La Lopez

After working her famous booty off for nearly 30 years, JENNIFER LOPEZ is not afraid to celebrate her success

- Christopher Bagley

Jennifer Lopez is sitting by the pool behind her Bel-Air mansion, waiting for two staffers to move an umbrella closer to her chair and thinking about how her life could have turned out very differently. She sends a quick text to boyfriend Alex Rodriguez, takes a sip of ice water and sits still for a moment while a stylist applies a piece of double-stick tape to the plunging neckline of her Alexandre Vauthier dress, so there will be no cleavage mishaps during a TV appearance later in the afternoon. Then Lopez reflects on how close she came to ending up as a bank teller in the Bronx.

“If I didn’t have certain ambitions, I might have gotten married after high school and had kids and decided to get a job at a bank in Castle Hill, like my aunt did,” says the New York native. “It’s just that I had dreams and ideas that were different.”

Lopez, who turns 50 in July, has been pondering her life path a lot lately. It’s partly because in her new movie, Second Act (in cinemas now), she plays a character who she describes as “soooo me”—an outer-borough girl with no connections and no university degree who suddenly finds herself across the river in Manhattan, navigating a world of glamour and power and Madison Avenue shopping sprees.