Megastar Jennifer Lopez returns to the big screen for Valentine’s Day in a romantic comedy. In “Marry Me” she plays a pop diva looking for love.
New York – If megastar Jennifer Lopez wasn’t the focus of this film – the plot of the romantic comedy “Marry Me” would hardly be worth mentioning: Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a pop diva with a colorful life.
Together with newcomer Bastian, she has one of the most watched celebrity relationships in the world, including the hit single “Marry Me”. So the plan is to celebrate the dream wedding in front of an audience of millions – but then everything turns out differently. The film with Latino hit musician Maluma, Owen Wilson and Sarah Silverman will be released in German cinemas on February 10th. While the story isn’t exactly new, it’s natural for Hollywood to wonder just how much of Lopez herself is in Kat Valdez.
Parallels to your own life
The private life of the 52-year-old has occupied the masses for decades: her career as a dancer in the 90s was followed by hits like “Love Don’t Cost a Thing”, accompanied by two marriages in 1997 and 2001, both of which lasted less than a year. Finally, she began a relationship with Hollywood star Ben Affleck, accompanied in 2003 by a lot of malice about the joint film project “Love with Risk – Gigli”, which was awarded the “Golden Raspberry” mockery prize as “Worst comedy in the first 25 years of the prize”. .
The engagement to Affleck fell through and Lopez reunited with Latino megastar Marc Anthony for a seven-year marriage, and they have two children together. After the separation in 2011, public affairs followed, including with baseball player Alex Rodriguez and singer Drake – until finally the tabloids cheered when a renewed relationship with Ben Affleck became public in June 2021.
But if you shorten Lopez to this life in the headlines, you will miss the decades of worldwide success of the New Yorker as a musician, producer, presenter, actress and dancer: estimates assume up to 80 million albums have been sold, the film database IMDB lists 67 awards and 176 nominations for her musical and acting work, on Instagram she is followed by around 195 million other accounts.
Singer, Actress, Star
And even her work in front of the camera has received frequent critical acclaim. Her breakthrough came in the biopic “Selena – An American Dream” about the Latina singer who died in 1995 and is considered by many to be Lopez’s pioneer. In “Out of Sight” under Steven Soderbergh, in the eyes of many fans, she made her best film as US Marshall alongside George Clooney, and most recently in the warm-hearted stripper drama “Hustlers” she showed more facets than her worst critics wanted to concede.
With “Marry Me” she now brings a commentary on her own status as a superstar together with the type of role with which she celebrated the greatest successes in films such as “Wedding Planner” or “Manhattan Love Story”: as a charming main character in romantic comedies. “I just really understand this life,” Lopez said in an interview about the film, which was completed in 2019. “I do all of these things in my life myself and I’ve grown from it. But there is still a person in there.” dpa
