Jennifer Aniston Details Strained Relationship With Her Late Mother
Jennifer Aniston’s relationship with her late mother, Nancy Dow, was rocky from the start, the actress revealed in a recent interview.
The actress said that her differences with her mother are “very similar” to the ones between the pageant mother she portrays in her new movie, “Dumplin.”
“One of the reasons I really loved the mother-daughter aspect of it was because it was very similar in a way to what my mother, and our relationship, was,” Aniston reportedly said in an interview with Australia’s The Sunday Telegraph. “She was a model and she was all about presentation and what she looked like and what I looked like.”
Aniston added, “I did not come out the model child she’d hoped for and it was something that really resonated with me, this little girl just wanting to be seen and wanting to be loved by a [mom] who was too occupied with things that didn’t quite matter.”
The actress has made similar comments before, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 that while her relationship was “fine” at the time with her mom, she still didn’t feel pretty compared to her.
“She was critical,” Aniston said. “She was very critical of me. 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. She was also very unforgiving. She would hold grudges that I just found so petty.”
She also revealed that there were some years that the two didn’t speak, due to her mother’s temper, which the actress simply couldn’t tolerate.
“If I get upset, I will discuss [things]. I will never scream and get hysterical like that. [But] I was never taught that I could scream,” the “Friends” actress said.
“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,” Aniston revealed. “And it was like a punch in my stomach.”
Dow was a model and actress who starred in TV shows like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Wild Wild West.” She died in 2016 at the age of 79 after suffering two strokes in 2011 and 2012.
Aniston and Dow’s rift reportedly began in the 1990s and intensified after the late actress wrote a book about her daughter and their estrangement, called From Mother and Daughter to Friends: A Memoir.
The two apparently didn’t speak for a decade and only reconnected after Aniston split from Brad Pitt in 2005.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
