Keanu Reeves girlfriend: who is Alexandra Grant, age, did he have a wife, when did he date Jennifer Syme?

Keanu Reeves is extremely private when it comes to his personal life - while the iconic action star has become a familiar face in Hollywood thanks to appearing in franchises such as John Wick and The Matrix, he is known for keeping himself to himself outside of work.

He made a rare appearance with long time girlfriend Alexandra Grant, 50, as the two attended the 2023 MOCA Gala at the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles. Even rarer still, the couple indulged in some PDA whilst on the red carpet.

The pair are known for generally keeping their relationship away from the spotlight, and while they may have only been officially in a relationship for the past few years, their friendship goes all the way back to 2009.

This is everything you need to know about the two.

Who is Alexandra Grant?

Grant is an American visual artist who was born in Ohio on 4 April 1973 and is currently based in Los Angeles.

Speaking about her background in an interview with Modern Edition in 2008, Grant said: “My first impulses to make art came from a need to create both a native language and place for myself.

“I grew up moving from Mexico to France to Spain to the US - the daughter of an American diplomat and a Scottish geologist. I became a keen observer of what is gained and lost in translation as people, books, and ideas move from culture to culture, context to context.”

Her parents divorced when she was young and, whilst living in Mexico City, attended a British school. When she was 11, she enrolled at the Thomas Jefferson School in St Louis, Missouri, a boarding school, for a year.

She then moved with her mother to Paris, where she attended the International School of Paris. Given her experiences growing up, Grant is multilingual and can speak English, Spanish and French.

She graduated high school from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1990, a private boarding school in New Hampshire and in 1995 she graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in history and studio art. From there, Grant attended San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, where she left with an MFA in drawing and painting in 2000.

Talking about settling in LA, Grant told LA Weekly in 2019: “I grew up in part in Mexico City, Washington, DC, and Paris, moving between languages and cultures.

“Los Angeles felt like home from the moment I first arrived in 1995, especially the diversity of people, idioms, foods, and plants (like jacaranda and bougainvillea).

“There’s an incredible work ethic here—many people are creative and entrepreneurial. Having friends who are working hard practising their crafts—whether it’s set design, publishing, or acting—is very inspiring.”

Grant launched her first solo exhibition in 2007, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, and from there she has worked with a number of fellow writers and artists on group exhibitions.

Some of her selected solo exhibitions include Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest (2013), ghost town (2016), Antigone is you is me (2017) and Born to Love (2019), and selected group exhibitions include Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art (2012), Drawn to Language (2013), Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art (2014) and These Carnations Defy Language (2015).

From 2009 to 2011, Grant worked as an adjunct professor at Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena, and in 2010 she also taught an MFA seminar at Cal State Northridge. From 2013 to 2014, Grant additionally was a mentor in the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Distance MFA programme.

How did Keanu Reeves and Alexandra Grant meet?

Grant first met Reeves at a dinner in 2009, and the two collaborated on a book together titled Ode to Happiness, which was published by Gerhard Steidl in early 2011.

Grant’s website describes Ode to Happiness as “a grown-up’s picture book”.

It says: “Featuring artwork by artist Alexandra Grant and text by actor Keanu Reeves, this thoughtfully crafted artist’s book serves as a meditation on making the best of a bad situation.”

The two collaborated once again on their second book, Shadows, in 2016, which was published again by Steidl.

“Shadows, published in 2016 by Gerhard Steidl, explores the real and symbolic nature of the shadow as image and figure of speech,” Grant’s site says.

“Grant’s photographs capture Reeves’s shadow at times as a silhouette portrait and at others as traces of light as he and the camera move together. In transforming the images into colour and reversing light for dark, Grant has made the shadows themselves the source of light.

“Reeves’s texts, written in tandem with the creation of the images, give voice to the multiple manifestations of the shadow: as a projected figure, a place of concealed emotion, and an invocation to shadow play.”

The following year, in 2017, Grant and Reeves, alongside designer Jessica Fleischmann, established the small publishing house X Artists’ Books, also known as XAB.

How long have they been together?

In June 2019, Reeves and Grant attended a Stain Laurent fashion show together where they were photographed holding hands and, later that year, in November, media speculation about their relationship was fuelled when they made their red carpet debut at the LACMA Art and Film Gala.

It’s unclear when Reeves and Grant officially got together, however, a friend of Grant’s, actress Jennifer Tilly, gave some clarity to the timeline in an interview with Page Six in 2020.

Tilly said: “I remember a couple of years ago, about a year and a half ago, [Grant] said, “Keanu Reeves is my boyfriend, “ and I’m like, “Wait. What? What? What?”.”

She added: “It’s really astonishing to me how in the last five months, all of a sudden, she goes to an event with him and everybody goes insane, like, “It’s his new girlfriend”, because she has gone to a lot of events with him.

“It’s just suddenly surfaced that he’s been dating her for several years.”

So, by Tilly’s account, it sounds like Grant and Reeves started dating somewhere around 2018.

Grant opened up about the attention she received after she appeared alongside Reeves in 2019, in a 2020 interview with Vogue.

“I think every single person I knew called me in the first week of November, and that’s fascinating,” she said.

When asked if marriage was something that she could see in her future, Grant said: “Over a glass of wine… I would love to tell you. Love at every level is deeply important to my identity.

“How’s that for dodging the question? I do not believe that isolation is the way. There is a period of isolation that I do as a painter, but I deeply value the experience of being in relationships.”

Was Keanue Reeves married to Jennifer Syme?

Jennifer Syme was an American actress who dated Reeves before her death in 2001.

According to reports, in 1998, Reeves met Jennifer Syme, the assistant to director David Lynch, at a party that was thrown for his band Dogstar, for which he played the bass.

The two started dating and, on Christmas Eve in 1999, Syme gave birth to her and Reeve’s child eight months into her pregnancy. Their daughter, Ava Archer Syme-Reeves was stillborn.

Shortly afterwards, Reeves and Syme went their separate ways, however they remained close and by 2001 were back together.

On 1 April 2001, Syme attended a party at the home of musician Marilyn Manson and, after being escorted home by a designated driver, she got into her own car, a Jeep, reportedly in a bid to return to the party.

Whilst driving, Syme drove the Jeep into a row of parked cars which instantly resulted in her death. She was 28 years old. An investigation after the collision found that Syme was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash and that she was intoxicated.

Reeves acted as a pallbearer for Syme, and following her funeral, she was buried next to her daughter in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in LA.

Speaking about Syme and loss in an interview with Parade in 2006, Reeves said: “Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, “It’s gone and I’m better”. They’re wrong.

“When the people you love are gone, you’re alone. I miss being a part of their lives and them being part of mine. I wonder what the present would be like if they were here - what we might have done together. I miss all the great things that will never be.”

He added: “Damn it! It’s not fair! It’s absurd. All you can do is hope that grief will be transformed and, instead of feeling pain and confusion, you will be together again in memory, that there will be solace and pleasure there, not just loss.”

When asked if loss had changed him, Reeves replied: “Much of my appreciation of life has come through loss.

“Life is precious. It’s worthwhile.”