Bradley Cooper Explains 4-Month Marriage to Jennifer Esposito

USMagazine, Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 2:02pm (PDT)

Although everyone's waiting for Bradley Cooper to pop the question to longtime love Renee Zellweger, some fans of the Limitless hunk forget that Cooper's already been a husband once . . .albeit briefly!

Now 36, Cooper was married to actress Jennifer Esposito for just four months. (After a late December 2006 wedding, the Blue Bloods actress, 38, filed for divorce in May 2007.)

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Cooper opened up about the short-lived union during a Monday chat on Howard Stern's Sirius XM radio show.

"It was just something that happened," Cooper said, without detailing exactly when he knew things were off. "The good thing is, we both realized it...Sometimes you just realize it."

As Stern prodded him for info, the actor explained simply: "It just wasn't right. It's interesting...things happen!"

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Cooper added that it's "not true" that the experience turned him off to matrimony for good.

"Making any declarative statement [like that] is a joke," he scoffed. (Indeed, Zellweger, 41, also had a quickie marriage: She and country crooner Kenny Chesney were also married for 4 months in 2005 before getting the union annuled.)

Stern also couldn't help but notice a wedding band on Cooper's right hand. The star explained that the ring belonged to his father, who passed away in January.

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But, for now at least, he insisted to Stern that he has never proposed to Zellweger, whom he met six years ago on the set of their flick Case 39.

"Then I didn't see her for a long time," Cooper explained. "I got married..."

The resolutely private star avoided almost all of Stern's questions about his romance with Zellweger, which began in fall 2009. One thing he did reveal? She's a Howard fan!

"She loves you," Cooper told Stern. "She speaks very highly of you."

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Stern explained that he and the Oscar-winning actress "shared a beauty parlor appointment" years ago at a movie studio as he shot his flick Private Parts.

"She [was] so friendly and personable," Stern gushed. "She sent me a beautiful bible when I got married."

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What kind of guy was Cooper before stardom, Zellweger and ex-wife Esposito? "I didn't lose my virginity until I was 17," he admitted.

And he didn't exactly take Hollywood by storm when he first arrived at age 26 with a part in ABC's Alias with Jennifer Garner.

"I couldn't get into the SkyBar at the Mondrian Hotel in L.A. when I first moved there..No one was looking at [me and my friend]," said Cooper, who remembered "sitting back at this one-bedroom thing I'm renting, depressed as hell. My sister came to visit for a week, she wanted to kill herself. L.A. can be horrible!

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