After years of maintaining that he’s against marriage, Simon Cowell says he’s finally found “the one.”
The 50-year-old “American Idol” judge has been quietly dating series makeup artist Mezhgan Hussainy for the past six months and is now hinting that he’s ready to end his much-touted bachelorhood.
“I’m smitten with Mezhgan. I think she’s the one,” Cowell said during a recently taped interview for ITV1’s “Life Stories,” set to air next month in Britain.
“She’s very special. You know when you’ve found somebody very special.”
When interviewer and friend Piers Morgan asked if he was engaged to her, Cowell replied, “No comment.”
Cowell and the 36-year-old Hussainy have been working together since 2003, when she joined the “Idol” crew in the singing competition’s second season. She was asked to do the makeup for the show’s first season, but has said she turned them down in favor of “Family Feud.”
Although she’s now leading a glitzy Hollywood lifestyle — complete with her own makeup line, Me by (Me)zhgan — her life wasn’t always so glamorous.
Hussainy grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she got a front-row seat to the brutality that followed the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion.
In 1981, the 8-year-old Hussainy, her three brothers and parents — a computer programmer and teacher — paid smugglers to get them into Peshawar, Pakistan.
The journey “took us 10 days on foot through the mountains and the Khyber Pass,” she told Emmy magazine in 2007. Nine months later, the family was cleared to move to the United States, where they had relatives living in New York and California.
They landed in Hollywood, living in an apartment building where Hussainy said she started giving manicures to other building tenants at the age of 12. In her teen years, she modeled for MAC cosmetics and got a couple of soap-opera acting gigs.
Compared to the trials of her early childhood, it’s no wonder she told Emmy that working with Cowell “is a piece of cake. His bark is much bigger than his bite.”
The couple outed themselves when Cowell kissed Hussainy during a “Britain’s Got Talent” audition last week.
On Valentine’s Day, he gave Hussainy an enormous diamond ring, reportedly worth almost $400,000, which she displayed on her left ring finger.
Cowell’s last big public relationship was with “Extra” correspondent Terri Seymour. They broke up in 2008 amid rumors that he was unwilling to settle down. When Hussainy was 20, she married a rug merchant who was 13 years older than her. They divorced after eight years.