The media frenzy surrounding her marital split and the huge success of The Break-Up paves the way for the movie break Aniston has been looking for.
Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The best part of breaking up..

IF JENNIFER Aniston's life was a movie, we would be throwing rocks at the screen by now. After all, doesn't every film fan groan when the third act employs that clunkiest of devices, the reversal of fortune, where our heroine appears to have found love, success, great clothes and a feel-good montage - only to have everything come crashing down, forcing our plucky protagonist to regroup and rethink.

For the benefit of latecomers, the story so far has been of a 37-year-old actress who spent a decade at the centre of one of America's most successful sitcoms, became one of the most scrutinised women in the world, then married Hollywood's number-one golden princeling, Brad Pitt. When Friends came to an end three years ago, Aniston, the show's most popular and glamorous star, was poised to make an effortless leap to major movie stardom, possibly even ending Julia Roberts' reign as America's highest-earning female star, and promising Oprah Winfrey that she had also scheduled in a pregnancy or two as well.

Then in 2005 came the clunker; Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt announced their separation, sparking a tabloid frenzy that saw Aniston's private life and personal anguish pored over in excruciating fashion. Vanity Fair eventually drew the admission that she had divorced Pitt for infidelity. "The world was shocked and I was shocked," she said dryly. Angelina Jolie's name never crossed her lips. Soon, it didn't have to.

If you were ever inclined to attack Aniston's acting skills, then Exhibit one for the defence should be Rachel Green, a beacon of hope to nerdy men seeking attractive girlfriends. Green is gregarious and quirky. Aniston is far more guarded and jittery.

Hardly an effusive interviewee at the best of times, when we meet she is weary that as well as Rachel she now has to fight off another image - the ditched all-American divorcee. She compares the last 12 months of press surveillance to being mugged, and says she would like to see legal restraints imposed on the paparazzi who hang outside her home every day: "But people don't really have a lot of sympathy about that. And I don't blame them.

"In a way, it's kind of freeing," she says of the coverage. "I might as well pull my pants down at this point. They've seen everything else."

Sleek in her sleeveless Rifat Ozbek dress, she twists the silver ring on her right hand and weighs even the most innocuous inquiries. If she thinks a question could carry a Brad inference - such as her latest picture's take on staying together - she brushes it aside. Later, however, she offers that "people are just lazy, and we have become a society where everything is disposable. But my parents certainly shouldn't have stayed married and they didn't. I just think you have to put in as much work into a marriage as you can and exhaust every option before you break up".

Such studied reticence begs another question: why on earth did she decide to ride out the wave of unwanted paparazzi attention that followed her final decree by signing up for a film about a couple who have split up?

"I thought it was a joke when I got the phone call from my agent about something called The Break-Up," she admits. "But after reading the script, I thought there was no better way to heal than through laughter, although I don't know if I could have done as good a job if it had come six months earlier."

The other attraction of The Break-Up appears to have been the film's writer and co-star, Vince Vaughn. Since appearing in 1996's Swingers, Vaughn hit his stride in the past two years with laddish successes such as Starsky & Hutch and Wedding Crashers. As loud and expansive as Aniston is low-key and reserved, the two actors are nevertheless rumoured to have become a unit to rival the Brangelina alliance. The two stars refuse to give official confirmation on "Vincifer", although Aniston cracks a little when she talks about their screen partnership.

"You feel like you're acting with a tennis pro and it's a nice little volley back and forth," she says with a rare smile. "It was fun. There were some times I'd just get entertained. You don't always get that kind of fun and feel like you're on an equal playing field."

Vaughn is equally protective when lauding Aniston. "She's so easy to feel drawn to," he says.

"You can see why people are so enamoured."

In turn she overcame her own body consciousness for a scene Vaughn had written where her character taunts her ex-boyfriend by strolling around the apartment nude to show off her bikini wax. "When I read it, it seemed so long and extensive," says Aniston. "It was literally: 'She walks down the hallway, walks through the living room, opens the fridge, takes out a cola ...' I don't walk around my own house that much naked, quite honestly. Doing the scene felt like it was taking so long. I felt like I was walking in slow motion, and it wasn't too comfortable."

The acting environment is one place Aniston has always felt comfortable. Her father, John, was a regular on the soap staple Days Of Our Lives, her godfather was Kojak's lolly-sucking Telly Savalas, and by 13, she was trying out for jobs herself, including extra work on another soap, Search For Tomorrow.

"At that age, it was thrilling to just sit in the make-up chair," she recalls. "And in the middle of the scene, someone came over and asked me to swap places with another girl. It was very quick, and I didn't think anything of it. On the way home, Dad mentioned how I wouldn't have been picked up by the camera if our places hadn't been switched. I felt terrible that the poor girl got bumped because of me. You know how there are some people who burn with this feeling of "I'm going to make it"? I never had that."

UNTIL HER mid-twenties, Aniston jogged along in this unambitious way, supplementing acting jobs in the film Fame, off-Broadway productions and television bits by working as a waitress, a receptionist and an ice-cream seller before landing the role of Rachel Green. The show hit its stride within weeks. Not only did viewers like her, they tore her picture out, brought it to their hairdressers, and tried to become her.

Yet despite striking a spark with TV audiences, her early feature films like Picture Perfect and The Object Of My Affection failed to launch her as a solo star at the box office. Now her choices are supporting roles in sunny summer comedies (Bruce Almighty), ensemble work in offbeat features such as Office Space, and occasional dips into more serious fare such as Derailed and The Good Girl. Aniston worked hard on toning down her physical comedy instincts by carrying weights so she wouldn't gesticulate, and drew attention away from her hair by not washing it. It may not have been a Charlize Theron-like Monster makeover, but it demonstrated her determination to show versatility.

She squirms at this, unhappy at the suggestion that she calculates her career moves: "I just try to pick something that I respond to, that interests me and that I'm moved by. In the past some of the roles I've done have been so far fetched and I've done them and I don't think I performed very well in them. It was way overdue for me to do something that I responded to."

Admittedly, Aniston might be overstretched when called to play a cynic, a bitch or a femme fatale, and it's hard to imagine her giving Nicole Kidman sleepless nights as a period heroine - but she's far from the tofu Meg Ryan that unkind critics have suggested. Onscreen, she has a likeability Kidman would kill for and a deft comic timing that recalls Carol Lombard.

Ironically, the interest surrounding her marital break-up, and the strong US box office business of The Break-Up might give Aniston the film break she has been looking for. The Break-Up knocked X Men 3 from the top of the box office last month, and now Aniston's upcoming projects, including a part opposite Meryl Streep in Wanted, a women-in-prison drama, and a serious role in The Senator's Wife, are being viewed with renewed interest in Hollywood. Her star has not shone this brightly since her Friends peak.

"Things happens for a reason," Aniston says. "And there has to be a reason that this is coming to me right at this moment."

article found at : scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/ 15-Jul-06 00:37 BST