Please don't call me J-Lo

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10 April 2012

Does Jennifer Lopez never learn? Four years to the day after the release of Gigli, the movie disaster in which she starred with then-fiancé Ben Affleck, she gives us El Cantante, in which she plays opposite new husband Marc Anthony.

But everything, she insists, is different now. The diva's diva claims she has learned from her mistakes of the Affleck era, when a week didn't go by without the launch of a new fragrance, restaurant, music video or - usually bad - movie. The woman who brought the large derrière back into fashion almost killed her own career through over-exposure. By the time the split came, the public were heartily sick of "Bennifer" and the two stars ran for the hills - in opposite directions.

"I just didn't realise that there was a different way to live, you know what I mean?" Lopez tells me today, using her trademark interrogative for the first of many times. "I had just been working and working, and doing all kinds of things and was kind of dizzy with the whole thing."

So does she admit she courted all that media attention then? "Mmmmm," she pauses. "I wouldn't say I courted it, but I didn't do anything to prevent it. I would just go out and wouldn't care, and say that I was not going to let it affect me even though it was affecting me."

At 38, she is as dazzling as ever - the sparkly white mini-dress and cascading hair show her off to best advantage - but she's not just spouting and pouting. She pauses to think before she speaks. Oh, and by the way, she doesn't like being called J-Lo anymore.

The transformation appears almost entirely down to her relationship with Anthony, one of the Latin world's biggest music stars. They married in June 2004, a speedy five months after Lopez left Affleck. They live in Los Angeles, where friends and neighbours include the Beckhams, and often have Anthony's children over - two from his first marriage, and a third with a New York City police officer.

"Getting together with Marc forced me to slow down and concentrate on things other than work," says Lopez. "We established early on in our relationship that it wasn't up for public consumption. We were basically in hiding for the first year. Marc has been in the business for so long but has had a different kind of career, a bit more in the background. He did very little press and always let his work speak for itself. He showed me that I didn't have to do it my way.

"It took some time to change the tide with the paparazzi. They know where we live, of course - they know where everyone lives. But we wore them down, little by little, by holding bags over our heads or letting them sit there all day without coming out. It becomes a waste of time for them, so they go somewhere else. There's a way to discourage that kind of attention. I just didn't know it earlier."

Anthony has clearly had a powerful influence on all aspects of Lopez's life. Though both were born in New York, both are of Puerto Rican descent and are leading the charge of Latin culture into white America. Lopez has called her film company Nuyorican, referring to the continuing wave of Puerto Rican immigration into New York and, judging by her most recent professional choices, is in the process of reinventing herself as a Latina hero.

She admits that, when she met Anthony, she was "at a point in my life where I thought I was missing it, you know what I mean?" Besides the film, she has made a Spanish album, Como Ama Una Mujer, and is about to embark on a concert tour of the Americas with her husband - provided her rumoured pregnancy does not interfere with her schedule (she's not telling). She also has an Englishlanguage album, titled Brave, ready for release next month.

This is by no means the easy route for Lopez. El Cantante is just out in the US, but awaiting a UK release date. Produced by Lopez herself, it stars Anthony in the true story of salsa singing legend Hector Lavoe, who died of Aids in 1993, with Jennifer as his headstrong wife, Puchi.

She has also produced - and stars in - Bordertown, which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival this year but is still without a UK distributor. Another real-life story, about the murders of scores of women in the Mexican border town of Juarez, costarring Antonio Banderas, it has been labelled both "kitsch" and "worthy" by American critics.

"When I got married three years ago, I decided to pull back from the public eye and work on projects that I was really passionate about," she says. "I mean, you get to a point in your career where you either sit down and wait for people to call you or you are proactive and make something happen."

So far, the results have been middling. She'll have to wait for Bordertown to test the American box office when it's released at the end of the month, but the Spanish album didn't sell well and El Cantante has split opinion - many critics scorned it, but a significant are also calling it a genuine Latin epic.

Hector Lavoe was a music sensation who pioneered the salsa sound in the Seventies. Leaving Puerto Rico to seek his fortune in New York, he met and married club girl Puchi early on, but his increasing fame was overshadowed by his legendary drug habits and hard-partying ways. The story ends in tragedy, but the film is a colourful, pulpy biopic filled with infectious music and dominated by a strident performance from Lopez, whose character gets even more screen time than Anthony's. She struts and shrieks her way through the drama, with more hairdos and vintage costume changes than the entire cast of Dreamgirls.

Lopez and Anthony met 10 years ago when he was performing on Broadway in Paul Simon's The Capeman. Lopez, a keen fan of his music, took her dad to see the show for Father's Day and they were invited backstage.

"I don't remember exactly how it happened," she giggles. "We met him and immediately he said something like, 'You're my wife and you don't even know it yet.' We just became friends from there. We did a record together on my first album. We kind of just found our way back to each other. We both lived very crazy lives for a time and went in different directions but eventually we just kind of got together again."

Crazy lives indeed. Anthony married a former Miss Universe, Dayanara Torres, in 2000 and they had two children before divorcing four years later, when Anthony was already seeing Lopez. And Lopez, of course, had a string of relationships - a nine-month marriage in 2001-2 to dancer Cris Judd, which was her second, and high-profile relationships with Puff Daddy as well as Affleck.

So did she have qualms about making a movie with her husband? Did the ignominy of Gigli not make her think twice? "It's funny, I had no concerns about Marc doing this part," she says. "It wasn't until we were close to shooting that agents and managers started mentioning other, bigger names to play Hector. But I just always knew, and there was no way I was going to let anybody talk me out of it." Sometimes it helps to be the producer.

Lopez has come a long way. Born in the Bronx in 1969, she began her career as a dancer in stage musicals, getting her big break as a back-up dancer on a popular TV sketch comedy, In Living Color, which is where Jim Carrey also got his break. Sitcoms and series followed but it was not until the 1995 film Mi Familia that Hollywood began to take notice. Bigger movies followed: Money Train with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, and the roundly panned Jack with Robin Williams.

Then came Selena, the true story of the Mexican pop singer who was murdered by the president of her fan club in 1995. Lopez became the first Latina to be paid $1 million for a film. It launched her into the big league, and she went on to co-star with Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine, with Sean Penn in U-Turn and with George Clooney in Out of Sight. Meanwhile, in her private life, she ended her first marriage, to model Ojani Noa, after less than a year.

She started her music career in earnest around this time, in 1999, with the hit album, On the 6, and was carrying films (The Cell and The Wedding Planner). A clothing line followed, with a second hit album and another hit movie, Maid in Manhattan.

It was Gigli and Bennifer that made Lopez's career falter. "I think from now on the focus has to be on the work," she says defiantly. "When we go on tour, so long as we do a great show, we'll be fine. I think the minute it starts getting scrutinised is when it's not great. That's when they will start talking about our relationship and say, 'They're a mess.'"

So does Lopez miss the spotlight that seems to have been redirected to a younger generation of women, such as Lindsay and Paris? "I still feel like there's some of that, so it's not completely gone from my life, but no, I don't miss it. I feel sorry for what some people are going through and the levels that it's got to right now. I'm so glad it's not me."

She shakes her head and repeats herself. "I'm so happy that it's not me." I'm sure that she means it, and, yes, I know what she means.

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