The actress was a couple of Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Pitt. To be with her, both actors broke her engagements; one with the Oscar winner and the other with the star of "Friends"
What can Laura Dern and Jennifer Aniston have in common?
Their careers don't seem very similar. The first acted in more than 50 movies but much less on television. Daughter of actors, her first job in front of the cameras was at the age of seven. After more than four decades of career, she just won her first Oscar on Sunday the 9th. The second is the daughter of an actor who did not want her to be an actress, her great success was not achieved on the big screen but on television. Although she never got, or even was nominated for an Oscar, she is one of the most powerful women in the industry. One of her has two children she is concerned about, the other has no children and she is not concerned. One measure 1.79; the other 1.64. They are not friends nor do they appear at events together. They did not share a dressing room or step on the same stage. However, an invisible thread unites them, their partners were broken by the same woman: Angelina Jolie.
Those who lived a great lack of love know how much it bleeds. The break hurts much more when there are no explanations. The award-winning Laura Dern can attest to that. The romance between the lawyer from Confessions of a Marriage and Thorton began in 1997 when they met on the recording set of the Ellen Degeneres series. Look goes, look comes. A little bit of conversation and a lot of attraction. At first, they were not very willing to start something stable. Dern just parted ways with Jeff Goldblum. Thorton accumulated four divorces. She tied the knot with Melissa Lee Gatlin, Toni Lawrence, Cynda Williams, and Pietra Dawn Cherniak in marriages that never lasted more than two years.
Thorton's unstable love affair was a detail to Dern. She was in love with that multifaceted man who told her about her childhood in a Methodist home where, due to religious convictions, there was no electricity or hot water. She was fascinated to listen to him play his drums while performing rock or country songs. She marveled at her ability to tell and write stories, so much so that she won an Oscar for Glow in the Night, a film she wrote and starred in.
They were 12 years apart, but for Dern, it was not a problem. Everything seemed to flow. The relationship was firm and stable. The actor used to humorously reply that "we already have a dog and a garden" and described his partner as "his best friend." Therefore, when Dern received the proposal to film October Sky in Virginia City, he did not hesitate to accept. Thorton encouraged her to do it. It would only be a few weeks apart. In addition, he would also be busy filming Out of Control. The co-star was a young actress with a reputation for rebellion, Angelina Jolie.
While Dern was shooting in Virginia, Thorton and Jolie were shooting in New York. He played an air traffic controller and she was his suggestive wife. Thornton was 45 and Angelina was 20 less. The first time they met was in an elevator. Uninhibited or out of place, he asked her to accompany him to her trailer because she had to try on pants for a scene. She told him no, but when she got out of the elevator, she leaned against a wall because she felt her heart beating a thousand times and s- excitement that was impossible to hide. “It made me happy to know that there was someone like him, who represented all the things I believe in,” Jolie said. A few days after that meeting, Jon Voight's daughter tattooed Billy Bob Thornton's name on her groin hoping he would find out. And boy did she find out. Just a few weeks later they took a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas and got married!
Meanwhile, several kilometers away, but also not on the other side of the world, Dern continued with his film. She had spoken several times with Billy and no alarm bells went off in his head. One afternoon, to entertain himself a little, he began to look at a magazine. Bored, she turned the pages and suddenly a double-sized photo showed his partner marrying another. To seal their commitment instead of exchanging alliances, they had made pendants containing each other's blood.
It was never known if he cried loudly, if he tore up the photos of him, or if he cursed at Angelina. Many years later he recognized that when he opened that magazine he felt like a sudden death. "There was never a closure, nor a clarification of what happened." He never received a call from his now ex-partner. Never a message, an apology, or even a minimal explanation. She returned to her house and did not find a single belonging of his. He just left her alone.
The couple never communicated again. Twelve years later, Thortom referred to the unorthodox and painful way in which she ended her relationship with Dern and rehearsed something of an apology. “Someone can say that I left a girl to marry another. It was not so. I left someone who made me happy to be with someone else who made me happier. I'm sorry it caused you pain."
After three years together, the multifaceted artist and Jolie parted ways: "She led a global lifestyle and mine is agoraphobic. It's really the only reason we're probably not together yet. We wanted a different path for lifestyles that we wanted to take.
While on the east coast of the United States, Thornton and Jolie fell in love and Dern's heart broke, on the west coast, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston posed together, smiling and happy in the prelude to the Emmy Awards and confirmed to the world their romance. It was September 1999, and they became the most popular boyfriends in America, on July 29, 2000, they got married. The two had begun their unstoppable path to megastardom. She was Rachel from Friends and he was the prettiest actor of the moment, but on the big screen, he showed that she was much more than just a pretty face.
A year after the wedding, Jennifer accepted an interview with Rolling Stone magazine and admitted that at the beginning of their relationship, her friends were worried because they thought that her now husband could be cocky, but when they met him they realized that he was a great person and admitted the good of marriage. "You know if there's ever an argument you can't say, 'F- you, I'm out of here!' You are there for the long haul. It's a beautiful thing to realize that for the first time, to have that knowledge. It takes the heat and weight off things.”
Fame, charisma, good projects nothing seemed to ruin the future, but at the end of 2004, Pitt was called to star in the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith. His co-star was an actress who had broken up with Billy Bob Thorton, his partner, the year before. She was Angelina Jolie.
It is not known if Jennifer felt worried or if she remembered what Laura Dern lived through. Nor if she objected to her husband or did she make a joke about what her co-star experienced with Thorton. Despite Jennifer's confidence, in the middle of filming, rumors began to spread about the explosive attraction between Angelina and her husband. Years later, and already separated from her, she confessed in Vogue magazine: “I felt that there were details, situations that were a bit inappropriate, to discuss. Those things about how he couldn't wait to go to work every day." Faced with these signs, Jennifer never made a scandal in public, nor did she make hurtful statements, nor did she even appear at her husband's motorhome to requisition a blanket from Nepal.
When she finished filming and after seven years together, the couple announced their separation. The first photos of Jolie and Pitt happy and in love were released just three months later. With the divorce consummated and her heart surely broken, Jennifer did not go out and rant against the woman who took her husband from her. She also did not bring to light the miseries or defects of her now ex. Every time the press avidly sought her statements, they found her silence.
In 2016, Pitt and Jolie broke up amid scandals and accusations. The press and the public were very interested in knowing what Jennifer thought, but she kept her opinions. She would never make firewood from the fallen tree. Even though Pitt "left her for another" she always had words of affection for her ex. “We wish each other wonderful things. No one did anything wrong. It's just that sometimes those things happen. If only people could stop this novel crap they think exists between us. Please, more credit to these humans," Aniston told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
Today both Laura Dern and Jennifer Aniston live a glorious moment. Both do not stop working, earn fortunes, and are pampered by success, the public, and critics. But when evening falls and those moments of introspection arrive, only they know how much it cost them to repair their hearts after the passage of that hurricane called Angelina Jolie.
