New heartache for Longoria-Parker fans at Paris wedding
(AFP)Updated: 2007-07-08 21:10 PARIS - "Desperate Housewives" star Eva Longoria and NBA basketball star Tony Parker held a church wedding in Paris on Saturday but disappointed fans were again prevented from seeing the glamour couple.
Eva Longoria and Tony
Parker attend an awards show in Los Angeles in January 2007. [AP]
Relatives and the couple's Hollywood friends arrived at the Saint Germain l'Auxerrois Roman Catholic church in a fleet of red buses. Longoria, 32, and Parker, 25, entered the church unseen by a back door.
After the wedding the couple and their guests went to the 17th century Vaux-le-Vicomte chateau near Paris to celebrate with a host of other celebrities.
Cars transporting guests and two limousines arrived just after 1900 local time (1700 GMT) as about a hundred onlookers and photographers strained for a look. Police officers had stopped traffic on the road leading to the chateau.
Longoria and Parker were legally married at a civil ceremony at a Paris city hall on Friday. They also avoided fans after that event and were jeered as they sped off immediately after the ceremony.
The church ceremony, widely billed as the celebrity wedding of the year, led a worldwide rush of weddings on the 7/7/7 date that many believe to be auspicious.
Longoria rose to global fame with her portrayal of a sexually voracious suburbanite in "Desperate Housewives." Parker is French but has made his name as a guard for NBA champions San Antonio Spurs. This year he became the first European to be the most valuable player in the NBA finals.
Many journalists gathered in the hot summer sunshine outside the church near the Louvre museum for Saturday's ceremony but got slim pickings. Security men held up big black umbrellas to block pictures by photographers perched on balconies of nearby buildings.
Rights to the wedding photographs have been negotiated by OK! magazine for a reported fee of two million dollars.
Alison Cox, 25, a basketball fanatic from the US state of Arizona on holiday in France, said she thought it was "pretty rude" of the couple to neglect all the people who had come to wish them well.
"I don't expect them to invite us into the church but why couldn't we at least see them walking into the building?" she asked.
Longoria and Parker have kept secret their guest list for the chateau bash.
But actors Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jamie Foxx and pop singers Lionel Richie, Sting, and Spice Girl Victoria Beckham were reportedly invited.
A private jet carrying stars of the "Desperate Housewives" television series -- Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman and Nicolette Sheridan -- arrived in Paris on Thursday, according to media reports.
Security at the party at the 17th-century chateau was also expected to be tight, as it also was on Friday when the pair were married by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe at a city hall ceremony.
That event was attended by around 40 people, including several US basketball stars and French football international Thierry Henry.
Disappointed fans booed when Parker and Longoria, who plays the adulterous Gabrielle Solis in the television show, quickly left the building in two Mercedes saloons with tinted black windows.
Parker told Le Parisien newspaper before the wedding he had left all the wedding preparations to his fiancee -- "except for the food and the music" -- after she advised him to "keep his focus on the NBA playoffs."
"I'm the luckiest guy in the world," he said.
Longoria and Parker held hen and stag parties in the French Riviera resort of Saint Tropez earlier this week.
Born in Belgium to an African-American basketball professional and a Dutch model, Parker was brought up in Rouen, northwest of Paris, and started his sporting career in the United States in 2001.
Longoria, a Texan, has been married once before, but has long been a San Antonio Spurs fan, and is a regular at Parker's games. They got engaged last November.
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