It’s not every day that a commercial for an airline draws viewers to YouTube in their millions. But that’s precisely what happened this week when Emirates released its new 60-second promotion of the high life on board its fleet of Airbus A380 aircraft.
As appealing as Emirates’ first-class experience doubtless is, it was clear who the real star of the show was.
Gently mocking her own celebrity expectations, high-flying Jennifer Aniston wakes from a nightmare in which she’s enduring a typical coach-class experience (highlight: free packet of nuts), and is relieved to find herself back in the lap of Emirates luxury.
The promo was released on Monday. By yesterday afternoon, more than 2 million people had watched it on YouTube.
Casting Aniston was a shrewd decision – the former Friends star has an internationally recognisable persona. But in the promotional material, Aniston is described only as "actress, director and producer". The fact there's no specific mention of the decade she spent playing the ditzy Rachel Green opposite Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey and Ross, says much about how far the 46-year-old has come since the show ended a decade ago.
These days, Jennifer Joanna Aniston, born into an acting family in Sherman Oaks, California, on February 11, 1969, is much more than a once-much-copied haircut, the ex of Brad Pitt or even Rachel, the role that made her famous.
Her parents have had respectable acting careers – her mother Nancy Dow in a handful of films, and her father, the Crete-born John Aniston, playing a key character in more than 2,200 episodes of the long-running American television soap Days of Our Lives – but they have both been outshone by their daughter.
When she was 9, Aniston's parents moved to New York and separated in an acrimonious divorce that, she would later tell Vanity Fair, "bitterly wounded her".
It was life in the Big Apple, however, that set Aniston on the road to fame and fortune. At 11, she discovered a flair for acting, and went on to study at the city's School of Performing Arts – the Fame school.
She was working soon after her graduation in 1987. Her first outing was on stage, in the off-Broadway play For Dear Life, and her first small film role followed in 1988, in the boy-meets-alien comedy Mac and Me.
For the next few years, she paid her dues in supporting or one-off roles in TV shows such as Ferris Bueller and Quantum Leap, and in 1993 briefly found the big-screen spotlight, starring in the comedy-horror Leprechaun.
The following year, Aniston got what she thought was her big break, a starring role in the TV comedy Muddling Through. It came perilously close to costing her the role of her life.
She recently revealed that during a frantic two-week period in 1994, she had been shuttling back and forth between the two shows, and the producers of Friends had begun sounding out other actors for her role.
"There was a period where I had to stand out of the photographs for the group shots," Aniston said in an interview earlier this year. "I had phone calls from girlfriends saying: 'I'm auditioning for your part in Friends.'"
Luckily for her, Muddling Through muddled through for only one season.
The Friends pilot was broadcast on September 22, 1994, and for the next 10 years and 236 episodes regularly drew 24 million viewers on American TV. The last episode, screened on May 6, 2004, was watched by 52 million.
Over the decade, Aniston and the rest of the cast set about becoming some of the wealthiest actors of their generation.
At first, they were each paid US$22,500 (Dh82,641) per episode. Not bad, but that quickly changed as the show took off. By series nine, each of the cast was receiving a reported $1 million per episode – making Aniston, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow the highest-paid television actresses of all time. With a share of rerun profits negotiated in 1996, some estimates put Aniston's earnings from Friends alone in the region of $100m.
As her fame – and that of her haircut – grew, so film work started to flow in, and Aniston became the exceptionally well-paid queen of romcoms.
Films she made while she was still in Friends, including Picture Perfect (1997) and Rock Star (2001), earned her respectable $2m or $3m salaries. But it was with 2004's Along Came Polly, in which she starred alongside Ben Stiller in a role that played cleverly on her Rachel persona, that she began to earn the big bucks – a reputed $5m.
The film coincided with the end of Friends, a time that was "really painful", she later said. "It was a family, and I don't do great with families splitting up."
Unfortunately, the conclusion of Friends also coincided with the end of her seven-year relationship with Brad Pitt.
The couple met on a blind date in 1998, and married in a star-studded Malibu ceremony in July 2000. In January 2005, they released a statement announcing they had decided to separate.
“For those who follow these sorts of things,” it added, “our separation is not the result of any of the speculation reported by the tabloid media.” They remained “committed and caring friends”.
But in the months and years following the break-up, Aniston had to endure portrayals in the media as the victim of the split, the duped wife betrayed by Pitt’s passion for Angelina Jolie.
It was a horrendous experience, as Aniston told Vanity Fair in September 2005, in her first interview after the break-up. Swimming in a sea of tabloid rumours, Aniston admitted struggling.
“I’m a human being, having a human experience in front of the world,” she said. “I wish it weren’t in front of the world. I try really hard to rise above it.”
Gladly, she did rise above it. While the media obsessed about her private life, she focused on her career, earning $8m or more apiece with big film hits such as The Break-Up (2006), Marley & Me (2008) and Horrible Bosses (2011). In 2011, Just Go with It, with Adam Sandler, banked her $10m. And the riches keep accruing. Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the last episode of Friends, the New York Post calculated that while her cast-mates had amassed wealth in the region of $60m to $85m each, "ditzy" Rachel had outsmarted them all, with an estimated net worth of $150m.
Since Management (2008), she has also developed a career as a producer. Perhaps her most significant work to date is last year's hit indie drama Cake, which she both produced and starred in. Playing a gritty part as a woman struggling to cope with debilitating pain following a car crash, she delivered a performance hailed by critics as "raw", "redefining", "poignant" and "unexpected".
She had suffered self-doubt before filming Cake. "I've been told so many times 'You're not that type' that part of me went: 'Am I not?'" she told The Hollywood Reporter. In the event, she "took out a tool bag I hadn't used", and found she was "capable of doing this after so many years of being able to 'show up'".
It could be the beginning of a new direction. Another serious drama, The Yellow Birds, in which Aniston stars as the mother of a young soldier sent off to fight in Iraq, is due to be released next year.
Aniston has also branched out into other businesses – notably partnering with the cosmetics giant Elizabeth Arden in 2010 to produce a range of perfumes. The latest, Near Dusk by Jennifer Aniston, was launched this summer. Since 2007, she’s been an investor in the premium vapour-distilled Smartwater, the most recent campaign of which plays on her credits as a “smart” businesswoman, and is also the co-owner and face of Living Proof hair care.
Aniston has also supported numerous charities, including Doctors Without Borders, Hope for Haiti, St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and Feeding America.
Many were surprised when Aniston wasn't nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Cake, but she has shrugged off the disappointment. After a post-snub interview with Ellen DeGeneres in January, The Hollywood Reporter said Aniston had been "exactly what millions of fans who have known her for two decades wanted her to be: funny and self-deprecating and exquisitely human".
Her appeal, it said, “is rooted in the very fact that she can be hurt, again and again – whether by the Oscars or the Sexiest Man Alive – and she’ll endure. She’s rich and glamorous and famous, but she’s also one of us: a real person with a beating heart”.
That heart found fulfilment in 2011, when on the set of the film Wanderlust, Aniston reconnected with the actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux, the star of the HBO drama series The Leftovers and writer of the blockbuster films Tropic Thunder and Iron Man 2. The couple married in August this year on the Bel-Air estate they had bought for $22m in 2012.
As she told Vanity Fair in the dark days of 2005, she had never given up on true love.
“Maybe it’s a fairy tale,” she said. “But I believe in happily ever after.”
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