Hollywood stars who found happiness away from the US

A celebrity might know they’ve ‘made it’ when they own a mansion in the Hollywood hills, a beachside home in the Hamptons or LA, or a New York brownstone. But for some celebrities, the shine of America wears off, and they crave a different pace of life.

The Clooneys parted ways with the US and took up a European lifestyle, while several A-listers have made the English countryside their home. A surprising number of celebrities chose to put roots down in Switzerland, while one celebrity had to change her home when she married into the royal family.

Read on to find out which celebrities have found happiness and settled abroad…

The Baywatch star relocated from the US at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, first moving to France, then back to her native Canada. She lives in a property on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, growing her own food in a vegetable garden as well as making her own rosehip oil, salt scrubs and candles.

“I always pictured that I would live here at the end of my life, for retirement. So that was a surprise,” she told HELLO! Canada. “But you know, my kids are grown and my parents are getting older. So I just felt like it was time to come home.”

For Pamela, the decision to move to Vancouver Island came at a pivotal moment in her life.

“A few years back, I kind of gave up at some point and needed a change. I thought, ‘Well, I guess that’s just what people think of me’. I was not in a good space when I moved back to Canada,” she told Better Homes & Gardens.

“I don’t know what happened over the last few decades, but I feel now so far removed from the image of who I was. I felt very sad and lonely. I didn’t feel just misunderstood, I felt like I had really screwed up, that my whole life was a bundle of mistakes. I was hard on myself, and I thought I put my family through a lot and put my kids through so much.”

Lena Dunham is synonymous with New York, having written, starred in and directed the hit HBO series Girls, which encapsulated millennial life through the misdemeanours of four young women living in the Big Apple.

But life had other plans for Lena, and everything changed in 2018 after she flew to the UK to work on a film adaptation of the Karen Cushman novel, Catherine, Called Birdy. She found herself rethinking her return to NYC after meeting fellow creative Luis Felber on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend.

“Birdy was interrupted by COVID. Filming for that actually commenced in 2021, and I thought, I’ll be here for the duration of the film, I’ll edit, and then I’ll skitter off to my life,” she told The New Yorker.

“And, about three weeks before we started, I met Luis. It became clear to me that he’s a person who set up a really beautiful creative life for himself. I was, like, I cannot drag him back to New York with me. I have to be here and engage in this life that he’s made.”

Lena is now happily ensconced in North London with Luis, who is now her husband. Lena says she’ll be eternally grateful to the friend who originally suggested they should go out on a date. 

“Our friend Honor Titus, who’s an amazing painter, suggested it,” she recalls. “I was sitting there in quarantine purgatory, going, ‘I’m never going to meet a single person.’ And he just said, ‘My friend is a blast.’ And I believe he actually said, ‘You’re not going to marry him or anything, but you two should hang out.’” Cut to: I owe him my life.”

After a lifetime in the limelight in the US, Tina Turner moved to the sleepy town of Küsnacht, Switzerland with German music executive Erwin Bach — her boyfriend since the 80s.

“I have left America because my success was in another country and my boyfriend was in another country,” she told Larry King on CNN. “Europe has been very supportive of my music.”

She settled in Küsnacht, in a 24,000 square foot home on the edge of Lake Zurich. According to Swiss newspaper Handelszeitung, the couple paid $77 million in 2021 for the magnificent property — where Tina lived until she passed away two years later.

Tina spent decades in Europe. She wed Erwin in 2013 — the year she gave up her American passport and became a Swiss citizen, for which she had to demonstrate her ability to speak German to do.

Neighbours in Küsnacht described the megastar as down-to-earth and friendly, and she clearly loved living in the Alpine country. “I must say the priority is fresh air — it’s clean, and I feel like I’m really breathing in fresh air,” she told a Swiss journalist in 2014. She also remarked that she felt safe enough to go out in public without security.

Asked during the same interview whether there was anything about life in Switzerland she didn’t like, she responded: “There is absolutely nothing that I don’t like, because I found out that I liked everything before I gave away the passport,” she said, referring to renouncing her US citizenship.

Grace Kelly was at the height of her Hollywood career when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956, but she left it all behind to focus on her new royal life with her husband in the small European principality.

It was the stuff of fairytales, but a big change for the new Princess Grace, who lived and worked in the States for 27 years, having grown up in Philadelphia and trained in a New York drama school before working in film.

Many theorised that she must have missed her acting career and the life she had in America, but she was committed to her new role as a wife, mother and princess and felt a strong sense of duty to Monaco.

Having long since traded the hills of Hollywood for rolling estates in Europe, the Clooneys have an impressive property portfolio. As well as owning a stunning £80 million property in Lake Como and residences in London and Los Angeles, the couple also have a beautiful chateau in Provence, France.

The 425-acre estate, named Domaine Le Canadel, is situated in the gorgeously picturesque town of Brignoles. It was purchased by George and Amal in 2021 for a reported £8.3 million, and includes a pool, a tennis court, huge gardens, a lake and a 25-acre vineyard.

After spending most of her formative years in the spotlight, Lindsay Lohan was ready for the extreme opposite. A decade ago she moved to Dubai, where paparazzi are outlawed.

Why did she want to remove herself from the spotlight? “I feel like some of [my work] got overshadowed by paparazzi when I was younger, and that’s kind of annoying. I wish that part didn’t happen. I feel like that kind of took on a life of its own. So that’s why I wanted to disappear. I was like, ‘Unless there’s no story here, they’re not going to focus on just my work,'” she told Bustle.

She also hoped a fresh start would help her find love, which is exactly what happened. She met her now-husband, financier Bader Shammas, in a restaurant in Dubai. Seeing no reason to leave, the couple settled in Dubai where they’ve lived ever since.

In 2014, the Pirates of the Caribbean actor moved to a 12-bedroom mansion in Somerset, UK. The property, which is valued at $16 million, sits on an 850-acre estate complete with its own dairy farm.

According to Johnny, privacy was part of the reason behind the move.

“British people are cool and will greet you as if you are a neighbour — without going over the top. I like going to places, seeing things and meeting people — but I’m not the great extrovert that people think,” he told Somerset Life.

“In truth, I’m quite a shy person,” Johnny continued. “That’s one of the great things about Britain, and especially Somerset. I can just be me — and that’s nice. I can go into shops without being surrounded by people wanting selfies. I don’t mind that up to a point, but sometimes it gets a little too crowded.”

Despite being the recipient of three Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, Daniel Day Lewis traded Tinseltown for rolling fields.

The London-born star has settled in the quiet village of Annamoe in Co Wicklow, Ireland, becoming a naturalised Irish citizen in 1993 and fully embracing Irish culture. He became involved in the local community and pursued activities like woodworking.

In his words, living in Ireland has allowed him to “go quietly about my business”, and the star has become “completely absorbed into the nobility of the Wicklow hills around me”.

“This is the place that sustains me,” Daniel explained in an acceptance speech for the Freedom of County Wicklow. “This is where I have planted myself. It is a refuge where I restore myself.”

As well as her residence in LA, Lily Collins also lives overseas in Denmark.

Per local news outlet CPH Post, Lily and her husband Charlie purchased a five-bedroom terraced house in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the tidy sum of 15.5 million kroner (approximately $1.4 million) in 2023. The couple later purchased the house next door for a reported 14 million kroner (about $1.3 million).

Effusive with praise for her European home, Lily told Elle Danmark: “Life here is just so wonderful and so calm and bright. What I love so much is that there’s so much colour and, yet, it’s so calm. I love being able to bike everywhere. It feels like a big city but also very intimate, and everyone is so nice.”

The singer splits his time between Paris, the Bahamas and a farm compound in Rio, Brazil.

His Brazilian pad includes a working farm, guesthouses, organic fruit and vegetable gardens, a gym, and a football field. With lush green pastures and plenty of agricultural goings-on, Lenny’s Rio farm is worlds away from his Parisian townhouse in the 16th arrondissement.

It’s a combination of old and modern, and it was love at first viewing. “Right away I knew it was the place,” Lenny told British Vogue.

While Madonna splits her time between the UK, the US and Spain, we thought it would be remiss of us not to mention her property portfolio and where she spends most of her time when she’s not in the US.

The Madame X star relocated to Lisbon, Portugal in 2017 to support her son David Banda’s football career. The 18th-century Moorish Revival mansion which is their base is 16,146-square-foot and includes four bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a guesthouse and a caretaker’s cottage.

Madonna quarantined during the COVID-19 lockdown in a £10 million Georgian townhouse in the heart of London in Marylebone.

Another star who has a multitude of properties is Man! I Feel Like A Woman singer Shania Twain, who has homes in the Bahamas, Canada, Las Vegas and Switzerland.

Her lakeside home in Geneva, Switzerland is where she spends most of her time, enjoying the beautiful views over Lake Geneva.