America yields a large amount of the world's entertainers. Some of those famous people have
decided to either change their home base to another country or simply enjoy the luxury of
having another home away from the U.S. Here are celebrities who made the leap to another country.
Tina Turner garnered worldwide attention in the early 1960s as half of the married duo Ike & Tina
Turner. As one of the most dynamic and compelling stage performers of all time,
the shimmying force of nature born Anna Mae Bullock combined soul, R&B,
and rock n' roll to make a style uniquely her own. In her book My Love Story,
Turner detailed extensive and brutal abuse she suffered from Ike Turner, whom she split with
personally and professionally in the mid-1970s, reinventing herself as a solo artist in 1984.
Turner further reinvented herself by moving away from the nation where she was born and
raised. In the 1990s, Turner moved to Switzerland and stayed put.
"Because my boyfriend moved there to run the company,
and I always wanted to go to Switzerland, and I was very happy."
In fact, she liked it so much that she learned German, and in 2013, Turner made it official,
relinquishing her American citizenship to become a resident of Switzerland.
Grace Kelly became a certified movie star when popular and influential filmmaker
Alfred Hitchcock selected her to headline two of his biggest movies, both released in 1954:
Rear Window and Dial M for Murder. Kelly had major acting skills, and was nominated for back-to-back
Academy Awards in 1954 and 1955, winning in the latter year for The Country Girl. After the box
office hits To Catch a Thief and High Society, Kelly never acted in a movie or TV show again.
She lived for another two-and-a-half decades, but she did so thousands of miles away from Hollywood.
According to The New York Times, back in 1955,
while filming in France, Kelly attended the Cannes Film Festival, where she met Prince Rainier III,
a member of the ruling family of the small, wealthy principality of Monaco. A year later,
Kelly wed the Prince and became officially known as Princess Grace of Monaco,
necessitating a retirement from show business and a move to Europe to fulfill her duties as a royal.
The Doors were at the forefront of the 1960s psychedelic rock explosion.
Songs like "Light My Fire," "People Are Strange," and "Riders On The Storm"
became big hits thanks to the unique combination of guitarist Robby Krieger,
keyboard wizard Ray Manzarek, and the undeniable presence and performance of frontman Jim Morrison.
Morrison struggled with addiction. According to Ultimate Classic Rock, he was drinking around
a dozen beers a day during the recording of the 1971 album L.A. Woman. Seeking a lifestyle reboot,
Morrison moved to Paris in 1971 with his longtime companion, Pamela Courson. According to Biography,
Courson found the 27-year-old singer dead in the bathtub of their home on July 3,
1971. Morrison truly never left Paris—he was buried at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery,
where his grave quickly became one of the City of Lights' most visited tourist attractions.
What do most of the films of director Tim Burton, which include Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd,
Batman, and Dark Shadows have in common? They're almost all categorically dark, vaguely creepy,
slightly Gothic, and evoke Victorian England-era styles and sensibilities.
Contrary to that singular unified creative voice,
Burton grew up in sunny Burbank, California, close to TV and movie production facilities.
When it came time to find his forever homes, the director opted to settle far away from Southern
California. Per Radio Times, when Burton was with British actor Helena Bonham Carter in the 2000s,
they lived in separate but "adjoining homes in London." Per Vanity Fair, Bonham Carter and Burton
split up in 2014 after 13 years together, but the Californian remained in England.
Long known as the little sister of the members of the Jackson 5, and "King of Pop" Michael Jackson
in particular, Janet Jackson broke out of the shadows and became a superstar in her own right.
She became a major musical force in the '80s and '90s with albums like Control,
Rhythm Nation 1814, and Janet selling a total of 26 million copies in the US alone.
Despite being one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Jackson tries to keep her love life
largely private. In February 2013, she told ET that she'd gotten married in a, quote,
"quiet, private, and beautiful ceremony" to her boyfriend, Wissam Al Mana,
the previous year. More than three years later, a source close to Jackson told HollywoodLife that
Jackson and Al Mana had decamped to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, for personal reasons.
According to The Independent, Jackson gave birth in January 2017 and then broke up with
Al Mana a few months later. As of 2020, per Daily Mail, Jackson still lived overseas,
as she was spotted driving a Range Rover around London.
Lindsay Lohan first came to the attention of filmgoers in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap,
in which she played tween twins. In the mid-2000s, she'd re-emerge as a headliner of films
geared at teens, such as Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Herbie Fully Loaded, and, especially,
Mean Girls. Almost immediately after Hollywood and the general public proclaimed the former
child actress Lohan a superstar on the rise, she reinvented herself as a jet-set, party-hopping
scenester, frequently seen going into and out of nightclubs in the US and around the world with
celebrity friends like Paris Hilton. In the 2010s, her movie career no longer on the up and up,
Lohan landed, permanently it would seem, in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates,
one of the world's most exclusive and expensive luxury playgrounds for the rich and famous.
She told David Spade in a Lights Out interview in 2020,
"I came here in 2008 when they had just finished building the Atlantis hotel,
and there was none of this here that there is now."
She couldn't return to the US in 2020 due to coronavirus lockdowns in Dubai, during which
time she sheltered in place in her home in the Emirate with her sister, singer Aliana Lohan.
In the late 1990s, an almost inexplicable sensation took most of the western world
by storm. People packed into theaters and tuned in
to television to watch traditional Irish step-dancing extravaganzas,
led by Michael Flatley. After making the "Riverdance" troupe an international hit,
Flatley went solo with his self-aggrandizing but not inaccurately titled show, "Lord of the Dance."
Flatley, who at the time was probably the world's most famous Irish person, was not actually born in
Ireland. According to the Chicago Tribune, Flatley was born and raised in the South Side of Chicago.
His parents immigrated to the US from Ireland years before the future superstar's birth.
In 2001, Flatley bought an estate in Ireland. According to Irish Central, Flatley paid around
€3 million for the dilapidated Castlehyde. He later tried to sell it, then took it off the
market, deciding, in the end, to split his time between Castlehyde and Monaco.
Location has always been a big part of the ongoing life story of Madonna. According to Michigan Live,
the "Material Girl" attended the University of Michigan a year before dropping out to pursue
her musical aspirations in New York until she had early '80s dance club hits like "Everybody"
and "Burning Up." After essentially making good on her American Bandstand-stated ambition to, quote,
"rule the world," Madonna acquired the means to live wherever and however she liked.
Madonna owns homes in America, as well as a well-appointed townhouse in the
Marylebone area of London, a city where she lived for about a decade.
According to Hello!, in 2017, she spent the equivalent of $8 million on a
16,146-square foot, 18th-century mansion just outside of the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon.
Additionally, her son, David, has aspirations of being a professional soccer player,
and Madonna says that Portugal has better schools and coaches to serve that end.
Zac Efron has made a career out of playing prototypical, all-American guys.
After his breakthrough role as teenage jock Troy Bolton in High School Musical,
he played various (and often shirtless) hunks, dreamboats,
frat guys, and doofuses in stuff like 17 Again, Neighbors, and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.
But according to a TMZ report, Efron slowly lost his taste for the United States. In August 2020,
a source told the tabloid that he hunkered down in the Byron Bay region of Australia during
COVID-19 lockdowns, theorizing that the area was safer than Los Angeles and that since he
had to videoconference in for meetings anyway, he might as well live where he wants to live.
Indeed, in his Netflix docuseries Down to Earth with Zac Efron, Efron expresses his
wish to leave California, and by early 2021, he'd made plans to permanently relocate down under.
Monty Python is arguably the most famous comedy troupe to come out of the United Kingdom.
In the 1960s, the six-man group made ridiculous sketch comedy on TV
with the worldwide hit Monty Python's Flying Circus and in the '70s, moved on to make some
of the most highly regarded film comedies ever made, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Terry Gilliam, the only member who wasn't British—was born in Minnesota. After the
troupe started to disperse in the 1980s, Gilliam became a writer and director of live-action films,
and was responsible for such cult classics as Time Bandits, and 12 Monkeys.
America seemed to like Gilliam, but by the 2000s, Gilliam didn't like America's political climate.
According to an interview with the AV Club, Gilliam renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2006.
He said,
"I thought I'd just simplify my life. I'm getting old. I'm gonna die.
I'm not at all happy with what America has been in the last 10 years."
And so, the only non-European Python resettled in England.
By the middle of the 20th century,
John Huston established himself as one of the great directors of American film.
Among his works are unrivaled, award-winning and nominated classics like The Maltese Falcon
and The African Queen. One of his final films, before his death in 1987 at age 81, was Prizzi's
Honor, in which he directed his daughter, Anjelica Huston, to her first Oscar nomination.
According to RTE public radio, the Missouri-born Huston renounced his American citizenship in
January 1964. Immediately after, in a ceremony in Dublin's Department of Justice, he officially
became a citizen of Ireland, where he'd lived for the previous 12 years and raised his children.
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