Who Is Tony Shalhoub's Wife? All About Actress Brooke Adams (2024)

Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams know how to light up a stage — and each other’s lives.

The actors met in 1990 while starring in the play The Heidi Chronicles in New York City. After moving to Los Angeles separately, they began dating and wed in 1992.

The pair share two daughters together, Josie Lynn Shalhoub, whom Adams adopted in 1988, and Sophie Shalhoub, whom the couple adopted in 1994.

“My main focus had been on my work, and that took priority over everything. But then, when I met Brooke, I realized, no, it didn’t have to be that way. The work could be in its place, and I could also have my life, a relationship, children,” Shalhoub told Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas during a joint interview with Adams in 2020.

He added: “I needed to be more well-rounded ... Once Brooke came into my life, the rest of my life just improved so vastly, and so quickly, it was an immediate turnaround.”

Not only did Shalhoub and Adams meet on the job, but they’ve also worked together multiple times since. Adams guest starred on Shalhoub's hit show Monk five times, and they got to act alongside each other in 2002’s Made-Up, which Shalhoub also directed.

“It revives our romance when we work together,” Adams told American Theatre in 2014, noting that she doesn’t work “much anymore” but does “love to work with Tony.”

So, who is Tony Shalhoub's wife? Keep reading to learn more about Brooke Adams.

She is from New York City

Adams was born in New York City on Feb. 8, 1949.

The Adamses were a theater family. Her father was a producer and CBS executive, and her mother was an actress. She has one older sister, Lynne Adams, who is also an actress and writer.

“In Manhattan we lived in a townhouse and Lynne and I slept in what was the parlor in the house,” Adams recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “The piano was in there and we’d often wake up in the morning to somebody auditioning in our bedroom and a line of actors out in the hall.”

Adams told American Theatre that they had always expected to embark on an acting career.

“It wasn’t so much that my parents encouraged us; it’s that they didn’t really offer us anything else,” she said. “This is all my sister Lynne and I knew how to do.”

She spent her early 20s in Spain

Adams attended the High School of the Performing Arts in N.Y.C. but didn’t go to college after that because, as she told the blog Better After 50, she loved acting and “just assumed I was going to act.”

In her early twenties, she took a trip to Europe with her sister, Lynne. She ended up staying in Spain from ages 20 to 24 because she “didn’t know what to come back to.”

“​​I lived with a Spaniard and was kind of a housewife for four years … I went to Spain to escape everything, to broaden my horizons and see what I really wanted to do. When I came back I really wanted to act,” she told American Theatre.

She is an actress and a director

Adams started acting at a young age, working alongside her older sister, Lynne, in their father’s summer theater, the Flint Musical Tent, in Michigan. She made her stage debut at age 6 in Brigadoon.

She moved to L.A. in 1974 “with a burning desire to get into the movies,” she told the Los Angeles Times. She had small roles in 1976’s Car Wash and 1977’s Shock Waves before landing her breakout role as the lead in 1978’s Days of Heaven, alongside Richard Gere and Sam Shepard. She has also appeared in films like 1978’s Revenge of the Body Snatchers, 1983’s The Dead Zone, 1992’s Gas Food Lodging and 1995’s The Baby-Sitters Club.

“It was a b---- making my debut in such an extraordinary movie,” she said. “I knew it was extraordinary when we were making it and that I’d never have another experience like it and I was right. I was offered lots of stuff after that--and looking back I have to say I didn’t handle things so well.”

On television, Adams played a lead character on the ‘60s series O.K., Crackerby!, appeared in more than a dozen TV movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and had a number of guest spots in the ‘90s on shows like Frasier, Thirtysomething, Touched By an Angel and Wings. After moving back to N.Y.C., she concentrated on theatre, appearing in plays like The Cherry Orchard in 2005 and the 2010 revival of Lend Me a Tenor.

The latter was one of many times Adams has worked with her husband, which also included five guest spots on Shalhoub’s hit series, Monk. In addition to acting, Adams is also a writer. Shalhoub did a reading of her play, Delusion by Proxy.

She met Shalhoub on Broadway

In the late ‘70s, Adams returned to N.Y.C. from L.A. to take care of her sick parents. She appeared in a number of plays, including The Heidi Chronicles in 1990, where she met Shalhoub.

“My contract was up in February, but because Brooke was in it, I re-upped for another four months, because I couldn’t extricate myself,” Shalhoub told Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas, adding: “I was so completely enamored of her that I just could not leave.”

She and Shalhoub got married in 1992

Shalhoub and Adams had a mutual attraction but didn’t begin dating until each had separately relocated to L.A. They reconnected after Shalhoub’s father died, and they got engaged after a few months of dating.

Shortly after they got engaged, Adams got cast in the national tour of Lost in Yonkers. Shalhoub was starring on the sitcom Wings at the time, so he would visit her and Josie every three weeks when the show had a hiatus.

They got married in April 1992, with Adams getting three months off to go to N.Y.C. for her nuptials.

“We were really simpatico. I guess, too, it has a lot to do with where you are in your life, and your sense of readiness,” Shalhoub told Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas. “When we got married, I was 38 and Brooke had just turned 43. We were both single and had both steered clear of marriage and large commitments, and there was this instant feeling, that this was going to be it, there would never be any other person for me.”

Two years after they wed, Adams told the Los Angeles Times that she was enjoying taking a break from acting, as it was “too brutal a way to make a living.”

“When I got married in 1992, it was the first time since I was 16 that I didn’t have to support myself, so I guess I’ve just been enjoying that … This is the most competitive business in the world, and there are so many young, beautiful, talented actresses that it’s a miracle I’ve worked at all,” she said.

She is a mom of two

The couple are parents to two daughters. Adams adopted Josie Lynn Shalhoub in 1989. After she and Shalhoub wed, the two adopted another girl, Sophie Shaloub, in 1994.

While promoting her mockumentary Made-Up, Adams admitted to the New York Times in 2004 that “it's such a weird thing to be a mother.''

''Being a mother is more like being wallpaper. It's not being the center of attention,” she said. “And so I think for a woman who's a mother, it is very hard to be an actress, to get all excited about yourself in the center seat.''

Josie followed in her parent's footsteps, earning her BFA in theatre from the California Institute of the Arts, and she now works as a writer. In 2020, Shalhoub and Adams became grandparents when she welcomed her first child that summer.

Ahead of his grandson’s arrival, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel actor told PEOPLE he was “in awe.”

“I’m going become a grandfather this year for the first time,” he said. “I play one on the show, but now I actually get to be one. My oldest daughter is having a baby boy in the summer.”

She is a painter

Adams began painting watercolors while in Spain. Her hobby took a backseat when she moved back to N.Y.C. and started acting again, but she took art classes after her second daughter was born.

The Unborn star’s first group show came in 2006, and she has gone on to showcase her work nearly a half-dozen times, most recently at the Kara Taylor Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard in 2021.

“When I started, it was the first time I felt like I’m not trying to impress anyone, I’m not trying to make anyone love me. I like this. I like painting. I loved acting too, the acting part was great, the business was what I hated,” she told the Better After 50 blog.

Adams’ paintings have run the gamut from a series titled Behind The Scenes to portraits of friends — including her husband — to a monochrome collection called Cast of Characters.

She has decided that she is “not an actor anymore,” telling Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas, “I’m not competing with [Shalhoub and his acting] in that way. I’m now a painter. I love to paint, and I sell my paintings, so it’s all good.”

She and Shalhoub live in New York City and summer in Massachusetts

To get away from the hustle of Hollywood, Adams and Shalhoub moved from L.A. to N.Y.C., and the couple spend summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where they’ve owned a house since 1999.

Their island home is a 90-year-old saltbox, chosen because it’s vastly different from life in L.A., and Adams spends plenty of time in her art studio there.

"Martha's Vineyard is quiet and green, not a parade of billboards and chain restaurants," Shalhoub told Country Living in 2010. "It's like going back in time 50 years."

Though they are both still tied to L.A. and N.Y.C. for work, they love being on Martha’s Vineyard and are well-connected to the arts scene on the island.

“One of the things that I find fun about the Vineyard in the summer is that we always get asked to do readings and stuff. There’s just so much going on, at the Yard, the Vineyard Playhouse, the Vineyard Arts Project,” Adams told Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas. “Our MO is to always say yes, and then bitch and moan about it until we actually do it — and then we love it.”

She and her sister Lynne are frequent collaborators

Adams has worked with her sister Lynne a few times, including directing her one-woman play Two Faced in the '90s, which toured the country. The play was turned into a film, 2002’s Made-Up, which starred both sisters and marked Shalhoub’s directorial debut.

More than a decade later, the two teamed up once again on the web series All Downhill From Here, a semi-autobiographical comedy about aging sisters.

''Brooke and I have this phenomenon. When I write something, it turns out to be true for her," Lynne told the New York Times in 2004.

Her dog is Instagram famous

Shalhoub and Adams have an adorable dog named Scoop.

A number of paintings that Adams has sold at her home gallery on Martha’s Vineyard have been of the pup.

But what’s really gotten the world’s attention is whenever Rachel Brosnahan, Shalhoub’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel costar, posts about “Scoop Shalhoub” — whom she’s deemed “the man, the myth, the legend” — on social media.

“Whenever she puts Scoop on, she gets more responses than anything,” Adams told Better After 50.