Jennifer Lopez postponed her marriage ceremony to actor Ben Affleck days earlier than the ceremony was resulting from happen in 2003. “Twenty years, three marriages, 5 kids, a Las Vegas residency” and “greater than 18 perfume launches” later, “Bennifer has been born anew for 2022”, says the Financial Times. Earlier this month, the couple had been quietly married at the drive-through Little White Chapel in Las Vegas.Cynics might say that “Bennifer, the rematch” has “solely vivified a flagging curiosity” in the couple’s upcoming initiatives. “But it’s onerous to not really feel a pinwheel of pleasure for a fairytale narrative during which the publicly damaged Affleck has been rescued by his Latina queen.” And J.Lo, aged 53, is actually on the up, having “clawed again a profession from the precipice of irrelevance” over the previous decade by way of a three-year run on the hit TV expertise present “American Idol” and “a star flip at the Super Bowl”.“It seems love is affected person,” J.Lo wrote in her e-newsletter, describing “a story arc” worthy of the many romantic comedies that she has starred in, says The Times. Indeed, in response to Alice Leppert, professor of media and communication research at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania, and co-editor of the journal Celebrity Studies, “People misplaced their minds once they reunited”. We “make investments” in movie star to compensate for our personal romantic disappointments and a part of J.Lo’s attraction – forming the foundation of her $400m fortune – is her girl-next-door high quality. “Her rags-to-riches story represents the mythology of the American dream on steroids.”The daughter of Puerto Rican dad and mom – her father was a pc technician, her mom a nursery faculty trainer – Lopez was raised in a cramped one-bedroom house in the Bronx the place she would dance in entrance of the bed room mirror pretending to be Rita Moreno in West Side Story. “I needed to perform issues. I had that sort of aggressive spirit,” she later informed Rolling Stone. At 18, she dropped out of school, the place she was learning enterprise, to pursue dancing full-time. A stint on a well-liked comedy present led to appearances in music movies earlier than her large break in 1996, when she landed the title function in a biopic of the Mexican-American singer, Selena – changing into the first Latin American star to earn greater than $1m for a movie and a job mannequin for hundreds of thousands of younger Latinas in the course of.J.Lo: an unstoppable cultural powerBy 2000, by which era she had a triple-platinum album to her identify, J.Lo had change into “an unstoppable cultural power”, aided by the rising web, says The Times. An look in a plunging Versace robe at the Grammy Awards triggered “one among the first viral style moments”, prompting Google to launch its Images search engine. By 2004, the self-styled “Jenny from the Block” had launched a profitable way of life model (maybe impressed by her relationship with the rapper P Diddy) that introduced in additional than $300m that yr alone. It began with a perfume and grew to incorporate clothes, watches and mattress linen. She is credited with pioneering “a brand new period of fame the place celebrities grew to become the product”: creating “a blueprint” for later enterprise empires constructed by Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon.Throughout her profession, J.Lo – described by Rolling Stone as “heat, but sphynx-like” – has continued “to reinvent herself”; famous Variety in 2019. At 50, the “multifaceted mogul” – then engaged to the athlete-turned-entrepreneur Alex Rodriguez – had “by no means been extra formidable as an entertainer or extra ferocious as a businesswoman”. According to a enterprise accomplice, “she understands the energy in the pivot”, believing that “the solely factor stopping you is you”. Lopez herself admits to “a relentless drive for perfection” and places all of it right down to stable graft. “My enterprise philosophy is that it’s a must to work more durable than everyone else…When everyone is sleeping, I’m doing extra. It’s only a relentless pursuit of creativity.”
https://moneyweek.com/financial system/folks/605175/jennifer-lopez-the-american-dream-on-steroids
