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 “The Big Bang Theory” star Jim Parsons married Todd Spiewak on Saturday night at the Rainbow Room in New York, Page Six has exclusively learned. 
 
 Last year the pair celebrated 14 years together and Parsons gushed on Instagram, “I met this guy… 14 years ago today and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, no contest.” 
 
 He added with a pic of Spiewak singing into a microphone, “One of his greatest gifts to me is that he no longer takes me to sing karaoke. Also, I believe this was a selfie with an actual camera, as our phones couldn’t do that back then hahaha!” 
 
 Parsons came out as gay in a 2012 New York Times profile and said he was in a 10-year relationship. 
 
 But in 2014, he told Ellen DeGeneres he was in no rush to tie the knot. 
 
 Ironically, Parsons’ character on his hit CBS show concluded the season with a marriage proposal — to Mayim Bialik’s character. 
 
 Parsons’ rep confirmed the nuptials happened Saturday. ||||| Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Jim Parsons has been with his partner Todd Spiewak for more than 14 years 
 
 Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons has married the man he calls "the best thing that ever happened" to him, after 14 years together. 
 
 He and Todd Spiewak tied the knot at New York's Rainbow Room restaurant on Saturday, according to reports. 
 
 It comes as - spoiler alert - his character Sheldon Cooper's slow-burn relationship with Amy also reached a major milestone on the hit sitcom. 
 
 The 44-year-old is one of the highest-paid TV stars in the US. 
 
 He shares that title with Big Bang co-stars Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki, who all get paid an estimated $900,000 (£696,000) for each episode of the comedy, about a group of highly intelligent - but slightly socially inept - friends. 
 
 Image copyright Instagram/Jim Parsons 
 
 Last year, Parsons marked his anniversary with Spiewak by sharing a picture of them on Instagram singing karaoke, writing: "I met this guy (the one with the mic) 14 years ago today and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, no contest. 
 
 "One of his greatest gifts to me is that he no longer takes me to sing karaoke." 
 
 In a 2015 interview he was asked if he and Spiewak planned to marry. 
 
 "I don't know - I guess I kind of think so but there's no date in the book, or ring on the finger," he told US chat show The View, pointing out he had grown up thinking gay marriage would not be a possibility. 
 
 But he added: "I have grown more interested in the idea and certainly supportive of the notion." 
 
 Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk. ||||| “People may not like me as Elwood, people may say ‘I enjoyed Jimmy Stewart more,’ ” he said recently, over coffee at a Midtown Mahattan hotel. “There’s nothing I can do about that. But I have to come in and take a stand on the performance, as it were.” 
 
 He memorizes his dialogue well beforehand, writing out lines on white 3-by-5 index cards (he has 200 for “Harvey”). He creates precise physical worlds for his characters, down to where they would place a hat or coat or, in the case of Harvey, where the rabbit would be at every second. He obsesses over body language too: the angular, ungainly stride he created for Sheldon, and the alternately swift and halting paces of Elwood. 
 
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 And he still has never seen the Stewart film or any stage production of “Harvey.” 
 
 “I try to master every facet of a character in order to build a safety net for myself, so I can go on to take more risks to create someone really distinct,” said Mr. Parsons, who is 39, roughly the same age as Stewart when he first played Elwood on Broadway.“One of my very early teachers said over and over again: ‘What are you bringing to the party?’ That expression never left me. 
 
 “Well, what about it? What am I bringing to this party?” 
 
 “If I’m not making a choice with each and every line,” he continued, “then why are you bothering watching me?” 
 
 Mr. Parsons hastened to add that he was not disrespecting Stewart, nor was he cavalier about audience reactions. He is the sort of person, in fact, you could imagine taking his bow then apologizing to theatergoers if any of them were disappointed with his work. His unfailing politeness has an old-fashioned courtliness to it; at a rehearsal for “Harvey” this month, he said sorry every time he had to ask the script prompter to remind him of a line. 
 
 It sounded almost automatic, reflecting a tendency to speak his mind without a trace of self-consciousness (a habit that makes his television character so winningly exasperating). At one point during the rehearsal, for instance, the actress Jessica Hecht — who plays Elwood’s sister, Veta — put a prop down on stage in a spot where Mr. Parsons wasn’t expecting it. 
 
 “Did Jessica leave that there?” Mr. Parsons said. “That’s never going to work.” 
 
 “It won’t happen again,” Ms. Hecht replied collegially. 
 
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 “It never happened before,” he said — not in an accusatory way but, like Sheldon, with an almost absent-minded bluntness. 
 
 “Um, let’s talk about it more,” she joked. 
 
 Later, Ms. Hecht described the way Mr. Parsons speaks as a kind of afterthought. 
 
 “His concentration is so total that he sometimes says surprising things that I don’t even think he’s aware he’s saying,” said Ms. Hecht, a Tony nominee for her last Broadway role, in the 2010 revival of “A View from the Bridge.” “There’s something so dorky in the best way about him.” 
 
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 Growing up in Houston, the son of an elementary-school teacher and a plumbing company president, Mr. Parsons was a theater nerd from the start; he recalled throwing himself into the role of the Kola-Kola bird in his first-grade production of “The Elephant’s Child” by Kipling. His curiosity about performance grew from watching the physical antics and reaction shots in the television sitcom “Three’s Company.” 
 
 “There was a kind of musicality to the actors’ timing and rhythms that I really responded to,” said Mr. Parsons, who also played piano as a boy. 
 
 A turning point came in junior year of high school, when Mr. Parsons was mulling the idea of becoming a meteorologist (Gulf Coast weather had led to a fascination with hurricanes). Thanks to his drama teacher and a fellow student, he was persuaded to take the role of Frederick Fellowes, a nosebleed-prone actor who beats himself up when things go amiss, in the farce “Noises Off.” But as the show moved toward opening night, he became concerned that he and his castmates weren’t in fine enough form. 
 
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 “All we had was each other, and our very basic mastery of the play, but at our first performance we pulled together and relied on each other and everything clicked,” he said. “We didn’t mug for laughs, we didn’t do anything showy — we just worked together as an ensemble. I felt totally comfortable in this warped world that was far away from the real world. And I wanted to keep doing it.” 
 
 Mr. Parsons went on to perform more than two dozen plays during and after his undergraduate years at the University of Houston; he was so busy that he failed a course in meteorology, putting an end to that career path. He did 17 plays in three years with an experimental theater company, Infernal Bridegroom Productions. He was the exploitative doctor in Büchner’s “Woyzeck” in a parking lot, and the servant Clov in Beckett’s “Endgame” and the gambler Rusty Charlie in “Guys & Dolls,” both performed in warehouses. 
 
 After graduation he pursued classical training in the master’s program at the University of San Diego, then spent several years in New York working Off Broadway and in guest appearances on television while making trips to Los Angeles looking for work. 
 
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 When he received the pilot script for “The Big Bang Theory,” he said, the show — about a group of genius-level scientists with terrible social skills — seemed clever enough to him, but the role of Sheldon felt like a great fit. 
 
 “There was something in his inability to understand sarcasm, his inability to read emotions off people in a general sense, that I understood,” Mr. Parsons said with a crooked smile. (For the record, in person he is far more at ease and a much better listener than Sheldon.) 
 
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 Chuck Lorre, one of the creators and producers of “Big Bang,” said Mr. Parsons’s audition was so “brilliant” that he asked the actor to return another day to make sure the performance wasn’t a fluke. 
 
 “He physically embodied a character who was like none we had seen before — the peculiar rhythms of the words, the way he held his body,” Mr. Lorre said. “He was uncanny in the choices he was making second to second.” 
 
 (Mr. Parsons is set to return to “Big Bang” in August; “Harvey” opens on June 14.) 
 
 By the winter of 2011 Mr. Parsons had won his first Emmy for “Big Bang” and was midway through Season 4 when he felt he was “spinning my wheels” as an actor, and began looking to do a play again. He landed the role of Tommy Boatwright, a young gay activist in “The Normal Heart” who bucks up the main characters in their fight against AIDS. The humanity and intensity of the play appealed to him, he said, just as Beckett and Büchner once did; in graduate school, too, his thesis project was a 15-minute performance piece about a mentally disabled death-row inmate, a psychiatrist and a murder victim’s father — all played by Mr. Parsons. 
 
 “If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material,” he said. “Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don’t think in terms of comic dialogue.” 
 
 “The Normal Heart” resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship, and working with an ensemble again onstage was like nourishment, he said. As the production was ending last summer, he heard that the Roundabout Theater Company was considering a revival of “Harvey” — initially with John C. Reilly under consideration for Elwood — and last November the play’s director, Scott Ellis, asked him and Ms. Hecht to do a private reading of the work in Los Angeles. 
 
 “Jim was solid in ‘The Normal Heart,’ ” Mr. Ellis said, “but his character didn’t really change in the journey of that play, so I wanted to see if Jim could take on a challenge and float a couple of feet off the ground, so to speak, in that magical way Elwood has. And in the reading he was just smart, smart, smart.” 
 
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 In rehearsals Mr. Parsons focused particularly on his relationship with Harvey — a character who is not there. He chose spots in the Studio 54 theater to fix his gaze, at the exact height where Harvey’s face would be, and developed a series of hand gestures when Elwood was speaking to or making way for the rabbit. If the show has plenty of the laugh lines that Mr. Parsons finds familiar from television, he said he was more aware of the differences between Elwood and Sheldon — and was savoring them. 
 
 “Elwood has such warmth, and wants nothing more than to connect with other people, whereas my nine-month-a-year job is a character who says things like, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop listening to you and talk now,’ ” Mr. Parsons said. “The jump-out-of-bed happiness I feel transcends any nerves about taking on a history-laden role. 
 
 “Now, would it have been preferable to take on a role that had not been created before? God yes. But breaking in a new role takes more time than I’ll have until my time on TV comes to an end. And when it does, I hope I’ll be back for longer.”
– In November, Jim Parsons commemorated his 14-year anniversary with partner Todd Spiewak with a celebratory throwback picture. On Saturday, Spiewak, 40, and the 44-year-old star of The Big Bang Theory made their longtime union official, marrying at New York City's Rainbow Room, Page Six reports, with a confirmation from Parsons' rep. Parsons had previously hedged on future wedding plans, telling Ellen DeGeneres in 2014 he was in no hurry and The View in 2015 that "there's no date in the book," per the BBC. Parsons came out as gay in 2012 in the New York Times.