For Jennifer Aniston, playing a critical, image-obsessed mum in her upcoming film brought up memories of her own difficult relationship with her late mother.
The 49-year-old plays former beauty queen Rosie Dickson, who’s plus-sized daughter signs up for the beauty pageant she runs in the Netflix film, Dumplin’.
The actress told the Daily Telegraph she could easily empathise with the young lead, played by Australian up-and-comer Danielle Macdonald.
Just like the character, exclusively referred to her mother as “Dumplin'”, Aniston was the daughter of a former model, Nancy Dow, who constantly critiqued her.
"She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like," the Friends star told the newspaper.
"I did not come out the model child she's hoped for and it was something that really resonated with me.
"This little girl just wanting to be loved by a mum that was too occupied with things that didn't quite matter."
Aniston has previously shed light on her complicated relationship with her mother, who died in 2016 after suffering a stroke in 2011.
Their relationship was marred by periods of estrangement that lasted years, including one for the entirety of Aniston's marriage to Brad Pitt.
In 2015, she told the Hollywood Reporter that her mum, a former model and television star, has been a difficult mother to live with.
"She was critical. She was very critical of me," Aniston said.
"Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn't. I never was. I honestly still don't think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine."
Aniston said her mother also "had a temper" and was "very unforgiving"
"She would hold grudges that I just found so petty," she said.
This opposed Aniston's demeanour, which is to discuss things calmly, rather than scream and to forgive people easily.
"I was never taught that I could scream. One time, I raised my voice to my mother, and I screamed at her, and she looked at me and burst out laughing. She was laughing at me [for] screaming back. And it was like a punch in my stomach," she recounted.
But it was once Aniston left her mother's home that their relationship became strained. Just as her daughter was cementing her fame as part of Friends in 1996, Dow gave a tell-all interview about her to tabloid TV show Hard Copy.
At this point, Aniston stopped speaking to her mother.
Then, three years later, she wrote and published a book, From Mother and Daughter to Friends: A Memoir, against her daughter's wishes in an apparent attempt to leverage of her daughter's stardom, that had by this point, eclipsed her own.
This did nothing to repair their relationship and Aniston didn't invite her mother to her wedding to Brad Pitt in 2000. But reportedly reconciled after their divorce in 2005.
It was also reported that the pair had another falling out around the time of Dow's stroke.
But a year before her mother's death she told the Hollywood Reporter "we're all fine", suggesting they had at least had some contact before Dow passed away on 25 May 2016.
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Top Comments
Isn't it strange how people buy Aniston's malicious defaming of her mother without really finding out the facts? Firstly, her mother didn’t sell her out. At least not until she was asked to go on an interview about a project she had, but the interview was edited so it was all about her daughter. This was not Nancy’s fault. Even though Aniston should know by now how the media can operate, she still attacked Nancy when Nancy was the victim of the media. Aniston would NOT listen to her. This left Nancy no other alternative but to give her side in a book. She was forced to do that.
Ditto the ‘oh Nancy was mean to her and a shitty mum’ bs. We only have Aniston’s word for that, and we know Aniston twists, exaggerates and manipulates facts. She has been caught out *many* times. Aniston never has anything to do with her half-sibling (hands up anyone who even knew she had a sibling?), so it seems to be a habit of her to exclude family she thinks are below her. There is a pattern.
Aniston waited until her mother, who raised her as a single mum for years after her husband cheated on her and left her yet Aniston favoured her famous dad, was dead before saying all this, when Nancy cannot defend herself. It really is a low move to say this after she's dead. So low, so uncool, and so missing a sensitivity chip. Aniston refused to talk to her own mum for years; all over something that wasn't even her mum's fault! She is one to talk about holding grudges! Aniston is a really vindictive, spiteful, malicious, conniving opportunist who cowardly attacks people who can't or won't speak back. It is disgusting that people don't do even the slightest research on her, and just buy her phony persona. Why can't people see through her? What she did to Nancy, who gave her so much and asked for nothing in return except to see her, was deplorable. Cruel and deplorable. People are truly snowed by her.