Lavish Wedding
Should you have a lavish wedding? To answer that question, let's define "lavish wedding". The average wedding in the US costs around $30,000, so anything above that could be considered "lavish" by some, but not in Hollywood.
In Hollywood, a lavish wedding would only start with the $1 million Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt lavished on their 2000 nuptial, long before Angelina Jolie entered their picture. Eddie Murphy spent about double that in today's dollars for his then lavish wedding to Nicole Mitchell in 1993, perhaps after picking up a few tips from attending Elizabeth Taylor's $2 million wedding in 1991 to Larry Fortensky - her eighth wedding to her seventh husband; the woman married Richard Burton twice.
A lavish wedding in the UK's recent memory is the one that cost Paul McCartney $3 million to marry Heather Mills in 2002, a little less than what Liza Minnelli and
David Gest spent back across the pond for their lavish wedding the
same year, complete with a 60-piece orchestra and a 12-tier wedding cake.Not to be outdone, Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar's lavish wedding started in the UK and finished half way around the world in Nayar's India. The price tag? $4 million, although most of it was covered by tabloids' photo royalties.
But even that pales next to the most lavish wedding in recent years. In 2004, the Indian steel king Lakshmi Mittal hosted a 5-day wedding across Europe for his daughter and 1200 guests. The receptions were held among other places, the Battle Gallery of Chateau de Versailles (above) in France and the final bill of $60 million received no help from the tabloids.
So how much should you spend on your wedding?