14 DAY TRIAL // The latest VH1 Behind the Music episode features singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, in what is undoubtedly one of her more revealing, in-depth interviews to date. The star, who worked for many years as a dancer before launching herself as an actress and singer, talks about anything from her troubled past romances to her long road to stardom, and even her rocky relationship with her mother, as the video below will confirm.
The episode is meant to cast some light behind Jennifer Lopez the artist, into how she’s like in real life and what prompted her to seek to make a name for herself in the entertainment industry. Her mother, sister, father and even husband Marc Anthony are all featured in it, along with countless people who met and worked with her somewhere along the way. Probably the most emotional moment is when Lopez reveals how becoming a mother herself helped her mend the relationship with her own mother.
Guadalupe (or Lupe for short) Lopez says in the video that she did not want Jennifer to go into entertainment, though she might have been ok with the idea of her trying out to become a dancer. Because Mrs. Lopez was opposed to her dreams of stardom, Jennifer left home when she was only 17, refusing to go to business college and setting out to earn her own living. Since then and up until two years ago, when Jennifer herself gave birth to twins, she and her mom were on the rocks.
“I did not want this lifestyle for her. We had a huge fight. I said to her, ‘If you don’t want to live by my rules, there’s the door.’ We were very angry with each other. I didn’t speak to her for quite a while,” the singer’s mother says at one point in the video. “At times, I feel like my girls [Leslie, Jennifer and Lynda] think that I don’t love them because I’m not very demonstrative. And I guess I was never, in their eyes, a good enough mum – that’s how I feel,” Lupe says later on, tears in her eyes.
“I actually moved into the dance studio, which was crazy. I literally was obsessed with dancing – I took classes day and night. There were a lot of dollar pizzas to survive,” Jennifer says of moving to Manhattan to catch her big break. Then, after she gave birth to the twins, she and her mother buried the hatchet. “She gave me a card saying, ‘The way you feel about Max and Emme I feel about you’,” she says, also struggling to keep emotions at bay and barely succeeding in doing so.
Below is the entire episode of VH1’s Behind the Music with Jennifer Lopez. Enjoy.