51 and Christine, 45, first met on the set of Fox TV pilot Heat Vision and Jack in 1999.
They
married in 2000 at an oceanfront ceremony in Kauai, Hawaii and share
two children, daughter Ella Olivia, 15 and son Quinlin Dempsey, 12.
'When
I met her, I pretty much thought, "That's the person,"' Ben told ET in a
2007 interview. 'It was like, "Wow, this is a great person. I love
her."'
Over the years the couple
starred in several comedies together, including Zoolander, Zoolander 2,
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Tropic Thunder and Arrested
Development.
In October last year, Ben revealed he had
privately endured a secret health battle after being diagnosed with
prostate cancer in 2014.
The Zoolander
actor admitted he was taken aback when doctors detected the
life-threatening disease because it came 'out of the blue'.
Speaking on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show in October, he said: 'It came out of the blue for me. I had no idea.
'At
first, I didn't know what was going to happen. I was scared. It just
stopped everything in your life because you can't plan for a movie
because you don't know what's going to happen.
'As
I learned more about my disease (one of the key learnings is not to
Google 'people who died of prostate cancer' immediately after being
diagnosed with prostate cancer), I was able to wrap my head around the
fact that I was incredibly fortunate,' he wrote in a blog post.
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