Foreign Affairs

In fact, this is what Jennifer Lopez is all about a sort of bluntness that sounds sexy, especially when you know from where it comes. On the flip side, this very forthrightness has also got the caramel-skinned actress into trouble on numerous occasions. "Cameron Diaz? A lucky model who’s been given a lot of opportunities. I just wish she would have done more with it. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, I thought, when directed, she can be good." Gwyneth Paltrow? "Tell me what she’s been in? I swear to God, I don’t remember anything she was in. Some people get hot by association. I heard more about her and Brad Pitt than I ever heard about her work," she told Movieline two years ago, in a scandalous interview that left a lot of bad blood between her and the actresses that she flayed.

Born and raised in the Bronx by a computer specialist and a kindergarten teacher, this 30-year-old actress attributes all her success to her severe background. "I have to say that the kind of upbringing I had, getting beaten up a little bit, growing up with all different kinds of different people, is the best upbringing for show business. The people who grew up softer, who don’t have what it takes to really survive in this business that’s why you find so many people on drugs here," she tells another magazine. Forget drugs, she seldom touches alcohol.

Anyway, this swaggering starlet started off her career learning jazz and ballet after dropping out mid-way from a college in New York shaking her thing in videos such as U Can’t Touch This and Janet Jackson’s That’s The Way Love Goes. And then in 1991, Lopez beat out thousands of applicants to become one of the Fly Girls in a TV show called In Living Color.

What followed after a few inconsequential television parts was her film debut in Gregory Nava’s critically acclaimed Mi Famillia, a movie on the lives of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. She then played the Cuban mistress of Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine (whom she referred to as "a legend in his own time and in his own mind like the rest of us are peons"), an incest victim in Oliver Stone’s U-Turn, and a Tejano singer named Selena in the movie with the same title. If being cast along with Hollywood’s A-list of actors wasn’t enough, she soon became the highest paid Hispanic actress with Out of Sight, a thriller opposite ladies man George Clooney, where she reportedly got paid a hefty 2 million. Next, Lopez went on to try newer pastures… actually, a terrain that she had started off with only this time she was going to sing as well. A career move that many thought would miscarry, similar to the fate that her predecessors (actor-crooners Bruce Willis, Don Henley, Keanu Reeves) met with.

However, she proved her critics wrong. On The Six, her debut solo album went on to go multiple Platinum and pave the way for a successful singing career. "Because it’s tough, challenging, and scary all the stuff I love. And singing and dancing is where I started. And when I was doing Selena, she inspired me to pursue that part of me all over again. I mean, it is a risk, but I have the same mentality I had with the movies: If I would’ve held back on that because I was scared and from the Bronx, I wouldn’t be where I am today," she painstakingly explains.

Of late, this capricious diva has made nutritious tabloid-fodder. Barely had the dust settled from her award-winning outfit at this year’s Grammys, she was back in the news and charged for the illegal possession of a gun along with boyfriend Sean Puffy Combs, in a true, sordid, New York style drama.

On a brighter note, she also has a number one movie out. Indian-born Tarsem Singh directs The Cell, a suspense thriller that stars Lopez as a child psychologist. The New York Times gave it a good review: "The picture wouldn’t work without her. She gives a provocative and nuanced performance. And her presence offers a tickling spin on the central idea of The Cell; what boy doesn’t want Jennifer Lopez in his dreams?"

Only the good ones.

Aditya Mehta