At 57, the eternal Monica Geller of Friends dropped out of the race against the years: “I spent it trying to beat time, because there is pressure to maintain the image that does not depend only on fame, it is only for being a woman ”. Throughout his career he put his voice and body to issues that cut across the genre, while reality intersected –sometimes sadly– with fiction.

Perhaps without intending to, throughout her career she made visible issues that ran through women’s lives. Almost a decade before playing Monica Geller on Friends , Courteney Cox became known in 1985 as the face of a tampon brand in which, to the horror of her former classmates from traditional southern Mountain Brook high school, she was the first girl to said the word “period” on American television.

By then she was 20 years old, she had left architecture and had come to New York at the hands of her boyfriend, the band manager and nephew of her stepfather Ian Copeland , who in addition to giving her a place in his company, suggested that she work as a model and actress. It didn’t cost him too much – he quickly landed a contract with Ford Models, one of the leading talent agencies of the day.

Born exactly 57 years ago into a wealthy Alabama family as the youngest of four children of businessman Richard Cox and Courteney Bass , she was ten when her parents divorced in 1974. CeCe, as she was christened growing up as the leader of the cheerleaders and prom queen, she had to get used to being the middle one: her parents had nine more children with their new partners. While Richard Cox moved to Florida, his mother married businessman and financier Hunter Copeland , and Courteney spent his adolescence with them in Birmingham, one of the wealthiest and most conservative suburbs in the United States. She was raised to be a perfect southern lady: with access to the most prestigious clubs and her beauty as the best letter of introduction.

But in its beginnings, its origin was an inconvenience for its acting pretensions. He spent months taking voice over classes to put his Alabama accent behind him. However, in the first public appearance for which he attracted attention, he did not have to speak. It was for the video for the song Dancing in the dark , which Bruce Springsteen recorded in 1984, and which would be awarded at the MTV Video Awards the following year. It is said that, during the filming, the musician, who was told that he should choose Cox from the public, did not know that she was an actress until he finished recording. The one who would become one of the highest paid women on television charged only $ 350 to go upstairs to dance with Springsteenon stage looked like a fan, with short hair and muscular rocker with the stamp of her supposed idol.

Later they would follow several commercials and a fixed role as the girlfriend of Michael J Fox in the series Family Ties , between 87 and 89. It was the moment in which he decided to definitively move on to acting. She had used what she earned as a model to pay for theater classes and landed roles in films such as Masters of the Universe (1987) and Cocoon (1988).

In 1989 he told a friend that he had loved the work of Michael Keaton in Clean and Sober (1988), with which he turned his career as a comedian. That friend played matchmaking and arranged a first date for them at Cox’s house, which, according to what he told People, would spend five hours with the Batman actor without stopping talking “about the houses of our dreams, the biggest we had ever seen and those that we would like to build ourselves ”. They were together for almost six years.

That love may end, but her passion for architecture remains intact: although she dropped out of college, design is still one of CeCe’s biggest – and most lucrative – hobbies today, who invested a good part of the fortune she earned thanks to her role as Monica in Friends in buying, renovating and reselling houses. Cox, who, like her former castmates, went on to earn $ 1 million per episode of the sitcom , is today the second-richest of the group after Jennifer Aniston , with $ 150 million.Part of that income comes from her investments in properties that she recycles – she’s known for her keen eye for transforming pieces of classic architecture with contemporary touches. A pleasure he shared with Keaton: the first gift he gave him was the mansion they moved to, in Santa Monica.

They separated at the beginning of the second season of Friends , in 1995. As recounted in the recent meeting at 17 years of the last chapter of the series by Marta Kauffman, David Crane and Kevin Bright, in the original audition, to Courteney, then 27 , they offered her the character of Rachel Green who would fall to the one who later became her best friend in and out of fiction: Aniston. But the actress said that she preferred to play Monica because she felt more identified with the role. A fan of order and cleanliness, in a recent video she shared with her Instagram followers she jokes about it: “Tell me that you are Monica without telling me that you are Monica. I go first ”. Then he goes on to show the pinpoint organization of the kitchen of his Malibu home, including a drawer in which there is an exact place for each utensil and another for the spices. “Yes, I know,” he accepts in total harmony with his alter ego.

In a way, the ten-year sitcom gave it its all and also showed its own pains and joys. In an episode of the third season, a guest star from a renowned Hollywood dynasty played a stalker who chased after Phoebe ( Lisa Kudrow) by mistaking her for his twin Ursula. Cox barely interacted on that occasion with the one who years later would become the father of his daughter, but when he crossed paths with David Arquette again on the set of Scream (1996) – they shared a poster throughout the trilogy – the attraction was snapshot.

They were married in Grace Cathedral, in San Francisco , days after she turned 35, on June 12, 1999. She began the sixth season of Friends , in September of that year, as Courteney Cox Arquette. For her, who after the separation of her parents “had been left with the feeling that nothing was necessarily permanent”, David had come to change it, and his way of showing it was by publicly announcing that he had changed his legal and professional name.

From the first moment, the Arquette-Coxes wanted to consolidate that love with the search for a child, but like Monica and Chandler in the fiction, they had to deal with fertility problems for years. In 2019, the actress was in charge of the Facebook docuseries Nine Months with Courteney Cox in which she accompanied ten couples in the process of conception and childbirth, precisely to bring to light these issues that had touched her so deeply. close. “ I lost many pregnancies, and I don’t think that’s something we should keep quiet about , because it’s something sad, but it happens. I think it is important to be able to talk about these things so that many people who are going through the same thing know that they are not alone, “he said while promoting the program in a report forBusy Tonight . ” I got pregnant easily, but it was difficult for me to retain them and we had many disappointments,” he confided in another interview with People . Although we tried to try again as soon as we were ready. I’m not going to say it was a walk in the park, but what were we going to do? I didn’t want to give up! “

But in the midst of that struggle, she had to smile and play Monica in one of the most popular shows ever. One of the miscarriages she suffered was days after Rachel had her daughter Emma during the eighth season of Friends . It is a moving chapter, in which Monica – struggling to get pregnant – gives her friend the name she had thought for when she herself had a baby.

When Cox finally had her daughter Coco through assisted fertilization in 2004, the godmother was none other than Aniston . Although in the fiction Monica and Chandler end up adopting twins, CeCe went through her pregnancy during the final season of the series, and the costumes had to hide it by putting blazers and wide shirts, while the cameras tried to make only close-ups.

Coco Arquette Cox, just turned 17 years old. He was born on June 13, two days before his mother’s birthday and one after his parents’ wedding anniversary. It seemed that they had everything they wanted and Coco had arrived to seal the illusion that the “permanent” family was possible, until, in October 2010, they announced their separation . After the divorce, in 2013, she would go back to being just Courteney Cox.

However, as he assured More magazine , the love and family they formed only changed shape. “When you love someone, you want them to be happy, even if it’s not with you,” he said about his ex when it became known that he was going to have another child with his new girlfriend, in January 2014. “We were married a long time, and in divorces there are always things that one regrets, but we have a daughter and many projects together, we see each other almost daily and we are always going to wish each other well, “added who was already in a relationship with the Snow Patrol musician Johnny McDaid. As proof of the good relationship between them, I would go even a little further: it was Cox who announced on the Ellen DeGeneres program that David Arquette’s baby would be a boy (“I hope they don’t challenge me for this infidelity,” he laughed).

Outside, everything was security. But, once again, in her life the fiction was too close to reality: like Jules Cobb, the character she played between 2009 and 2015 in the series Cougar Town , suddenly Cox was also a divorced mother facing the world again of dating and the cruelty of seeing, at 50, how maturity is not measured by the same yardstick for men and women . His ex was going to be a father again with a girlfriend 17 years her junior, while Courteney – who had once been named by Playboy as “the hottest girl”, and was “among the ten sexiest in the world” of the magazine For Him – was determined to stop agingwith all kinds of treatments and surgeries. Cougar Town’s message was positive, women could also run after muscular young men and seek non-committal relationships, but for her it was devastating.

A few years ago, during her run on the reality show Running Wild , she admitted: “ Getting old was not the easiest thing for me. I spent my time trying to beat time, like in a race. Until I realized that you can’t. But it is very difficult, because there is pressure to maintain the image that does not depend only on fame, it is only for being a woman ”.

Cox still regrets some surgeries that made her look “fake.” “Everything falls apart, and I was trying desperately to avoid it. But faces need to have gestures, especially if you have thin skin, like me ”, he explains, and assures that to reverse this effect he allowed the fillers he had to dissolve and today he only resorts to non-invasive treatments, such as laser. “I am as natural as I can and I feel better. I think I am more like the person I was. Or so I hope ”.

Since then, the actress became one of the spokespersons and promoters of a more natural aging and a beauty with less demands. With many routines and exercises that she shares with her friend Aniston –with whom they usually get together for lunch salads (no, they don’t eat hamburgers and fries) -, such as using an infrared sauna several times a week “to rejuvenate the cells and eliminate toxins ”, and skin care with“ a hot towel every morning, a serum with vitamin C and anti-wrinkle cream ”before makeup, she repeats that, for her, the most important thing was to avoid fillers and injections of botox and collagen .

“It took me time, but I learned to embrace movement, to accept that getting old is a part of life, and to accept myself as well,” says Cox. That same southern girl who, without trying, dared to talk about all the taboos of women, in a job where that can cost them their career.

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