Childhood traumas, high-profile divorces, and unrelenting tabloid coverage. If you think
being a movie star and one of the "Friends" is easy, Jennifer Aniston might disagree.
An accident from Jennifer Aniston's childhood has left her with a severe phobia that she has
yet to overcome and possibly never will. She explained in an interview with Extra,
"I drove my tricycle into a swimming pool when
I was five. And I didn't let go. And I sunk to the bottom."
Luckily, one of Aniston's brothers was there and saw what had happened. Acting quickly,
he dove in and pulled her to safety.
Decades later, the trauma from that frightening incident continued to
stick with her. She explained in an interview with E! News,
"I can't go underwater and no one will believe me. I honestly can't."
The lingering effects of that childhood experience came into play when Aniston was filming her 2014
feature, "Cake." In the film, Aniston's character deals with lingering trauma from a horrific
accident, which she addresses by, ironically, undergoing water therapy. In those scenes,
the script called for her to submerge herself underwater in a swimming pool — something she
found exceedingly difficult to accomplish. As Aniston told Extra, she held weights
in her hands for the scene, in which she's supposed to descend to the bottom of the pool.
"I just couldn't. It took 30-some-odd takes for
me to finally get any kind of take that you saw me sort of going down."
As she explained during a conversation with fellow actor Sandra Bullock for Interview,
Aniston's childhood was deeply impacted by the fractious relationship between her parents,
actors John Aniston and Nancy Dow. Still, Aniston turned her ability to stay positive during her
parents' fraught marriage into a coping mechanism for the rest of her life. She told Bullock,
"It comes from growing up in a household that was destabilized and felt unsafe.
Watching adults being unkind to each other, and witnessing certain things
about human behavior that made me think: 'I don't want to do that. I don't want
to be that. I don't want to experience this feeling I'm having in my body right
now. I don't want anyone else that I ever come in contact with ever to feel that.'"
Aniston eventually came to the conclusion that she would do everything in her power
to break that cycle to not replicate the behavior she'd witnessed as a child. As she told Bullock,
"You can either be angry or be a martyr, or you can say,
'You've got lemons? Let's make lemonade.'"
Aniston's parents' marriage ended when she was just 9 years old. She learned
that they were divorcing in dramatic fashion;
when she returned home from attending a friend's birthday, her mother informed her
that her father had left them. Aniston joked during a 2004 interview with Diane Sawyer,
"He was quick. There one minute, and yeah, I think it was like ripping off a Band-Aid."
While her parents' divorce calmed the combative atmosphere that had characterized
her childhood home life, it also proved to be a deeply traumatic time for young Aniston.
When she grew older, Aniston came to realize that childhood experience left her with an
aversion to embarking on serious relationships of her own, given that she had nothing to
model what a healthy marital partnership was supposed to look like. She told WSJ Magazine,
"It was always a little bit difficult for me in relationships. My parents,
watching my family's relationship, didn't make me kind of go, 'Oh, I can't wait to do that.'"
Throughout her life, Aniston never felt like she could live up to the expectations set by
her mother. Growing up, Aniston recalled that her mother had an intense focus on appearance,
which led to a barrage of criticism. Aniston told The Hollywood Reporter,
"Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn't."
In that interview, Aniston noted that her mother's behavior put a wedge between them, saying,
"She had a temper. I can't tolerate that. She was
also very unforgiving. She would hold grudges that I just found so petty."
The mother-daughter dynamic between Jennifer Aniston and mom Nancy Dow had never been great,
but it turned downright frigid in 1999 with the publication of "From Mother and Daughter to
Friends: A Memoir." Dow wrote the tell-all book under her married name, Nancy Aniston, in order
to capitalize on her daughter's "Friends" fame. Jennifer was reportedly blindsided by the book,
feeling it to be a massive betrayal by the one person whom she should have trusted the most.
The book led to an estrangement between the two that lasted for a decade;
so bitter were her feelings toward her mom that Aniston refused to invite her
to attend her wedding to Brad Pitt in 2000. Aniston told interviewer
Diane Sawyer in 2004 of the state of their relationship at that time,
"I never thought my mom would not know my husband."
However, that chill eventually began to thaw. In a 2005 interview with Vanity Fair,
Aniston revealed that she and her mother were both making moves toward reconciliation,
even though it hadn't yet happened. Aniston and her mom ultimately did
repair their relationship, and Dow died in 2016 at the age of 79.
Ever since Jennifer Aniston was a child, she struggled academically. Over time,
she'd come to accept that perhaps she simply didn't possess the same level of intelligence
as her classmates. It wasn't until she was in her 20s, however, that she learned there was another
reason for why she lagged behind others in school: she was dyslexic. She told The Hollywood Reporter,
"Now I had this great discovery. I felt like all of my childhood trauma-dies,
tragedies, dramas were explained."
According to Aniston, her diagnosis of dyslexia came about by accident.
"The only reason I knew [that I had it] was because I went to get a prescription
for glasses. And I had to read a paragraph, and they gave me a quiz,
gave me 10 questions based on what I'd just read, and I think I got three right."
In 2000, Jennifer Aniston walked down the aisle with actor Brad Pitt,
with the Malibu wedding reportedly costing a cool million dollars.
"Wow, he's really got that sexy smoldering thing going on." Sexy smoldering to 3:36
During their marriage, they walked red carpets together, and Pitt even guested
on an episode of "Friends." Just a few years later, in January 2005,
they announced they were separating. By the end of the year, their divorce was finalized.
A decade later, Aniston wed for the second time, this time to actor and writer Justin
Theroux. That marriage ended up being shorter; in February 2018,
the couple issued a statement announcing that they'd split the previous year.
Aniston has remained on good terms with both of her ex-husbands;
after the newly single Pitt attended her 50th birthday party in 2018,
fans began pining for the two to get back together. They didn't, but have reportedly
remained friendly. Ditto with Theroux, given that he and Aniston have only had good things
to say about each other since their divorce. Despite their brevity, Aniston declared that
she doesn't view either of her marriages as failures. Aniston told Elle in 2018,
"My marriages, they've been very successful, in [my] personal opinion. And when they came
to an end, it was a choice that was made because we chose to be happy,
and sometimes happiness didn't exist within that arrangement anymore."
During her marriage to Justin Theroux, Jennifer Aniston found herself in the midst of a media
frenzy when rampant speculation and frequent tabloid reports began claiming that she was
pregnant. In 2016, Aniston fired back in a scathing op-ed she wrote for HuffPost.
Not only did she set the record straight by declaring she wasn't pregnant, she also took
issue with the notion that a woman is defined by her marital and parental status. She wrote,
"We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child.
We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies."
Several years later, Aniston revealed why those reports were especially hurtful to
her at that time: she and Theroux actually had been trying to start
a family. She admitted in a 2022 interview with Allure,
"It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road. All the years and years
of speculation […] It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it."
When Jennifer Aniston wrote her 2016 HuffPost op-ed criticizing
the media for its obsession with whether or not she was pregnant,
she referenced the army of paparazzi that has relentlessly stalked her. She wrote,
"Every day my husband and I are harassed by dozens of aggressive photographers staked
outside our home who will go to shocking lengths to obtain any kind of photo,
even if it means endangering us or the unlucky pedestrians who happen to be nearby."
Of course, Aniston has experienced her own personal dust-ups with the
paparazzi before. In 2005, she launched a lawsuit against a paparazzo who took photos
of her sunbathing topless in her backyard. Those photos ended up in European magazines,
before ultimately being published elsewhere.
Aniston explained in a 2016 interview with Marie Claire that the media's constant spin
on her life was why she decided to fire back with her HuffPost op-ed. She said,
"My marital status has been shamed; my divorce status was shamed;
my lack of a mate had been shamed; my nipples have been shamed."
She continued,
"It's like, 'Why are we only looking at women through this particular lens of
picking us apart? Why are we listening to it?' I just thought: 'I have worked
too hard in this life and this career to be whittled down to a sad, childless human.'"
"This was not just about me, it was also saying
something…insulting women that are out there doing this on their own."
Aniston had more to say on that topic in a 2018 interview with InStyle, noting,
"I've definitely had my fair share of sexism in the media."
She also called out the typical narrative that
plays out in the media during pretty much every celebrity split, saying,
"When a couple breaks up in Hollywood,
it's the woman who is scorned. The woman is left sad and alone. She's the failure."
When the world shut down in 2020 due to the pandemic, Jennifer Aniston suddenly found
herself without the distraction of constant work opportunities. With film and television production
halted, and everyone advised to quarantine within their homes, Aniston decided to use
this rare period of stillness in her otherwise hectic life to engage in some self-reflection.
For Aniston, that reassessment resulted in
resetting her priorities. She explained in her conversation with InStyle in 2021,
"My level of anxiety has gone down by eliminating
the unnecessary sort of fat in life that I had thought was necessary."
During that interview, Aniston was also open about how she'd embraced therapy
in order to quell her anxiety while also working on improving herself.
Although her father left Jennifer Aniston and her mother when she was just nine,
he ultimately resumed his paternal role in her life. A source told the Daily Mail in 2020,
"Jen forgave her father for walking out a long time ago.
But their relationship has had its ups and downs."
According to that source, Aniston hadn't spoken with her father for some time, but
during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had something of an epiphany about the brevity of human life.
Recognizing her father wouldn't be around for too much longer, she made an effort to reconnect.
In November 2022, the "Days of Our Lives" star died at the age of 89.
Aniston paid tribute in an Instagram post, featuring a vintage photo of her
father holding her when she was just an infant. She wrote in the caption,
"Sweet papa ...⁣ John Anthony Aniston. ⁣You were one of the
most beautiful humans I ever knew. I am so grateful that you went soaring into
the heavens in peace — and without pain. […] I'll love you till the end of time."