The Painful Truth Behind Jennifer Aniston’s Strained Family Ties

The character of Rachel Green had a strained relationship with her mother, but in real life, Jennifer Aniston had it much worse. Her parents split up when she was just nine years old, and afterwards she lived with her mom Nancy Dow, a model . It was a difficult upbringing, with Dow constantly demeaning Jen and holding petty grudges.

“She was very critical of me,” Jen revealed in 2015, “Because she was a model, she was gorgeous, stunning. I wasn’t. I never was. I honestly still don’t think of myself in that sort of light, which is fine. She was also very unforgiving. She would hold grudges that I just found so petty.”

Things only got worse when Jen was grown up, with Dow publishing a tell-all memoir, Mother and Daughter to Friends: A Memoir, in 1999. This led to mother and daughter barely speaking to each other for over a decade. Nancy wasn’t invited to Jen’s weddings and Jen was left out of Nancy’s will. They started to reconcile in the 2010s, as Dow’s health was worsening, and Jen attended her mother’s funeral after she sadly passed away in 2016.