page_title: David Burtka
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: David Burtka / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: David Burtka and Neil Patrick Harris at a ceremony for Harris to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in September 2011.
context_page_description: David Michael Burtka is an American actor and professional chef. He is known for his acting roles in theatre and television shows such as How I Met Your Mother and The Play About the Baby. After his role on How I Met Your Mother, Burtka gained media attention for dating Neil Patrick Harris, whom he later married in 2014.
context_section_description: Six months after Burtka's first How I Met Your Mother appearance, allegations arose that the actor had received the part because of a romantic relationship with one of the show's stars, actor Neil Patrick Harris. Speculation around this story eventually led Harris to acknowledge publicly that he himself was gay in a cover story in People Weekly Magazine. Burtka made no public response to the story, though later Harris stated that he and Burtka were moving in together.
  Burtka and Harris attended the Emmy Awards in September 2007 as an openly acknowledged couple for the first time, an appearance which Harris discussed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
  Burtka's mother died of cancer in May 2008.
  On February 4, 2009, Burtka and Harris appeared for the first time on stage together, singing a duet from Rent at a benefit for The LGBT Community Center in New York. The two actors had been together since April 2004. Harris customarily referred to Burtka as "my better half" and "an amazing chef." Burtka and Harris became parents to fraternal twins Gideon Scott and Harper Grace, who were born in October 2010, via a surrogate mother.
  Burtka, though not the biological father of his ex Lane Janger's children, who had also been born via surrogate, remained close to them over the years.
  Following the passage of the Marriage Equality Act in New York on June 24, 2011, Burtka and Harris announced their engagement, stating that they had proposed to each other five years earlier but had kept the engagement secret until same-sex marriage became legal in their state.
  According to Harris, Burtka quit acting full-time to become a professional chef. He graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Pasadena in the summer of 2009; afterwards, he began running a Los Angeles catering company which he called "Gourmet M.D." Burtka did continue to act, including in It Shoulda Been You on Broadway in 2015.
  Burtka's first cookbook, Life is a Party, a collection of recipes and tips on entertaining, was published in April 2019.
caption: Burtka with his husband, Neil Patrick Harris, in September 2011.
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