The intoxicating mix of literary lion and tattooed bad boy that entranced Hollywood’s most unlucky-in-love star
EVEN in the dim light of Hollywood’s Sunset Tower Hotel, the couple’s ease with one another was instantly apparent. Nestled in a corner booth of the stylish Art Deco-style bar, favoured by A-listers for its strict no-paparazzi policy, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux made no attempt to hide their affection as they sipped their chablis.
‘I can honestly say I’ve never seen her looking more relaxed or happier,’ says George Blodwell, a celebrity stylist who has known the actress since the mid Nineties, after seeing the pair together last month.
‘She looked more at ease than I’ve ever seen her. She was beaming at Justin and looked so content and secure. Justin couldn’t stop smiling either. He had his arm protectively around her and was as gracious to me as she was. They looked like a little island of love, in a world of their own.’
At the age of 43, Aniston is marrying Theroux, an actor, director and screenwriter who proposed last week on his 41st birthday with an eight-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring.
After a series of failed highprofile romances, most notably her marriage to Brad Pitt which ended in 2005 when he began a relation- ship with Angelina Jolie, Aniston’s friends and family hope she has finally found lasting happiness.
On the face of it they are an odd couple – she the Hollywood golden girl who has built a phenomenally lucrative film career since starring as Rachel in TV sitcom Friends, commanding £8.2million per movie; he the virtual nobody whose struggle to find success has only recently begun to pay off. While her image is one of cleancut, Californian healthy living, he exclusively wears black, is heavily tattooed and rides motorcycles.
Moreover, until he began dating Aniston in May 2011, Theroux was in a 14-year relationship with stylist Heidi Bivens. Rumours that he left her for Aniston were problematic for a woman whom the public sided with after Pitt’s alleged infidelity was said to have ended their marriage.
Yet it is in Theroux’s eccentricities that his appeal seems to lie.
Unlike her former boyfriends, including Gerard Butler and Vince Vaughn, he comes from an illustrious academic and literary family, whose influence can be seen in his thoughtful and cultured personality.
According to a friend: ‘Jennifer admires him because he is seriously intelligent and so different from most of the men you meet in Hollywood. He’s an edgy New Yorker and can talk with ease about anything from the latest plays and books to cutting-edge music. The fact that he is drop-dead gorgeous only adds to his allure.’
Theroux is the cousin of British TV presenter Louis and author Marcel Theroux and the nephew of famed travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, whose book The Mosquito Coast was turned into an award-winning film starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. His other uncles, Peter and Alexander Theroux, are also novelists.
Following the family’s tradition, his mother Phyllis forged a career as a feature writer for The Washington Post, while his father Eugene, from whom his mother has long been divorced, is a corporate lawyer in Washington DC.
Phyllis now lives in Virginia with her second husband, retired businessman and community theatre organiser Ragan Phillips, who last night refused to comment on the engagement.
Growing up in Washington DC, Theroux was a rebel from an early age, and was arrested for vandalism aged 12. He has spoken of being ‘tossed out of several schools’ before being sent to a liberal arts boarding school called Buxton in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he discovered his passion for acting in school plays.
Theroux has spoken of his father’s decision to pursue a corporate career making him determined to follow his own artistic ambitions. He said: ‘My dad was a very good painter but somewhere around his mid-20s he got worried he wouldn’t have money. He went to law school and now he’s had 30 years of zero-artistic experience.
‘He’s a very wealthy guy but, man, is that sad because you have to really climb down deep and kill something inside you to do that. I’m not slamming him. It’s just instructive to me in the choice I don’t want to make.’
Of course, his father’s wealth gave Justin a privileged start, allowing him to attend Vermont’s Bennington College, one of America’s most expensive universities, where contemporaries included the author Bret Easton Ellis and wild parties were frequent.
After graduating in 1993 with a degree in visual art and theatre – he also studied Chinese and speaks Mandarin fluently – Theroux entered what friends call ‘his dark years’ in New York. He supported himself painting murals and working in a variety of low-paying bar jobs, including at New York’s notorious nightclub The Limelight, which hit the headlines in 1996 when party promotor Michael Alig was arrested and later convicted of killing and dismembering Angel Melendez, a drug dealer at the club.
A friend who knew Theroux at that time says: ‘He was the quintessential tormented artist. He barely had enough money to eat but he’d write poetry and perform readings at these tiny clubs and coffee houses downtown.
‘He also did bit parts and modelling gigs, anything that would pay the rent. He lived on ramen noodles and started getting tattoos.
‘He wore all black. He smoked rollup cigarettes and was seriously cool, a