Jennifer Aniston

[mameha]

You're welcome Yeah this Bennetts seems to lean towards the dramatic (not to mention biased) side. Here's the rest of the article.

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Aniston's friends were particularly horrified by W magazine's 60-page photo spread featuring Pitt and Jolie as an early 1960s-style married couple with a brood of miniature blond Brads. "You want to shake the shit out of him and say, 'Your timing sucks!'" says one. "He's made some choices that have been tremendously insensitive."

The W feature, which was entitled "Domestic Bliss," couldn't be blamed on the paparazzi; not only did Pitt conceptualize it, but he retained the international rights, so he actually profited from it. Aniston's eyes widen in surprise when I mention that last fact, and she grimaces. "I didn't know that," she says. But she refuses to indulge herself in an angry reaction. "Is it odd timing? Yeah. But it's not my life," she says. "He makes his choices. He can do - whatever. We're divorced, and you can see why."

She shakes her head in exasperation. "I can also imagine Brad having absolutely no clue why people would be appalled by it," she adds. "Brad is not mean-spirited; he would never intentionally try to rub something in my face. In hindsight, I can see him going, 'Oh - I can see that that was inconsiderate.' But I know Brad. Brad would say, 'That's art!'"

She rolls her eyes, pretending to screw something into her forehead. "There's a sensitivity chip that's missing," she says.

Aniston's friends are amazed at her willingness to give Pitt the benefit of the doubt, but they basically agree with her assessment. "I don't think he was trying to hurt Jen," says Courtney Cox, Aniston's dear friend and former co-star on Friends. "I don't think that Brad is malicious, or a liar. The W thing was his idea, but I don't think he thought that one through, about what it would look like to anyone else."

Although Aniston remains determined not to lash out, she sometimes questions her own restraint. "Why am I protecting him?" she exclaimed to one friend, only to continue with what she sees as the dignified course of action.

"I'm not interested in taking public pot-shots," she explains. "It's not my concern anymore. What happened after the separation - it's his life now. I've made a conscious effort not to add to the toxicity of this situation. I haven't retaliated. I don't want to be a part of it. I don't have a halo that I'm polishing here; everyone has their personal thoughts. But I would much rather move on. I am not defined by this relationship. I am not defined by the part they're making me play in the triangle. It's maddening to me. But I had a mom who was very angry about her divorce, and made shots, and I don't want to play that out. If people are frustrated that I don't want to do that, I'm sorry. I'm figuring this out as I go along. This is my first time at this particular picnic."

As befits a storybook tale, the Pitts' marriage was the first for both of them, and some of Aniston's fondest memories are from the time they shared before the world discovered their romance. "We had so much fun falling in love," she says wistfully. "It was so private; we kept it to ourselves for so long. It was something we were really proud of."

But after the relationship became public, it was always difficult to reconcile their mythic image with the quotidien reality of their private life, which was more likely to involve watching television, ordering takeout, and having close friends over than swanning around on red carpets.

"We were put on a pedestal, but we were a couple just like anybody else," Aniston says. "When we were home, we'd watch the shows we loved, and one time there was this program called It's Good to Be Brad and Jen. It was all about us going to Scotland and Greece and having our matching S.U.V.'s, and it wasn't my life - I'd never even been to some of these places, but even I got sucked in. We're sitting there saying, 'Yeah, boy, it sure must be good to be Brad and Jen!' So is it our responsibility to demystify this, to say, 'This is not what it's like - it's not that fabulous, not that great?' There's no doubt our life is fortunate but..."

But even golden couples struggle with the formidable challenges of marriage. "It's like the ebb and flow of every relationship," Aniston says. "It's hard; it gets easy; it gets fun again. What's hard to sustain is some ideal that it's perfect. That's ridiculous. What's fantastic about marriage is getting through those ebbs and flows with the same person, and looking across the room and saying, 'I'm still here. And I still love you.' You re-meet, reconnect. You have marriages within marriages within marriages. That's what I love about marriage. That's what I want in marriage. It's unfortunate, but we live in a very disposable society. Those moments where it looks like, 'Uh-oh, this isn't working!' - those are the most important, transformative moments. Most couples draw up divorce papers when they're missing out on an amazing moment of deepening and enlightenment and connection."

She sighs heavily and turns away to light a Merit cigarette. "That's not Brad's view of it," she says, glum again. "We believe in different things, I guess. You can't force a relationship, even if it's your view of how you like it to be conducted. Obviously two people leave a relationship because there's a different thought pattern happening. My goal is to try and achieve a very deep, committed relationship. That's what I'm interested in, but it's someone's prerogative to be or not to be in or out of a relationship."

"I think Jen wanted to work it out, and I don't think he wanted to work it out," Andrea Bendewald observes. "I don't think he knew what he wanted."

Nevertheless, Aniston has only kind words about her marriage. "I still feel so lucky to have experienced it. I wouldn't know what I know now if I hadn't been married to Brad," she says. "I love Brad; I really love him. I will love him for the rest of my life. He's a fantastic man. I don't regret any of it, and I'm not going to beat myself up about it. We spent seven very intense years together; we taught each other a lot - about healing, and about fun. We helped each other through a lot, and I really value that. It was a beautiful, complicated relationship. The sad thing, for me, is the way it's been reduced to a Hollywood cliche - or maybe it's just a human cliche. I have a lot of compassion for everyone going through this."

As for what went wrong, Aniston rejects any simplistic explanations. "It's just complicated," she says. "Relationships are complicated, whether they're friendships or business relationships or parent relationships. I don't think anybody in a marriage gets to a point where they feel like, 'We've got it!' You're two people continually evolving, and there will be times when those changes clash. There are all these levels of growth - and when you stop growing together, that's when the problems happen."

Friends say it was always difficult for Aniston and Pitt to maintain the intimacy they craved while juggling their demanding work schedules, which often required long separations. Those tensions notwithstanding, Aniston believed her marriage was the real thing. "We both did," she says.

So what happened? "I think - it changed," she says, haltingly. "We both changed."

She sighs again. "You do the best you can, and I think we did. We did the best we could."

Both of them? She looks me straight in the eye. "Both parties," she says.

But nagging questions remain about Pitt's conduct during the months leading up to their separation. "She was committed to the marriage," says Bendewald. "He wanted to figure out who he was and what he wanted, but he seemed to want to do it without being married. She wanted him to figure out what he wanted and stay married. He didn't think he could do that, so at that point she was like, 'O.K., go figure it out.'"

Throughout that period, Pitt insisted that his relationship with Jolie was not the cause of his marital discontent, but his actions since the separation have suggested otherwise.

"I just don't know what happened," Aniston admits. "There's a lot I don't understand, a lot I don't know, and probably never will really. So I choose to take with me as much integrity and dignity and respect for what that relationship as I can. I feel as if I'm trying to scrounge around and pick up the pieces in the midst of this media circus."

Does she buy Brad's claim that he didn't cheat on her before they separated? "I choose to believe my husband," Aniston says. "At this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything, but I would much rather choose to believe him."

Their friends are still trying to parse what happened with Jolie. "I don't think he started an affair physically, but I think he was attracted to her," says Courtney Cox, who vacationed with her husband, David Arquette, and the Pitts on Anguilla just before they announced their separation. "There was a connection, and he was honest about that with Jen. Most of the time, when people are attracted to other people, they don't tell. At least he was honest about it. It was an attraction that he fought for a period of time."

He may have been fighting it, but Pitt virtually checked out of his marriage as soon as he began working with Jolie, according to Aniston's intimates. "He was gone," says one.

Aniston has met Jolie only once, when she took a passing opportunity to say hello. "It was on the lot of Friends - I pulled over and introduced myself," Aniston recalls. "I said, 'Brad is so excited about working with you. I hope you guys have a really good time.'"

But he soon became emotionally unavailable to his wife, at a time when she needed him desperately. Pitt's withdrawal coincided with the end of Friends, which Aniston experienced as a huge loss. "That was really painful. It was a family, and I don't do great with families splitting up," says Aniston, who was deeply wounded by her parents' bitter divorce, which happened when she was 9. "It was hard to have such a wonderful constant in your life, a place to go every day, and then all of a sudden it's not there."

[mameha]

When she reached out for her husband's support, she didn't get it. "He just wasn't there for me," she says.

To the amazement of Aniston's friends, Pitt didn't even show up for the final taping of Friends.

"He was working," she says, still defending him, even though movie stars have been known to request changes in a shooting schedule to accomodate events that are important to them.

Although she isn't talking to Pitt these days, Aniston remains in regular contact with his mother, whom she loves dearly, and she doesn't rule out a better relationship with Brad in the future. "I really do hope someday that we can be friends again," she says.

She certainly doesn't regret her four-and-a-half-year marriage - not even the million-dollar wedding with 50,000 flowers, a 40-member gospel choir, a Greek bouzouki band, and fireworks exploding over the Pacific. ("It was fantastic!" she says.) But she does have other regrets.

"There's a lot I would probably do differently," she says. "I'd take more vacations - getting away from work, enjoying each other in different environments. But there was something always preventing it; either he was working or I was."

She made more profound mistakes as well. "I wouldn't give over so much of myself, which I did at times," she admits. "It was that thing about being a nurturer; I love taking care of people, and I definitely put his needs before mine sometimes. It's seamless; somewhere along the way, you sort of lose yourself. You just don't know when it happens. It's such an insiduous thing, you don't really see where it started - and where you ended. There's no one to blame but yourself. I've always been that way in relationships, even with my mom. It's not the healthiest. I feel like I've broken that pattern now. I'll never let myself down like that again. I feel like my sense of self is being strengthened because of it."

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There's about a page left I'll try to get up tomorrow.

[jewels007]

THANKS AGAIN. Take your time.

[mameha]

Article cont

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Aniston's unhappy family history colored her experience of marriage from the outset. "I come from a fighting family, and I had a tough time arguing," she says. "Fighting scared me. I wouldn't speak up for myself. That's something I've learned; I will always speak my mind."

In recent months, the process of healing from the breakup with Brad has also created a new openness to healing relations with her mother. Their estrangement began nearly a decade ago, when Nancy Aniston gossiped about Jennifer on a television show, and worsened when she tried to cash in on Jennifer's fame by writing an appalling book called From Mother and Daughter to Friends. Jennifer severed all contact, but she is now re-asserting their relationship.

"We've exchanged messages," she says. "Our doors are open. We're taking baby steps. It's a good thing."

Although Aniston incurred criticism for distancing herself from her mother, who did not attend her wedding, she offers no apologies. "I feel pretty good about the choices I've made. The choice of not speaking to Mom for a while - that's ours. Nobody else has to understand it. The same thing with Brad and myself," she says. "I wouldn't change my childhood, I wouldn't change my heartaches, I wouldn't change my successes. I wouldn't change any of it, because I really love who I am, and am continuing to become.

"Besides, it's all in the past," she adds. "This doesn't kill you. You move on. You can't let the devastation of a divorce take over and win - let it make you this bitter, closed-off, angry, skeptical person. Then you're just falling victim to it. You don't want to shut your heart down. You don't want to feel that when a marriage ends, your life is over. You can survive anything. Compared to what other people are surviving out there in the world, this is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things. Human endurance is unbelievable. Think of what mothers of soldiers have to rise above! Everything's relative."

She looks down at her firm, fit body. "Nothing's broke," she says.

Catching the quizzical look on my face, she concedes, "Maybe a little bruised."

A few weeks later, on a stifling hot day in Chicago, Aniston and I are sitting in her hotel suite looking out on Lake Michigan, which is studded with little white boats. I've just told her about the gossip magazine that she's registered her as "Mrs. Smith." The report claims Aniston is taking perverse pleasure in making hotel staffers address her as Mrs. Smith, even though they know perfectly well who she is.

The only problem with this amusing tidbit is that it's not true. "I wish I'd thought of it," says Aniston, who is registered under an entirely different, although equally humorous, name.

Despite her vow of abstinence, she succumbed to a celebrity magazine the other evening - and immediately regretted it. "I feel like I've fallen off the wagon," she moans. Unfortunately, the first publication she picked up featured an insult from Kimberly Stewart, Rod's party-girl daughter. "She said I'm homely," Aniston says. "It literally ruined my night. I got my feelings very hurt, actually. That was my instant Karma."

She has always fretted about her appearance, although that is often hard for others to believe. Posing for her Vanity Fair cover shoot, Aniston was equally fetching in French-dance-hall-girl black stockings and in a half-open oversize shirt that evoked every man's favorite just-rolled-out-of-bed look. With her tousled hair, cobalt-blue eyes, and dazzling smile, she seemed the ultimate adorable sexpot. Far from pining away in seclusion, she appeared to be sending a far more spirited message - like "Eat your heart out, Brad!"

But Aniston has never been able to reconcile the glamorous Jen on page or screen with the self-doubting woman she sees in the mirror, and the current tabloid coverage has exacerbated that gap. "It's literally two different people - the real me, and the 'Jen' they write about, 'fighting back', 'getting revenge,' - everything I couldn't be farther from wanting to do," she says. "So I'm back on the wagon."

When she arrived in Chicago to film The Break-Up, the gossip media, frantic for a new development, immediately plunged her into a torrid romance with her co-star, Vince Vaughn. This affair apparently does not exist.

"I adore Vince Vaughn, but I'm not going out with Vince Vaughn," she says. "I barely know the guy. We've exchanged a wine-and-cheese basket for the start of the movie, and we've gone out to dinner with the director and other people. We've got to get to know each other."

But is Aniston seeing him - or anyone else? "Nobody," she says firmly. "I like a lot of people, but I am sooo not 'in like' with anybody. I am really enjoying being by myself. I'm excited that I know there's somebody out there for me, but I am absolutely in no rush. This is all very fresh, very new. This was a seven-year relationship that was very dear, very complicated, very special. I need to honor it."

Aside from her initial flurry of tears, Aniston remains calm and thoughtful through hours of conversation with me over the course of several weeks. But there is one final topic to be addressed, and it's the most hurtful of all. The rumor that Jolie is pregnant with Pitt's child has swept around the world; some reports have even have her finishing her first trimester.

When I ask Aniston about that, she looks as if I've stabbed her in the heart. Her eyes well up and spill over. Several long minutes go by as the tears keep rolling down her cheeks; she bites her lip, seemingly unable to speak. Finally she shakes her head; this subject is simply too excruciating to discuss.

"My worst fear is that Jen will have to face them having a baby together soon, because that would be beyond beyond painful," says Kristin Hahn.

Fortunately, there are many other things to keep Aniston occupied these days. Although she took some time off after Friends ended, she has since shot several movies, and the coming months will bring a series of premieres. First up is Derailed, a thriller starring Aniston and Clive Owen as two married strangers who meet on a train and arrange a hotel-room tryst - only to have an armed man burst in, rape the woman, and beat the man and blackmail him, setting off a horrific chain of events. The film will make adultery look about as appealing as Fatal Attraction did, according to Aniston: "It will be one of those movies you leave and say, 'The affair thing? Maybe not!'"

Then there's Rumor Has It, whose plot revolves around a young reporter's conviction that The Graduate was based on her family, and that she herself is adopted. Mark Ruffalo plays her fiance, and Shirley MacLaine is the Mrs. Robinson character, with Kevin Costner as the Benjamin Braddock who may or may not be Aniston's father.

Yet another upcoming film is Friends With Money, in which Aniston portrays a pothead maid whose friends -- played by Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand -- are all married and far more successful in life.

Aniston is also re-evaluating her future role at Plan B, the production company she formed with Pitt and Brad Grey, who has since become chairman of Paramount. Pitt is now asuming the lead role at Plan B, but Aniston says she will still produce movies through the company.

"I'm excited about what the future holds," she says. "I'm not a fortune-teller; I have no idea how it will play out. People say, 'What are you going to do?' I don't know. I kind of love that not knowing."

She is trying to outgrow some youthful illusions. Prince Charming let her down, and Aniston no longer believes in one true love. "I think there are many people, many soul mates," she says.

But she still has faith in the redeeming power of love itself. "It's out there," she says. "It will happen. There's an amazing man that's wandering the streets right now who's the father of my children. In five years I would hope to be married and have a kid. I still believe in marriage 100 percent. When I hear people say that they would never do it again, it's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Why would you ever close your heart down?"

She gives me a sheepish smile. "Maybe it's a fairy tale, but I believe in happily ever after."

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There you have it

She's going to be featured in the April issue of Vogue in an article entitled, "Don't Feel Sorry For Me."

[rocwilder36]

has anyone noticed the change in her nose over the years? i think she might have visited a surgeon.

[Cee]

Magazine: Glamour

Country: UK

Date: February 2006

Model: Jennifer Aniston

Photographer: Michael Thompson / Steven Meisel

Fashion Editor: Paul Cavaco

Hair: Chris McMillan at Chris McMillan Salon

Make-up: Gucci Westman

Manicure: Lisa Jachno

[aldago]

[Solo]

Im personally a big fan of Jolie, but im not here to say anything against Jen... I respect her and I thought Jen and Brad were the best couple ever...they just matched so perfectly... it was so beautifull to see them smiling and holding hands... Jen has or maybe already had tough time and i understand her..its hard to let ur love go... I never read so long article/interview and im glad ive read it...thank you for posting it. She will find somebody who ll again make her happy and she ll redirect her love... Im fan of Brad for much longer then Jen's , but reading his side of the story makes it look different...Nowadays I just got use to see him with Jolie and now they look fine couple...tho in the beginning I thought he is not strong enough for woman like Angelina...anyway thats another topic...The sad thing is that even that ppl post whatever they want about Jen and they put her pic next to Brangelina .......that must be painful to hear or see that...

has anyone noticed the change in her nose over the years? i think she might have visited a surgeon.

who hasnt ??? i thought about that billion times...as well as for Jolie..for Brad...Cox...Lisa Kudrow ...for bunch of other celebs

Edited February 22, 2006 by Solo

[Anouk]

Oscar 2006

[Brit]

She was very beautiful. But I am bored that she always wears black and the same cut.

Why was she invited anyway?

[victoria's_secret]

So, from reading the above statement. She was kinda cheating on her husband at the time? That's pretty messed up if that's true then.

well during the making of Mr. & Mrs. Smith witnesses said that when they saw Brad & Angelina together, it looked as if they were a couple too, so it's just whatevers.

[DutchChick]

I love Jen!!!!

[SympathysSilhouette]

I've never been crazy about her.

[Rogue]

awww, poor Jen.. let's bump her... some wallpapers. Probably, reposts

http://gereblyecel.atw.hu/page_11.htm

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all little bum crack http://gereblyecel.atw.hu/page_11.htm

}

http://gereblyecel.atw.hu/page_11.htm

}

http://gereblyecel.atw.hu/page_11.htm

[chiva474128]

Uh...I see Ana Beatriz Barros and Ana Hickman in those links, which btw, are all the same.

[sha]

[sha]

[AnaBB Cover]

[Aida]

I've never been a fan of Jen, I like Angie more. Everyone likes Jen only because of Friends.

[AnaBB Cover]

no, i've always hate angelina. i love jen