Meg Ryan Through the Years: Her Life in Photos (2024)

Meg Ryan has been an acting force ever since scoring her breakout role in 1981’s Rich and Famous.

While Ryan played a supporting role to Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen’s respective characters, she landed her big break eight years later when she portrayed leading lady Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally.

“[The] comedy of Sally is so behavioral. It’s not really so much talking. It’s doing,” Ryan recalled during the 30th anniversary screening of the movie at the TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night Gala in April 2019. “So it’s sort of really very logical. And it wasn’t hard.”

The production featured a now-iconic scene where Ryan’s Sally fakes an org*sm during lunch with Harry Burns (Billy Crystal). “Meg said, ‘Well, I’ll do it! I’ll just actually act it out. We don’t have to talk about it,’” director Rob Reiner said during the screening.

Following the film’s success — including a movie premiere that Princess Diana famously attended — Ryan continued making Us laugh and cry on the big screen.

In her personal life, Ryan married fellow actor Dennis Quaid in 1991 before ultimately splitting nine years later. Several years later, she also had a high-profile on-and-off romance with musician John Mellencamp.

Scroll below to see Ryan’s life in photos:

The Connecticut native was 18 years old when she appeared as 18-year-old Debby in Rich and Famous.

Ryan proved her rom-com leading lady status when she and Crystal made When Harry Met Sally, playing a pair of opposites who strike up an unlikely friendship when moving across the country.

Ryan first met Dennis Quaid while filming Interspace in 1987 before they reunited onscreen one year later in D.O.A. and they started dating. The pair wed on Valentine’s Day in 1991.

“[It was] my most successful relationship,” Quaid said on Megyn Kelly Today in July 2018. “When we met, you know, I was the big deal. And then my career [came to a halt]. … We’d go out on the streets of New York and it would be like, ‘Meg! Meg!’ And I have to admit it, I actually did feel like I disappeared. I didn’t think I was that small, but I was. It was a growth opportunity. I learned from that.”

The couple divorced in 2001.

Less than one year after Ryan and Quaid tied the knot, they welcomed their first child. Son Jack is also an actor. He’s appeared in the likes of The Boys, Oppenheimer, The Hunger Games and Plus One.

Ryan’s next blockbuster project was Sleepless in Seattle, in which she costarred with Tom Hanks and was directed by Nora Ephron.

Ryan continued her rom-com renaissance with You’ve Got Mail, where she reunited with Hanks and director Ephron.

“I really loved the script and wanted to work with Tom and Nora again,” she gushed to Entertainment Weekly in December 1998. “But people were starting to get the idea that all I could do was romantic comedies. I've done something like 30 movies and only seven have been romantic comedies. But I was getting locked into that. It was starting to get irritating.”

Ryan's rom-com heyday didn’t end with the millennium. In 2001, she starred alongside Hugh Jackman in the time-traveling romance Kate and Leopold. Ryan played Kate McKay, a modern-day businesswoman who was charmed by Jackman’s Duke of Albany when was transplanted in New York City after experiencing a ripple in time.

Ryan adopted her daughter, Daisy True, from China after signing up for the country’s adoption lottery. “I am convinced, completely convinced that there was nothing random about it,” the actress gushed to Redbook one year later in 2007. “She is the daughter I should have. I never felt like I was on a rescue mission or anything like that. I just really wanted a baby.”

Ryan added at the time: “I was on a mission to connect with somebody, and Daisy and I got to meet each other this way at this time. We are so compatible. And also having the experience of having had Jack and now to have Daisy in a different way — there’s no difference in the love you feel.”

While continuing to balance her career with motherhood, Ryan found love with John Mellencamp. The pair were first linked in 2011, nearly three years before they went their separate ways. Ryan and Mellencamp reconciled in 2016 and got engaged two years later.

“What’s great about now is that John and I are so free to have fun. Maybe that freedom is about being a million years old,” Ryan told The New York Times of their engagement. “But I sometimes think relationships are for aliens. Who does it? Who can do it? I don’t know how any of us ever do.”

Us Weekly exclusively confirmed in October 2019 that the duo had called off their engagement.

Ryan ultimately took a “10-year breather” from acting, which she later detailed to The Hollywood Reporter in September 2016.

“I loved it. It wasn’t a plan or anything like that, but I really discovered myself more as an artist in these last ten years than when I was an actor,” she told THR of her hiatus. “And it just has to do with feeling like my hands are on the wheel. No matter what, I’m taking full responsibility for it. For better or worse, I like that.”

Ryan returned to the big screen with Ithaca, which was also her directorial debut. The film reunited her onscreen with Hanks and her son, Jack, also starred in the production.

Ryan is making her grand return to romantic comedies in 2023’s What Happens Later, which she cowrote and directed. What Happens Later, which also stars David Duchovny, chronicles what happens when a former couple reunites while stranded in an airport.

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