With her fourth divorce, Jennifer Lopez is becoming an Elizabeth Taylor for a new generation

NEW YORK – Children grow up. Parents grow old. Summer’s warmth gives way to winter’s chill. Add to this list of sad inevitabilities the Jennifer Lopez-Ben Affleck break-up.

After months of speculation and internet chatter, the news broke last week that the American singer-actress had on Aug 20 officially moved to dissolve her union with the American actor-director – on the anniversary of their 2022 wedding ceremony at a recreation of a Georgia plantation, no less.

“She was done waiting and the date she did it speaks a ton,” a source told People Magazine.

This marriage was, of course, the second time around for Bennifer, who had first been engaged in the early noughties, and who had found their way back to each other in 2021.

It was a love story for the ages – or, at least, for second chance-loving pop culture fans of a certain age seeking pandemic-era distractions. Had romance conquered all? Or was another of JLo’s relationships destined to take a turn on Fortuna’s wheel?

The reports that the couple did not sign a pre-nup suggest they were of the former belief. Call it the triumph of hope over lawyers.

This will be Lopez’s fourth divorce, which puts her at risk of becoming an Elizabeth Taylor for a new generation – a multi-talented female celebrity who is best known not for her vast creative output nor even for her undeniable beauty and charm, but, instead, for her many marriages.

Over her eight decades, the late American-British Hollywood screen icon Taylor was married eight times to seven men – she walked down the aisle twice with Welsh actor Richard Burton. She died in 2011 at the age of 79.

At 55, Lopez has married, in addition to Affleck, 52, producer Ojani Noa, backup dancer Cris Judd and singer Marc Anthony. She was also once engaged to baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Which means she is just a few Larry Fortenskys away from hitting what future historians may refer to as the Taylor line, where what gets covered is your love life, and not your life’s work.

But there is a big difference between JLo and La Liz.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was too young to know Taylor as the violet-eyed phenom who first dazzled in National Velvet (1944) and went on to be perhaps the most famous and glamorous movie star in the world.

I was, however, just the right age to experience her as a pop culture mainstay and occasional punchline. This was Taylor’s frosted-tips-and-caftans era, when she appeared in front of a camera only to make soft-focus perfume advertisements, parodied by Saturday Night Live.

It was the time of her union with Mr Fortensky, a construction worker she had met in rehabilitation, and whom she married at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.

The news media that had once so eagerly built her up was all too happy to lavish attention on her decline, as well.

But here is the thing. In between getting married, divorced and married again, Taylor found time to leverage her brand for an unglamorous but utterly urgent cause: She put her fame in service of people with Aids.

She did it early, in 1985, when many still wrongly feared that HIV could be transmitted through casual contact, and people with Aids were pariahs. Some hospitals did not want to treat them. Some landlords did not want to rent to them. Some schools did not want to teach them.

And there was Elizabeth Taylor, holding fund-raisers, giving money, urging then US President Ronald Reagan to make a speech about Aids (a word he had for years been reluctant even to say in public), rallying Hollywood friends and lovers to the cause, even when some colleagues warned her that aligning herself with such a reviled disease and the strident activism that was associated with it could end her career.

Who cares about careers, she demanded, “when the people, without whom we wouldn’t have a career, are dying?”

“I resented my fame,” her biographer Kate Andersen Brower has quoted her as saying, “until I realised I could use it.” She used it, and changed the world.

Lopez could do it too.

Unlike Taylor, who had retired from movies in her later decades, Lopez is still a fantastically successful entertainer.

This has not been her best year. There was a much-mocked, self-financed multimedia project (the album This Is Me... Now, the romantic drama musical film This Is Me... Now: A Love Story and the documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told), a hastily cancelled world tour, and a spate of think pieces about where it all went wrong and why social media had turned on her.

Even during this, she found time to serve as a co-chair of the Met Gala, where she appeared in a stunning Schiaparelli gown. She has beauty and charisma for days, work ethic for weeks.

Read enough about Lopez and two things are quickly evident: She wants to control her own narrative, and she yearns for love and affirmation.

She is hardly the only woman who wants to fall in love (and to look amazing while she is doing it). But she is one of very few who can also command the attention of millions of fans, whose voice can draw attention to the plight or oppressed group of her choosing, whose words could change the world.

I would not be presumptuous enough to tell Lopez which cause to embrace, nor to trot out the hoary old advice about how you will fall in love not when you are looking, but when you are pursuing your passions, living your best life. She is a queen – and she is already pursuing her passions and living her best life. I hope she gets her heart’s desire.

Meanwhile, I hope she knows that the kind of cultural capital she wields can be a tremendous force, reaching far beyond the bounds of the movie theatres and the tabloids and the satellite radio broadcasts. If JLo is going to be our generation’s Elizabeth Taylor, I hope she will lean into the best, most empowering parts of that story – Taylor as world-changer, speaking truth to power, not Taylor as the eternal bride. NYTIMES