Jennifer Lopez hasn’t always been lucky in love, but, as she tells Lina Das, it’s the one thing that has always driven her. And now she has everything she’s ever wanted – devoted husband, three-year-old twins and a career that’s still not missing a beat 

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'No matter how much experience you have in love, you’re always learning new things about it; you’re always going to have questions you can never fully answer, says the Latina superstar

If the old adage holds good that you should write about what you know, then Jennifer Lopez couldn’t have picked a more appropriate subject for her seventh studio album, titled Love?. Few artists have experienced the exultant highs and crushing lows of relationships as publicly as Jennifer, nor been as quick to dust themselves down after a fall. The title track is one of her favourites: ‘The chorus goes, “What is love? Somebody show me,”’ she says. ‘I think a lot of people go through life wondering if it’ll happen for them. I definitely went through stages of thinking: “Am I ever going to find Prince Charming?”’

This is pure Jennifer Lopez – a woman who lives hard and loves hard and who continues to wear her heart on her sleeve, even if her sleeves these days are a touch more expensive than when she first started out. At 41 – an age when many people might have adopted a more jaded outlook – she’s bubbling over with barely concealed enthusiasm. ‘I admit it, I still find love the most confusing, fascinating thing in the world.’ And that’s despite having finally found her Prince Charming – singer and actor Marc Anthony, her husband of seven years.

We’re sitting in a suite of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, where Jennifer has arrived early for our interview. It’s unheard of in interviewing terms and unprecedented, one imagines, for Jennifer – the scent of diva-like behaviour trailing her like one of her many branded perfumes. For her part, she has always denied such excesses (‘All that diva stuff was so unreal. I never made demands like that. I would never ask for rooms to be painted white’ cocktail dresses for wedding cocktail dresses for wedding) and certainly on today’s evidence, the reputation seems wide of the mark. She’s businesslike, of course (anyone whose net worth is estimated at more than $100 million would have to be), but also disarmingly chatty: a girl’s girl in spite of those stunning looks.

Today she’s in towering blue snakeskin heels, and though her famous derrière is masked in a floaty Reem Acra mini- 5, she still exudes a perfectly toned curvaceousness. When she insists that her secret indulgence is biscuits – ‘I love cookies…I really do!’ – I can’t help but wonder if she limits them to one a year. ‘No!’ she says. ‘One a week, sometimes one a day! Thank God I grew up around confident, beautiful, curvaceous women like my mother and my aunts. Curves were considered beautiful in our family, so I felt there was nothing wrong with having them.’

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Jennifer takes her twins Max and Emme to work on American Idol

Does her husband encourage her to eat more? ‘He loves my curves, but I wouldn’t say he gets me to eat more,’ Jennifer laughs. ‘But he likes it when I feel good about myself. When I’m reluctant to work out, two piece prom dress patterns he says: “You always feel better when you work out – when you don’t, you complain!” which is true. So then I’ll go, “Right, I’m gonna work out!”’

She and Marc dated briefly in the late 1990s, went their separate ways and both got hitched to other people – she to her second husband, dancer Cris Judd; he to his first wife, former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres. They finally got back together in 2004 and are now the proud parents of three-year-old twins, Max and Emme. So with an adoring husband and two gorgeous children – everything Jennifer always said she wanted – why does she still find love confusing?

‘Well, I think because I can look at things with a little bit of distance,’ dresses for prom dresses for prom; she says. ‘I’ beach wedding dresses m in a really happy short champagne prom dresses , good place now, and when you have babies, you feel a different kind of love to anything you’ve experienced – deeper, more profound. No matter how much experience you have in love, wedding color swatches you’re always learning new things about it; you’re always going to have questions you can never fully answer. And that’s what I wanted to do with this album – explore the questions.’ And what answers did she come up with? ‘Absolutely none at all!’ she laughs.

The question mark in Love? – her first album for four years – is a touch disconcerting. ‘Marc hated that question mark at first,’ she admits, ‘because he felt people would wonder whether there were problems between us and read it in a negative way. So I said, “But there isn’t a problem with us, so why bother what people think?” He understands now that it’s my statement as an artist, that I want to open up a dialogue – are we behaving the right way towards each other, are we treating each other right?’

What perhaps made it easier for her husband is that Jennifer gives him a glowing reference in one of the tracks, ‘One Love’, in which she sings of a man who ‘made me want to try once more and I couldn’t say no’. 

‘Yes, that line was about him, and he adores that,’ she grins. ‘And that’s the thing about love – it doesn’t matter how devastating the last relationship was, we’re always regenerating and always hopeful the next one will be better.’

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Jennifer with her husband Marc Anthony at the Golden Globes in January

Jennifer’s powers of regeneration have probably been called on more often than she would have liked. While many people would have been floored by the romantic buffetings she has gone through – from kiss-and-tells (first husband Ojani Noa) to broken engagements (actor Ben Affleck) – Jennifer has emerged fortified by her work ethic and self-belief, and powered ahead. 

Her marriage to Ojani, a Cuban-born waiter, ended in 1998 after less than a year. They married around the time of the release of Selena (the biopic of Hispanic singer-songwriter Selena Quintanilla which made Jennifer’s name), and Ojani subsequently touted around various books and films purporting to tell their story (Jennifer went to court to stop him). She then embarked on a two-and-a-half-year relationship with hip-hop mogul Sean Combs – which was characterised by copious amounts of bling and Cristal champagne, and ended after Combs was arrested in connection with a nightclub shooting in 1999 (although he was later acquitted of all charges).

In 2001, Jennifer married Cris Judd, a dancer she met while filming the video for her single ‘Love Don’t Cost a Thing’, though the pair split up less than a year later, and Jennifer was promptly – and publicly – spotted with Ben Affleck. Nicknamed ‘Bennifer’, she and Ben were a high-profile couple, starring together in the films Jersey Girl and Gigli (the latter of which was described by the New York Times as possessing ‘a special badness all its own’), with him also popping up in the video to her song ‘Jenny from the Block’, memorably slathering her behind with suntan lotion. Their engagement ended after Ben reportedly enjoyed a night out with some lap dancers, a line dress a line dress weeks before their wedding. But a couple of months later Jennifer was seen out with her ex-boyfriend and longtime friend Marc, whom she married in June 2004 in a quiet home ceremony.

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So she’d admit that the ups and downs of relationships can get just a bit, well, exhausting? ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘and it can destroy you for a while. But I have a song called “Until It Beats No More” where I sing about having given up on life, until someone pulls you through. And I really believe that’s true.’

She adds that her new album is her most introspective so far. ‘Absolutely everything I’ve been through in my life is right there,’ says Jennifer, ‘because that’s what I’ve felt and suffered and celebrated. You have to sing what you know.’

It’s true that you can almost chart her story from hip, upcoming Latina to wife and mother through her successive album titles. Born in New York – to Puerto Rican parents Guadalupe, a teacher, and David, a computer specialist – Jennifer sang and danced from an early age, financing her own lessons from the age of 19. At 29, after years of working as a back-up dancer (for acts such as New Kids on the Block and Janet Jackson), she released her first album, On the 6, a dance-themed record which referenced the number 6 subway line she used to take while growing up in the Bronx. 

Her next album, J.Lo (the snappy moniker she ascribed herself), was more urban-oriented, her boyfriend Combs having worked on it as a producer. And later albums Rebirth and the Spanish-speaking Como Ama una Mujer (How a Woman Loves) reflected a more grown-up view and again featured the man in her life, husband Marc, as a producer. Her moniker has gone from J.Lo to Jenny to Jennifer, reflecting her moods, ‘and I still see myself in all those names. J.Lo seems to have stuck, though,’ she laughs, ‘and I’m good with that.’ For the record, Marc calls her ‘Jen’ or, even more simply, ‘Ma’.

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Clockwise from top left: at the Grammys with Sean 'P Diddy' Combs in 2000; with first husband Ojani Noa in 1997; with second husband Cris Judd in 2002; performing on stage; starring opposite husband Marc in El Cantanter, and with Ben Affleck in 2003

So now that she is settled, red dress strapless prom red dress strapless prom does she ever miss the highs and lows of dating? ‘Well, with Marc, I still have those highs and lows,’ she says. ‘We don’t always agree on everything. In an interesting, loving relationship you should challenge each other to keep it fresh and exciting. If you don’t have that push-and-pull, at a certain point it gets kind of boring – and that’s just not who we are as people. You want to be on the same page a lot of the time, but it’s OK if you aren’t all the time…and no, I’m not going to tell you what we disagree about! But like anything important in life, you have to work at [marriage], because it’s hard.’

Occasionally it seems as though who Jennifer is and what she creates are inextricably linked. She definitely enjoys working with the people she loves: as well as producing her later albums, Marc has starred alongside her in the 2006 film El Cantante. She even appeared with her twins in a recent campaign for Gucci’s new children’s clothing line, ‘and it was a big decision for Marc and me because we’re not really ones to parade our children. But it was for a beautiful cause [Gucci donated $1 million to Unicef and $50,000 to Jennifer’s own charity, the Maribel Initiative, which promotes healthcare for women and children worldwide] and the kids had so much fun.’

Both Jennifer and Marc come from humble beginnings (his father was a musician and hospital kitchen worker). Does she worry that her own children, growing up around their wealth, might become spoilt? ‘We think about that, for sure,’ she says. ‘But for the most part me and Marc always say we’re giving them the same upbringing we had…except we have a slightly bigger house!

‘I’m glad I had years to fall and get up again and learn from my experiences’

But it’s basically a house full of Puerto Ricans cooking and yelling and talking too loud and loving each other. It keeps them pretty grounded, I think. I don’t know yet if it’ll be hard for them, because they’re still so young and their world is just us at the moment,’ she adds. ‘But I still see myself as a kid who grew up in the Bronx and Marc as a boy who grew up in Spanish Harlem, and we’re just trying to raise them how we were raised – with good values. They need to know what it is to work hard and be honest and independent. All you want for your children is for them to be healthy, happy people.’

She loves spending time with them – ‘we do everything together as a family’ – and if a tour for the new album is finalised, ‘then I’d definitely take my babies. I’d die if they didn’t come with me! They’re developing their personalities already. Emme is very girlie and loves to dress up – she tries on my shoes, but can’t really walk in them. And Max is a pure boy, running around trying to break everything and then fix it with his little hammer.’ Though Jennifer conceived naturally at 37, there were times, she admits, ‘when I thought that it might not happen’. She would love more children: ‘It’s not something we’re trying for at the moment, but if it happens, it would be great.’

After box-office hits with films such as Maid in Manhattan (opposite Ralph Fiennes) and last year’s The Back-up Plan, Jennifer is waiting for a juicy film role to come along, not to mention a part in the hit TV series Glee (she’s touted to play a cafeteria worker). She already has more than enough on her plate, however, thanks to her current judging stint on American Idol, alongside record producer Randy Jackson and Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler, whose critiques of the contestants have entertained and baffled in equal measure (to one bewildered contestant: ‘I thought you were all hat and no cattle, but you brought Elvis into the house’).

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Jennifer with her fellow American Idol judges, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler (left) and Randy Jackson

‘Actually, Steven’s sayings are so off-the-wall, I can’t even remember how he phrases them to tell you which is my favourite,’ says Jennifer. ‘Randy delivers his verdicts with flair. But I think Steven and I are more kind of emotional in the way that artists
tend to be.’

Jennifer has a point. She made her mark on the show after crying at the dismissal of popular contestant Chris Medina, whose fiancée had suffered brain damage in a car accident just months before they were due to marry. ‘I wasn’t expecting to be so emotional,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect my feelings to hit me that hard.’ 

Would she have entered such a competition herself when she was younger? ‘Maybe, but I don’t know how far I would have got! Truly. This isn’t an easy way to become successful, whatever people think. I’m glad I had years to fall and get up again and learn from my experiences. But these kids go from working in a coffee shop to all of a sudden singing in front of 20 million people. If you can handle that kind of pressure, you deserve to be in this business.’

With that, Jennifer gets up to leave, an American Idol meeting next on her agenda. ‘I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,’ she says, ‘and my husband and my babies have everything to do with that. Work’s great too, and I’ Maybe you want to 2012 homecoming dresses create an illusion of a slim waist or curves, but do not want too much attention on the quinceanera Dresses.m just in love with life at the moment.’ Well, of course she is. Love: it is her favourite subject, after all. 

Jennifer’s new album Love? is out now

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