Name : Jennifer Lopez
Nickname : ''La Guitarra'' (guitar shaped body)
Date of Birth : July 24, 1970
Place of Birth : New York, New York USA
Sign : Sun in Leo, Moon in Aries
Height : 5'6''
Eyes : Brown
Hair : Brown
Occupation : Singer, Actress & Model
Father : David Lopez - A computer operator
Mother : Guadalupe Lopez (School Teacher)
Sisters : Lynda & Leslie
Spouse : Ojani Noa [Divorced- February 1997 - 1998]
Fan Mail : Jennifer Lopez
C/O United Talent Agency
9560 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 500
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

So many film stars have attempted to launch a career in film; so many hit musicians have sought further success

in the movies. Think Madonna, Bruce Willis, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Keanu Reeves, Mariah Carey, the list

goes on and on. Yet none of them have ever matched the monumental parallel achievements of Jennifer Lopez.

Three multi-million-selling albums, and counting: several major blockbusters: Hollywood pay packets breaking

the $12 million mark, AND a Golden Globe nomination. Then there's the clothing line, the cosmetics and

fragrances. The woman is truly an all-singing, all-dancing phenomenon.She was born in the Castle Hill area of New York's Bronx on the 24th of July, 1970, growing up on Blackrock Avenue. Her father, David, was a computer technician, eventually working for Guardian Insurance. Mother Guadalupe (nee Rodriguez) was a kindergarten teacher working up in Westchester County. The couple both hailed from Ponce (though David's maternal great-parents were European), the second largest city in Puerto Rico, but had met in America, where they were both brought as children.Jennifer and her two sisters,Leslie (now a housewife and opera singer) and Lynda (a DJ, VJ and entertainment reporter), grew up in a small apartment which was "cold in the winter, hot in the summer". But "Hey", Jennifer later recalled "there was always rice and beans". And there was music. To keep the kids off the streets,Guadalupe would encourage them to put on little performances in the front room, singing and dancing. Salsa and merengue were favourites, with West Side Story viewed on many occasions - being about their people in their kind of neighbourhood. Jennifer claims to have seen the movie over 100 times. As a kid, she always admired Rita Moreno for her feistiness, her hot dancing and her cool boyfriend, yet ambition told her she should want to be Natalie Wood's Maria - the star.This ambition was fed from an early age. Jennifer began singing and dancing lessons from the age of 5 (at 7 her school dance class would tour New York), continuing through 8 years at the Catholic Holy Family high school in the Bronx, and another 4 at the all-girl Preston High School. Here she also proved herself to be an excellent athlete, pursuing softball, tennis, gymnastics and track events. She wasn't ever much of a student, though. When later asked what she got on her SATs, she joked "Nail polish".

Something of a tomboy, she grooved to R&B and the new electro and hip-hop scenes and was reputedly not to be

messed with. Physically a slow developer, she claims not to have felt like "a hot babe" till, at age 15, she

started going out with David Cruz, "the best-looking guy in the neighbourhood", a relationship that would

continue for some 9 years.Two years before the Cruz experience, at 13, she gained her famous profile when a truck carrying cylinders of compressed gas hit her mother's car. One of the truck's headlights came through the windscreen and crashed into the back of the car, where young Jennifer was sitting. Luckily, she was bent down, tying her shoelace and received only a broken nose, rather than a face fit only for a starring role in Mask.At 16, Jennifer won her first film role, as Myra in Connie Kaiserman's My Little Girl, where Mary Stuart

Masterson played a rich woman who volunteers to help institutionalized orphans in Philadelphia and must

overcome much opposition. But this didn't kick-start Jennifer's career, it simply gave her a tantalising taste.After graduating from High School, she entered a period of frenetic activity. Enrolling at Baruch College in Manhattan, she also held down a job in a law office and, at night, continued with her dance classes.

Unsurprisingly, her college career lasted just one semester. Guadalupe, keen on her daughter continuing her

education and doubting her chances in showbiz, was incensed. So Jennifer moved out, for a while sleeping in the

building where she'd won a scholarship to study dance.

For a while, Guadalupe was proved absolutely correct. Even while still in high school, Jennifer had performed

in musicals and on chorus lines, but nothing big. She was in local productions of Oklahoma and Jesus Christ

Superstar, there was a brief European tour with the Golden Musicals of Broadway revue, but after a year and a

half of auditioning, there was no real hope of a breakthrough. When she failed an audition to dance in the

Wayans brothers' comedy show, In Living Color, she was on the verge of breakdown. Fortunately, her luck changed

rapidly. She won a place on a Japanese tour of choreographer Hinton Battle's Synchronicity. On her return, she

received a call from Hollywood, saying she'd now been accepted for In Living Color, and could join the

Flygirls, the dance group whose routines opened and closed the show, choreographed by Rosie Perez. Off she went

to the west coast, but hated it, only settling when Cruz moved out to join her. When their relationship ended,

in 1994, he would move back to the Bronx, opening a dry-cleaning business.In Living Color was, of course, a huge hit, launching the Wayans brothers, as well as Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx

and Chris Rock. Working under Perez, Jennifer gained valuable experience, but was keen to proceed with an

acting career. It was Keenan Ivory Wayans who persuaded her to stick with the show for two years, to gain both

further knowledge and financial security.Eventually, she did leave, continuing to dance in several music videos, most notably Janet Jackson's That's The Way Loves Goes. But, offered Jackson's world tour, she turned it down, resolute in her thespian ambition and moving into more TV work. First came the movie The Crash Of Flight 7, starring Lindsay Wagner and Robert Loggia, where one of three planes on their way to a remote medical outpost crashes in the Mexican jungle. Immediately the search is on to locate and rescue any survivors, Jennifer playing heroic nurse Rosie Romero.

After this came three series in quick succession. First was Second Chances, created by husband and wife Lynn

Marie Latham and Bernard Lechowick, part of the Knots Landing team. Here three women, each finding her life in

turmoil, are drawn together as a "second chance" comes their way. Then came the infinitely more streetwise

South Central, Jennifer having been recommended to the producer by his wife, one of her co-dancers in the

Flygirls. This concerned the Mosley family and in particular mother Joan, as she tried to keep her son Andre

(Larenz Tate - Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) on the straight and narrow amidst the drugs, guns and bloody

money of one of LA's roughest districts. Jennifer would appear in a recurring role, as a cashier in a local

business.In terms of continuity, Second Chances had been a disaster. Not only were the sets destroyed in an earthquake, but two of the stars fell pregnant. The producers decided it wasn't worth rebuilding, or writing in some weird Dallas-style plot about a plague of alien impregnations, so they moved on. However, they had been impressed by the public response to Jennifer and her screen father, and brought their characters back in their next project, Hotel Malibu (very rare, that). Here Joanna Cassidy played a tough cookie who runs the family hotel after her husband pegs it, her sly son all the while trying to sell the business so he can pay off corrupt government officials. Jennifer returned as Melinda Lopez, now the new bar assistant in the hotel. Now, at last, she was on the rise. In Gregory Nava's My Family, she inhabited the 1930s as the director followed three generations of an immigrant Mexican family in Los Angeles, Jennifer winning an Independent Spirit nomination for her efforts. Then came the first blockbuster, when she came in between Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, just as her former dance-leader Rosie Perez had in White Men Can't Jump. In Money Train, Harrelson and Snipes are transit cops who decide to rob the train carrying all the day's taking on the New York subway system. Naturally, they fall out over new partner Grace Santiago (Jennifer), an all-action kinda gal who punches Wesley out in the ring.