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Jen Faces Her Future

Originally posted Thursday January 26, 2006 12:00 PM EST

"They get each other," says a Vaughn pal of the pair (in L.A. in November). Photo by: RAMEY

After a year of melodrama, laughter is what Aniston is seeking. "I want to find peace," she told reporters in December. "I just want to be happy." Aniston has called the year since she and Pitt stunned fans by announcing their split – and then he stunned her by fast-forwarding parenthood with Jolie – "the best of times and the worst of times." She's toughed out the trauma with a sort of Zen resignation. Her survival mantra, Aniston said, has been simple: "Sit in it, be with it, be in it. There is such a freedom, in a weird way, to say, 'Look, here I am, this is it.'

You move through it faster." Where she is heading is unclear. But her future today bears little resemblance to life the last time she hit Sundance, in 2002, when acclaim for The Good Girl offered a taste of her post-Friends movie career and life with Pitt seemed full of promise. Since the split, Aniston has dealt with disappointing box office for the thriller Derailed and the romantic comedy Rumor Has It. And how audiences will receive Money– as well as The Break-Up – may determine her viability as a Hollywood star.

But for the woman who raced through four back-to-back films in the months after her split from Pitt, that kind of success may suddenly be a less pressing priority. "As much as I love my work " she told the Orange County Register in December, "there is so much else that's now interesting to me." Reconnecting with her long-estranged mother, actress Nancy Dow, for starters.

At home one recent Sunday when she was feeling down, she told the Register, she saw a set of numbers flash through her head – and recognized them as a phone number she had not dialed in nearly a decade: her mother's. The two had not spoken since Dow wrote a book about her daughter in 1996, and Aniston, who was soon to wed Pitt, cut off all contact.But from the vantage of her own divorce, Aniston looked anew at her mother, who had split from her father, actor John Aniston, when she was a child. "I finally had some compassion," Aniston told the Register; she dialed and said simply, "'Hi, Mom. It's Jen.' And [Mom] said, 'You're kidding. Get out of here.' I said, 'No, it's me.' And she said, 'Jennifer? Jennifer Aniston? My kid?' "