“After two failed marriages, Jennifer Aniston said she was happy being single at the age of 56.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
She wouldn’t rule out another romance, she conceded, but she wasn’t actively looking. But if she did find someone special, however, she would love him to be an industry outsider.
Last week, Aniston’s wish seemed to come true when she went Instagram-official with her new boyfriend Jim Curtis, posting a black-and-white photo of the couple hugging at his 50th birthday celebrations.
‘Happy birthday, my love. Cherished,’ Aniston wrote in her caption alongside a heart emoji.
‘If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up,’ responded Curtis effusively on his own Instagram account.
So who is this handsome, silver-haired stranger who has, out of the blue, captured the heart of the actress best known for Friends and currently starring in the hit Apple TV series The Morning Show?
A virtual unknown, divorced father of a teenage son, he could not be more different from Aniston’s two former husbands, the actors Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux.
Just as she wanted, he is not a star in Hollywood but is instead a well-known and influential figure in the ‘wellness’ industry, working as a hypnotherapist and a life coach.
He’d started out as a Wall Street trader, but has since made it his mission to help others after experiencing his own physical and mental health problems at the age of 22, when doctors found lesions on his spinal cord, which left him walking with a pronounced limp.
A source close to Aniston said she and Curtis have known each other for far longer than people suspect. ‘They’ve been friends for a long time, but the romance only blossomed over the summer. He’s a down-to-earth guy and everyone loves him. That makes him sound boring, but he’s not. He can hold his own and is funny and really charming. Plus he has nothing to do with her world – acting – which is great.
‘Jim has been on a profound health journey and spends his life helping others suffering from chronic illnesses. He’s incredibly grounded and isn’t impressed by things like fame.
‘He adores Jen and supports her 100 per cent, but he’s not someone who wants to go out all the time. They’re both homebodies. They watch a lot of movies and have friends over, rather than hitting the town.
‘He’s helped her to open up in ways she never has before. He’s a good guy and she trusts him. They laugh a lot and he’s taught her to embrace her silliness and not take life too seriously.
‘None of us have ever seen her this happy and relaxed. She’s glowing and very much in love.’
His world may be far from red carpets, private jets and public veneration, but Curtis has a back story worthy of a Hollywood script. In a 2018 interview with the business magazine Fast Company, he described how ill health first struck when he was in the prime of his life.
‘It was unknown how it started but I very rapidly became ill and soon had trouble walking,’ he said.
‘My illness was telling me something about the perception of who I was [which to me] was this macho guy. I was an athlete, and I had a plan to work on Wall Street.’
Entering the pressurised atmosphere of the American Stock Exchange in New York was the wrong decision, he said in hindsight. ‘It was super-high stress, which is inflammatory and devastating for a condition like mine. It increased symptoms of pain and fatigue and it brought on new ones like IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] and other things I couldn’t control.’
After two years on Wall Street, he switched to working in sales in digital health media and helped build the WebMD health network, which now has millions of users a month.
In 2003, Curtis married Rachel Napolitano. Their meeting itself has a touch of rom-com to it: he described how he was watching a TV show one evening in 1998, when he became fixated on one of the guests, a pretty consultant in the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui.
He told friends: ‘I want to date a girl who looks like that.’
The following year, he struck up a conversation with an attractive cocktail waitress in a bar in New York. She also worked as a consultant in feng shui, which focuses on the arrangement of objects in the home to create harmony. ‘She was really smart. We talked about spirituality,’ Curtis recalled.
It wasn’t until months later that he realised Rachel was the same girl he’d seen on TV that night.
The marriage resulted in the birth of their son, but didn’t last, for reasons unknown. Napolitano seemingly keeps a low profile and has yet to comment on her ex-husband’s new romance.
As a single man, Curtis continued to seek out alternative practitioners to help with his health problems with varying success.
On one occasion, he visited a so-called shaman in New York who claimed he could heal Curtis’s disability.
‘He told me to take all my clothes off and lay in front of him on a dirty old rug… he lit some sage branches and hit my back and legs with the burning sage sticks and blew cigarette smoke into my face. The scene was so surreal I began to laugh,’ Curtis recalled.
Reliant on a walking stick, Curtis was initially embarrassed about his condition, and would tell people he’d been injured falling off a motorbike because he thought it sounded macho.
While working as a travelling salesman for health companies, he recalled that he ‘was eating a lot of bad food and alcohol’ and was 50lb overweight.
A breakthrough came when Curtis decided to talk about his condition in front of 700 people at a health industry event and said he realised that it was better to be open about the challenges he was facing.
The wellness pioneer also embarked on an Indiana Jones-style odyssey to seek out, and be treated by, non-traditional healers around the world, before becoming a healer and life coach.
He chronicled those adventures in his 2017 book The Stimulati Experience. They included sessions with Ecuadorian shamans and grand masters of kung fu and Qigong, ancient Chinese practices that combine movement, deep breathing and meditation to strengthen the body.
Along the way, he became a New Age zealot, studying ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ – how our thoughts affect behaviour – in order to ‘better understand the unconscious mind’ and became a certified Institute of Integrative Nutrition health coach. He also refers to himself as a ‘student of human engagement’ and a ‘subconscious strategist’.
Nowadays, his day job is coaching clients on how to become successful with regards to their health, careers and relationships. ‘I guide people on how to get s*** done, despite the obstacles in their mind’ is how he puts it.
Some of the advice he dispenses is certainly quirky. A list of his lifestyle tweaks to improve wellbeing includes: ‘Put a rock in your shoe. If you want to change your behaviour and create gratitude. Live in discomfort.’
For advice on recovering from heartbreak, he recommends: ‘Sleep on the opposite side of the bed. When you change your routine, you grow new neural pathways in the brain.’
For those looking for love, he advises: ‘First love yourself. When you love yourself, you will magnetise more love to you.’
He shares this motivational and self-improvement content with his 806,000 followers on Instagram, but it probably also gets the stamp of approval from Aniston, who has suffered her own fair share of heartbreaks and disappointments.
While at the height of her fame, she married heartthrob actor Brad Pitt in a lavish wedding ceremony in 2000, making them a Hollywood golden couple.
Just five years later it was all over after Pitt fell in love with his co-star, Angelina Jolie, while on the film set of Mr And Mrs Smith.
Ten years later, she found love again, this time with actor Justin Theroux, whom she married in 2015 – yet that marriage floundered too, after three years.
Whether it was Curtis’s renown as a healer that brought him on to his famous new girlfriend’s radar is not clear. It is said they were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and were first photographed together in July during a trip to Majorca, when they were joined by Aniston’s close acting friend Jason Bateman and his wife Amanda Anka.
They were also spotted on a couples’ night dinner in Malibu with fellow Friends star Courteney Cox and her musician boyfriend Johnny McDaid.
Since meeting Curtis, Aniston has opened up about her struggles with infertility, revealing how she ‘did everything she could’ to have a child, including gruelling – and ultimately unsuccessful – rounds of IVF in her 30s and 40s.
Speaking on a podcast last month, she said: ‘When people say “but you can adopt”, I don’t want to adopt. I want my own DNA in a little person. That’s the only way, selfish or not, whatever that is, I’ve wanted it.
‘It just wasn’t in the plan, whatever the plan was. It’s very emotional, especially in the moment when they say “that’s it”, because there is a weird moment when that happens.’
Curtis was with her last month at the premiere of the fourth series of The Morning Show, but stayed out of the spotlight.
Her next big project is to star in a TV adaptation of actress Jennette McCurdy’s bestselling memoir about her pushy stage mother, I’m Glad My Mom Died.
So far, Curtis has passed the crucial friends test, and everyone seems to like him and believe they make a great couple.
TV personality Bethenny Frankel, who said she dated Curtis about a decade ago, said: ‘I genuinely believe that they’ve found each other’s “forever”.’
Best-selling self-help author Gabrielle Bernstein, who wrote a foreword to Curtis’s book, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Jim is a lovely man. I’m so excited that he has found love.’
Amid a wave of good will, celebrities in Hollywood have also voiced their approval of Curtis and are hoping that Aniston will be third time lucky in love with her hunky hypnotist.