From the most copied haircut of all time to watching her ex get it on with Angelina Jolie, writer Kate Wills explains why she’ll always be Team Jen.
RACHEL, America’s Sweetheart, Poor Jen… however you know her, there is perhaps no other A-lister we feel as personally invested in as Jennifer Aniston.
Whether it’s because she was beamed into our living rooms for a decade as Rachel Green on Friends, or because watching your ex get it on with Angelina Jolie is every woman’s worst nightmare, for some reason we all feel like we know Jen.
Despite the Pilates-honed body, designer wardrobe and the Malibu beach home, she’s strangely relatable.
And though she’s better known for her hair and being perpetually unlucky in love than for her post-Friends acting career, she’s also become a symbol for women who don’t fit neatly into the “married with kids” pigeonhole.
On February 11 she will turn 50, and it’s funny now to think that Jen was actually on the verge of giving up acting before her breakthrough role as Rachel on the sitcom that defined an era.
The daughter of actors John Aniston and Nancy Dow and a self-described “chubby” teenager, by the time she was 23 she had landed parts on dodgy horror films such as Leprechaun.
But her career was going nowhere until she got the script for Friends, after reportedly bumping into an NBC executive at a petrol station.
Her will-they-won’t-they love story with Ross, and that hairdo (which Jen later called “the ugliest haircut I’ve ever seen”) turned her into one of the most adored and bankable TV stars of all time.
When the show ended in 2004, along with her five cast mates she was commanding a record-breaking $1million (£779,000) an episode.
A series of movie roles followed – including an acclaimed part in The Good Girl – but it was Jen’s personal life that we all wanted front-row seats for.
When she married Brad Pitt in 2000, it seemed like a fairy-tale ending. But the golden couple weren’t to be. While Brad was filming Mr & Mrs Smith in 2004, he famously fell in love with Angelina Jolie, and Brangelina was born.
A very public split ensued, with Jen accusing Brad of having a “sensitivity chip missing”, and the actress was cast as the jilted good girl to Jolie’s femme fatale in our collective imaginations.
Tellingly, sales of Team Aniston T-shirts apparently outsold Angelina ones 25 to 1.
Her fraught relationship with her mother – they were estranged after Nancy tried to cash in on her daughter’s fame by writing a book called From Mother And Daughter To Friends – made her seem more human.
And from that point, the Poor Jen narrative was established. She dated co-stars Vince Vaughn and Gerard Butler, but the happily ever after eluded her.
In 2011 she started dating – and later married – Justin Theroux, but after seven years together they announced their separation in early 2018.
If rumours Jen had never got over Brad always dogged her, they went into overdrive after Brad’s bitter 2016 split with Angelina. But
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