Grow up and then we’ll listen to you, Jennifer!
IDON’T know about you but I’d be a lot quicker to believe Jennifer Aniston’s barnstorming speech about how Hollywood has changed if she wasn’t dressed like a teenager heading to the legendary Wezz disco. If anything, the Interview magazine cover showing the Friends star in her hotpants, patent leather thigh-high boots and striking a pose that suggests she’s playing air guitar seems to scream that, just as nothing has changed whatsoever for women in Tinseltown, time has also stood still for this leading lady.
Of course it has not. Time has marched on for one of the most popular TV stars of the Nineties at the same rate as it has for all of us.
She is now a 51-year-old woman, well into middle age although thanks to a combination of magical genes and an iron discipline, she looks much the same as she did in her heyday.
The film industry is notoriously hard on women; once you’re over 25, you’re over the hill. Actresses are punished with fewer roles, the spotlight of public interest moves onto the next starlet; it’s as if getting older is a sin.
It’s no wonder female stars worship so valiantly at the altar of youth, spend a fortune on cosmetic surgery, quack therapies, whatever will help them look younger.
But there is a fine line between holding off the ravages of time – while declaring, like most actresses, that the secret of your flawless complexion is lots of water and Vitamin D – and being Jennifer Aniston whose dread of ageing seems so allencompassing that she never seems to change.
LOOK at the photographs of her today, compared to a quarter of a century ago when she exploded onto the small screens as Rachel in Friends. Her hairstyle has hardly changed; she has not experimented with any new fashion or make-up while her girl-next-door charm has been constant.
Her crotch flexing hotpants are something that Rachel might have gotten away with, in a pinch, for a date night after her shift at Central Perks. But just because the biological miracle that is Aniston still fits into them some 25 years later doesn’t mean she should wear them. By now a certain dignity should have replaced the look-at-me exhibitionism of hotpants and thigh-high boots.
Aniston has thrived in a cutthroat world, as an independent career women. She has taken the path less travelled in so far as she is child-free and single. She has an enormous talent for friendship – her 50th birthday party included everyone from the Friends cast to the Hollywood A-List.
IT’S pathetic when a woman of her calibre looks as if she has raided her teenage daughter or grand-daughter’s wardrobe, rather than like a sophisticated woman of the world. Her not outgrowing the young adult fashions is also curious because part of the craft of an actress is to inhabit different styles and looks.
Even the most strikingly unique looking actresses like Angelina Jolie or Tilda Swinton reinvent themselves from time to time.
The stars that Jennifer emulates, Hollywood goddesses like Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger, her contemporaries from Nicole Kidman to Reese Witherspoon, all let themselves age to some degree because that’s life and the job of an actor is to face up to life, in all its challenges and fears.
Jennifer’s drive to control the passage of time, to pretend that she is still the hotpants-wearing kid of her teenage years smacks, like her cover girl photograph, of desperation.
It shows that while her peers grow old gracefully, she is frozen in time, a sort of Hollywood Dorian Gray, yearning for eternal youth.