Inside Jay Leno and Wife Mavis Leno's 5-Decade Love Story (2025)

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Jay Leno Makes Rare Comment on Being Granted Conservatorship of Wife Mavis Leno Amid Her Dementia

Jay Leno has entertained millions of people over the years. But little has mattered as much as keeping the love of his life smiling.

"Nothing was more fun than making my mom laugh or pleasing my mom," the comedian told Oprah Winfrey in 2002. "So I've transferred that to my wife. Now don't get it confused: I don't see my wife as my mom. But making her happy or making her laugh is a priority."

Luckily for Jay, who's turning 75 on April 28, Mavis Lenoalways thought he was pretty hilarious.

"I know there are certain things that will always make my wife laugh—like anything involving the cat," Jay continued. "If she's feeling sad, I will take the cat, go in the other room, and the cat and I will have a discussion. It's usually, 'No, you can't have a dollar.' Then the cat meows. I say, 'Yeah, I'm sure the Kitty Council has a lot of power to make me do that.' And then I hear her laugh!"

But while the formerTonight Showhost had thatmaterial down to a science, the last several years of caring for Mavis as she battles advanced dementia have required a new routine.

Mavis' condition became public in April 2024 when Jay filed to establish a conservatorship over his wife's estate.

Mavis was "in agreement" with the arrangement, her attorney said in court at the time, and was "receiving excellent care with her husband, Mr. Leno."

And the 78-year-old's spouse been happy to live up to the vows they exchanged on Nov. 3, 1980. (Which, incidentally, was also Jay's parents' anniversary, and Mavis, as she told the Los Angeles Times in 2014, was "crazy about" her in-laws.)

Mavis Nicholson went to Los Angeles' famed Comedy Store one night in January 1976 to network. She did notexpect to be swept off her feet by one of the comics.

Who, incidentally, she thought was "gorgeous."

"I was writing comedy with some partners," Mavis recalled to the LA Times in 2014. "Friends kept saying, 'You have to hang out at the Comedy Store and the Improv, you'll meet people who can give you jobs. The first time I went, they sat us front row center—that means you're this far from the comic. And there was Jay."

And there was his latest girlfriend to be born on Sept. 5.

"The interesting thing is," Jay told theTimes, "I've probably lived with five women, and every one of them was born on the same day. I can look at a woman and go, 'September 5.' I don't know why that is. I don't look for a woman born on September 5, I just wind up attracted to them."

His future wife was just as practical, forgoing his offer to get her an engagement ring at the time since they had just bought a house because, she explained, "I'm not that kind of person." (Though she didn't mind the massive diamond he gave her years later.)

Mavis also didn't think she was the marrying kind, but was "insanely in love" with Jay, she said. The self-described "voyager" compared a previous long relationship to an island she spent time on before sailing along—and "with Jay, I realized all this time I'd been sailing, he was the destination."

Neither did it hurt that, over the years since, "he made me laugh till I almost died many times in the course of a lifetime."

But a couple can't be laughing allthe time.

"From day one, he just saw me," Mavis said. "He thinks the same things are important that I think are important, the same things are wrong that I think are wrong. We have the same temperament, and we understand each other completely."

Once he started hosting the Burbank, Calif.-based Tonight Show in 1992, the first years were admittedly hard for Mavis.

"All of a sudden, Jay had this day job, and every person on the planet was asking him for something," she recalled to theLA Times. "So I thought, I'm going to be the one who doesn't ask for anything. Then it gave him relief at home, but that can also feel like distance."

That rough patch made them stronger in the end, though, because, Mavis noted, "however steadfast your feelings for each other, your life circumstances are going to go all over the place."

But she also didn't just sit around in the meantime.

A longtime women's rights activist and philanthropist, she became chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan in 1997, work that was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

And Jay couldn't have been prouder.

"I've always wanted a situation where people would go, 'Oh, that's Mr. Mavis,'" he told Oprah in 2002. "That would make me laugh."

You know what they say about something being funny because it's true.

"I've done what I want to do, and now it's my turn to help her," Jay added. "It's a matter of priorities, and it makes the marriage better."

So it was no surprise that, when Jay left The Tonight Show in 2009 and then controversially returned as host in 2010, Mavis was his fiercest defender amid the flak he got for seemingly going back on a deal to pass the torch to Conan O'Brien.

"This is a subject I’m very, very angry about to this day," she shared on60 Minutesa few weeks before Jay left his late night post for good on Feb. 6, 2014. "It made me angry because there was this perception that for some reason Jay had decided to give up the show. It was like he gave the show to Conan and then he took it back. That was not what happened, okay? That was not what happened."

That moment in time is the stuff of Hollywood-feud legend, but both Lenos maintained their stance that nothing Jay did was as sneaky or nefarious as he was often portrayed by some of his fellow comedians.

And while there are days where Mavis doesn't recognize her husband of 44-plus years and she can't reminisce about all the fun times, it's clear how good they had it.

In addition to admiring his values, "I thought he was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. I still do," Mavis told the Timesin 2014. "And certainly, he was the funniest."

As she emphasized, "It's really important to think the same things are funny. And the good examples Jay's and my parents' happy marriages undoubtedly contributed. I think a lot of people have a very unrealistic idea of what a long relationship will be like."

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