Chely Wright has married girlfriend Lauren Blitzer just a little over a year after the country music star came out about being a lesbian and revealed just how painful that confession was in the world of country music. 
 
 Wright, who has posted wedding photos on Twitter of herself and Blitzer in white gowns, announced to the world in May 2010 that she was a lesbian. 
 
 "Country music would rather an artist be a drunk -- they even encourage and endorse that one," Wright said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times' Geoff Boucher shortly after she came out. 
 
 "You get good money from Jim Beam to put that emblem on the side of your bus. I was on the Crown Royal tour, and I have to say it was one of my favorite tours. They would rather you were a drug addict than be gay. They will forgive you if you beat your wife, lose your kids to state, get six divorces, make a sex tape, get labeled as a tramp — any and all of it is better than being gay." 
 
 After the honeymoon, Wright will see how the latest turn in her personal life has affected her career. 
 
 In an interview earlier this year with the blog Autostraddle, Wright said coming out "didn't help my career." 
 
 A January article in the Tennessean said that Wright’s sales were down about two-thirds from her last studio album and noted that she had shifted her focus from country music to Americana. 
 
 But Saturday was a day of celebration for the 40-year-old singer and Blitzer, 30, an LGBT activist. The couple married at the home of Blitzer’s aunt in Connecticut. 
 
 On Sunday, Wright's Twitter account was filled with congratulations from fans: 
 
 "Congratulations on your big day tomorrow! Wishing you a long and joyful life together. (@MaddiesCorner)” 
 
 "congrats lady!!!! Wishing you and your love so much happiness! (from @AudraEqualityMc)” 
 
 A comment she made last year is fitting given this weekend's celebration: "I feel like I'm floating," Wright said after coming out. "It's like my friends who are in the know, which are not many, and my family members who know, which isn't all of them, are lifting me up to get through this." 
 
 ALSO: 
 
 Chely Wright's 'Lifted Off the Ground' 
 
 Chely Wright finds strength to face the music 
 
 Chely Wright is engaged to girlfriend Lauren Blitzer 
 
 -- Amy Hubbard 
 
 Photo: Chely Wright. Credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times ||||| David Fincher couldn’t sleep. The celebrated director of such films as Se7en, Gone Girl, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was up late in the Four Seasons in Baltimore, where he was staying while shooting the pilot episode of the Netflix political drama House of Cards. Fincher is an executive producer of the series as well as the director of the pilot. He was pacing in his hotel room, thinking about the next day’s shoot, when he flipped on the TV and found himself watching the 1990 gangster/cop movie State of Grace, co-starring Robin Wright and Sean Penn, with whom she was then romantically involved. “I gasped. I hadn’t seen State of Grace in 20 years,” Fincher said. “It was amazing to see the evolution of this 23-year-old to the woman she is now. You just go, Wow! Fantastic!” Based on the 1990 BBC satirical political drama of the same name, the American House of Cards was moved from the British Parliament to Capitol Hill, in contemporary Washington, D.C. It first aired through Netflix streaming in February 2013. For the one or two of you who haven’t seen it, the show centers on the political machinations of Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey), a charming but ruthless congressman from South Carolina’s Fifth District, and his formidable wife, Claire, who runs a nonprofit organization, the Clean Water Initiative (C.W.I.), and coolly abets her husband’s scheming. When Underwood, serving as majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, is passed over for secretary of state, he begins a murderous campaign that ultimately wins him the presidency. Fincher knew the series would hinge on perfect casting. And he knew exactly whom he wanted in the lead roles as the ultimate power couple: Spacey and the severely beautiful Robin Wright, whom he had directed two years earlier in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Read more: Subscribe now for access. The full issue is available March 11 in the digital editions and March 17 on national newsstands. Fincher was right on both counts. House of Cards, once considered a risky experiment, won nine Primetime Emmy Awards and received four Golden Globe Award nominations in its first season and 13 Emmy nominations in its second season. Wright has won multiple awards for best actress in a television drama, including a Golden Globe, a Critics’ Choice Television Award, and a Primetime Emmy. Robin Wright Has a Cold 
 
 Vanity Fair met with Wright in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, on the eve of a blizzard that threatened to shut down the city. She was on Z-Pak, fighting a terrific cold (“croup,” she called it, as anyone might who has raised two children). Wearing a newsboy cap and comfortably nestled in front of a fire in the Safari Room of the Beatrice Inn (co-owned by the editor of this magazine), she kept her beige checked Burberry scarf wrapped around her neck as she sipped chamomile tea. Before playing Claire Underwood, Wright, who lives most of the year in Baltimore while filming House of Cards, was probably best known as Buttercup in the cult favorite The Princess Bride, and as the troubled Jenny opposite Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. She actually began acting 31 years ago as Kelly Capwell, the “daddy’s girl” ingénue on the soap opera Santa Barbara, and she has appeared in 43 films since then, often playing supporting characters. It took only three decades for her to find big, unequivocal stardom—ironically, back on the small screen. Watch: Robin Wright’s Cover Shoot When asked about the new fame and respect House of Cards has brought her, Wright answered, “I feel as though I’ve just graduated. I mean, I never went to college. I was pregnant at 23. You hear people say how they have ‘arrived,’ but it was just always there, waiting to come out. For me, it just took a long time. I’m 48. I’m finally a person. I think I’m finally ready.” Jodie Foster, who directed Wright in an episode of House of Cards, also believes that Wright has finally “settled into a pair of shoes that were the ones that were always supposed to fit her.” Foster says she’s “been talking up Robin Wright for 20 years—it’s just so clear she’s an amazing actress, one of the best we’ve got. But she was in movies that were not home runs.” Rebecca Miller, who cast Wright in the lead role of the 2009 film adaptation of her novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, felt that part of the actress’s late launch was due to the fact that she was “a great actress trapped inside the body of a Norse goddess.” So, perhaps Wright was smart to develop herself as a character actress, instead of just relying on the looks that made her a fashion model at the age of 16. “This is her flowering and her becoming,” Miller explains. “There’s something about her subtlety and her approach that’s just very special—she achieves liftoff in a way that very few people can do. With House of Cards, she’s created a character.” Claire Underwood has been described as manipulative, ruthless, and calculating, but Wright doesn’t really see her that way. “I can’t see her as evil and cunning. To me, she’s utilitarian and efficient,” Wright said between sips of tea. Part of what makes the character so intimidating is her fierce, androgynous beauty. First, there’s the ultra-short haircut. It came about by chance. “I was just cutting off damaged hair—too much bleach over months of [appearing in] different movies,” Wright explained. “It was a mercy killing, but it works for the character.” Her wardrobe, by first-season costume designer Tom Broecker, is a study in muted elegance, by way of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Armani, and Zac Posen. For decades Washington, D.C., has been known for a somewhat dowdy style for women—pantsuits and low-heeled shoes. (John F. Kennedy, while still a senator living in Georgetown, once described the city as possessing “Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”) Not so in House of Cards. Claire’s stiletto heels, pencil skirts, crisp white blouses, and asymmetrical, sleeveless dresses revealing striking, toned arms give her the look of a sleek warrior. “Helping build Claire’s wardrobe has been a hoot!” Wright noted. “Sleek, sexy, and all woman.” 
 
 The role, and the image, really clicked for her when Fincher suggested that she think of Claire as resembling a marble bust, appropriate in D.C., that city of monuments. “There’s something in that stillness,” she said. Fincher recalls, “We discussed that whole idea—I said, ‘Your job is to remain immovable, and it’s everyone else’s job to orbit you.’ ” Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. The series’s 37-year-old show-runner, Beau Willimon, said that he didn’t think of himself as “having created Claire. I think of Claire as a collaboration. Robin created Claire as much as I and the writers did. Unlike Elizabeth Urquhart [played by Diane Fletcher] in the BBC version, we wanted her front and center, to be equal to her husband—the couple pursued a mutual ascendancy, almost completely from scratch.” Willimon learned from Wright that, for Claire, “fewer words are better. Her real strength is between the lines. She’d ask me, ‘Can we cut these three lines? I think I can act them.’ Claire is a woman of few words, but well-chosen and powerful words. She doesn’t bloviate. When she speaks, it’s powerful, potent, fast.” Jodie Foster understood immediately that the relationship between Claire and Frank is crucial to the show’s success. “This is in some ways the greatest love story of all time because each of them accepts the gravest, shameful secrets about the other.” In Season One, Claire is well aware of Frank’s adultery with the ambitious newspaper reporter Zoe Barnes (played by Kate Mara), but she allows it because she knows it can further his career. In Season Two, Frank helps Claire spin the tabloid news of her affair with an acclaimed New York photographer, Adam Galloway (played by Ben Daniels). “If the show didn’t have that—if it was just Frank and his machinations—I don’t think it would’ve been of interest,” Foster believes. Fincher confided that “a lot of people were asking, Is this meant to be Bill and Hillary? It shouldn’t be, but what I do love—especially with Bill and Hillary—is there’s an unfathomable place at which they meet, and you’re not going to get to the bottom of it. That was kind of where we started.” A leitmotif of the show is the intimate moment when Claire and Frank, framed by a window in their town house, share a postcoital cigarette, except that it’s for a coitus that never happens. “I love the idea of that,” said Fincher. “There is this intimacy, a moment where they decompress from the day. You know, Machiavelli is only as good as his right hand, and he needs to keep her apprised.” And satisfied. Becoming an Actor 
 
 As snow began to swirl outside the windows of the Beatrice Inn, we talked about the trajectory of her career. She said that becoming an actor wasn’t anything she’d planned, but “from a very young age my brother and I would perform for my mother. We were mimics. We would do accents. We would do characters for her. Keep her entertained. You know, you love to make your parents laugh.” Her older brother, Richard, took up ballet at age 15 and danced with Baryshnikov at American Ballet Theatre. “He was ballet; I went into modern jazz. And that was my life—get out of school, 11 A.M., [then] independent study and dance for 10 hours a day. My dream was to come to New York and be a dancer on Broadway. I wanted to be in A Chorus Line and Cats!” Following her divorce from pharmaceutical sales rep Freddie Wright, Robin’s mother, Gayle Gaston Wright, moved her two talented offspring from Fort Worth, Texas, to La Jolla, California, where there wasn’t an opportunity to study dance. Instead, Robin began modeling. She looked like the quintessential California girl—athletic and sun-kissed. She “danced in commercials, holding Doritos,” until her talent agent, Eileen Farrell, suggested she audition for John Hughes, the director of a slew of popular teen-themed films (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink). Despite several callbacks, she never made it into a John Hughes movie. Wright describes herself as “painfully shy as a kid” but says her mother was congenial and outgoing. After her divorce, she got together with some of her friends, including entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash, and they started selling cosmetics door-to-door. “From the time I was wee big, my mother was one of the first members of Mary Kay Cosmetics. Women going door-to-door and letting housewives have their own business—that was really a breakthrough. It was huge.” Robin grew up with beauty shows in their home. “We were driven to school in a pink Cadillac [a perk awarded to top Mary Kay saleswomen] every day.” Wright went on auditions for almost two years and didn’t get anything but a bit part on a short-lived nighttime soap, The Yellow Rose, with Sam Elliott and Cybill Shepherd. “I’d basically thrown in the towel after I wasn’t getting anything, graduated high school, kept driving to L.A. from La Jolla [to audition]. I had already done Europe for eight months, modeled right out of high school, and decided to go back to California to pursue acting again. Well, I didn’t get anything. You know, three and four callbacks—and I never got it. That just happened 14 million times for all of those [youth-oriented] movies that were going around, like Less than Zero and Sixteen Candles.” Robin gave up and got a job working in the kitchen of a tour boat, despite a tendency to get seasick; 24 hours before she was set to sail she got the part as Kelly Capwell, on Santa Barbara. She signed a two-year contract and, without any acting training, managed to be nominated for three Daytime Emmys. When Rob Reiner, who saw her on Santa Barbara, cast her as Buttercup in The Princess Bride (opposite Cary Elwes), in 1987, she found herself in a big movie with a wonderful cast of well-established actors—Billy Crystal, Mandy Patinkin, Carol Kane, Wallace Shawn, and Chris Sarandon. Seven years later she co-starred in Forrest Gump, as Gump’s troubled best friend/love interest, who ends up a victim of the excesses of the 60s. 
 
 Tom Hanks first met Wright when the cast did camera tests for Forrest Gump. “She had, even then, a mysterious presence that is based on no small amount of physical grace and beauty,” he recalled. She also possessed a “degree of concentration that’s almost intimidating.” During one scene in Forrest Gump, in which Hanks’s awkward, mentally challenged character dances, he made Wright laugh so hard that “I peed my pants and didn’t have a change of costume!” she recalled with a laugh. A member of the crew dried her clothes with a hair dryer. Hanks remembered that night, too, but a little differently. “We’re out on this beautiful location. The light was kind of magical. And Forrest’s innate lack of rhythm and yet his unfettered joy at dancing with the love of his life—yeah, that was a pretty great night.” Josh Brolin co-stars with Wright in her next film, Everest, based on Jon Krakauer’s 1997 best-seller Into Thin Air and due to be released later this year. Like Hanks and Michael Kelly, who also appears in Everest, he’d been deeply impressed when he first saw her in The Princess Bride. Brolin told Vanity Fair that “there was nothing phony in what she did: total conviction is what she had, and it was, and still is, extremely powerful. She lends herself to her characters completely, no matter how intense, funny, silly, or tragic. Even in *Forrest Gump—*who wouldn’t run if Jenny told you to?” Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. 
 
 Wright met Sean Penn on the set of State of Grace and they fell in love, marrying in 1996. This was a second marriage for both—Wright had been briefly married to the late actor Dane Witherspoon, in 1986, who acted with her in Santa Barbara. Penn, famously and also briefly, was married to Madonna, in 1985. (They made one movie together, Shanghai Surprise, in 1986, “a venture so grisly that it added to one’s reverence for the deranged power of love,” in the words of film critic David Thomson.) Indeed, marriage to Wright was a kind of redemption for Penn, and she really was a princess bride, married to one of America’s great leading men, who’s been compared to James Dean and Marlon Brando. “I was pregnant and ostensibly married at 24,” Robin says. She called herself Robin Wright Penn and raised their two kids, Dylan and Hopper Jack, now 23 and 21 years old, respectively. “I did it [changed my name] really for my children because we’d had kids before we married, and I thought that we should all have the same name. That’s traditional.” Their marriage lasted 14 years, but there was tristesse. Some felt that Wright suffered in the shadow of Sean Penn’s fame. Was this another Ali MacGraw-Steve McQueen marriage, in which McQueen’s moodiness and greater fame had a chilling effect on MacGraw’s career? When asked if she felt that way, Wright answered that she didn’t warm to the idea of talking about her marriage to Penn. “I’m not in the business of talking about what ‘isn’t,’ ” she wrote in an e-mail. “My eyes are set forward and I’ve never been happier. I have too much respect for Sean and our two extraordinary children to sell our past joys and woes for public consumption and fodder.” But after several weeks in Paris, she phoned to say she was ready to talk about the marriage and what she has learned sifting through the ashes. “I grew up very fast as a young girl, but I grew slowly into my womanhood. We were learning as we were going along. We agreed as parents that we’d not work at the same time, so that one of us was always with the kids. He was making more money than I was at the time, so it was a simple decision: ‘You go work—I’ll stay with the kids.’ And we got along great as creative people. Acting together, him directing me [in The Crossing Guard in 1995]—that was great.” To avoid the “bubble of celebrity,” Wright says, “we got out of L.A. and raised our kids in Northern Cal.” But the move ultimately failed to preserve their marriage, and in 2010, after repeated breakups and reconciliations, they divorced. “I believe we were together not only to have our beautiful children but to learn how to love … for the next time around, the right way. And then, what I’m looking for in people now,” she adds, “is kindness.” (V.F. reached out to Penn for anything he would like to say about their life together, but his publicist, Mara Buxbaum, responded in an e-mail: “Sean is traveling and not available to participate.”) In 2013 she appeared alongside Naomi Watts in the unsettling Australian movie Adore, about two best friends who have sex with each other’s sons (a role that still disturbs her). But it was her supporting role as Erika Berger in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the best-selling thriller by Stieg Larsson, that changed the game for her. When Fincher took her out for coffee and told her about House of Cards, Wright asked why she should consider doing television. Fincher told her, “ ‘It’s a great story. It’s a great character, and I don’t think it’s television. I think it’s something slightly four feet to the left of television.’ So I asked if she would bless us with her presence. I basically begged.” As for the chemistry between the series’s two lead actors, Tom Hanks thinks that Wright is “without a doubt the absolute equal to Kevin Spacey. Perhaps she even tops his character, because you get a sense of how afraid he is of her, and rightly so. In a lot of ways, she’s like the female version of Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad—someone loaded with secrets and so very self-aware. It’s a perfect match of story, character, and actor.” Directors and Directing 
 
 James Foley, who directed nine episodes of House of Cards in the first two seasons, says, “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth: in shooting Season One, everybody shared the same healthy skepticism, and we were very aware that this could be totally under the radar. We even joked in the beginning, you know: ‘Streaming soon to a device near you.’ I remember being stunned when David told me he was even doing it.” Michael Kelly, who plays Underwood’s henchman, recovering alcoholic Doug Stamper, was also skeptical about the new, streaming format of the series. “We knew [early on] that we had something special, but the only thing we didn’t know was Netflix. Nobody might ever see the show. But it’s just so great—look at how many people have followed it.” (Though Netflix doesn’t release its numbers, the show’s popularity has skyrocketed since its first season, increasing its viewership eightfold.) The Congo
– She probably didn't make $17.9 million doing it, but country crooner Chely Wright has gotten married to girlfriend Lauren Blitzer a year after coming out on the cover of People magazine. The pair wed yesterday in Connecticut, and Wright's Twitter account was abuzz with photos of the two women in their dresses and congratulations from fans. Wright has said that admitting she was gay "didn't help my career," and the LA Times notes that sales of her most recent album had dropped by two-thirds over its predecessor.