JLo - 'The Queen of Mistakes'

Congratulations!

Jennifer Lopez: 'Thank you! I'm really happy. I've never made any secret of the fact that I want children - this is a special time for us.'

It must be a huge relief for you after three years of trying.

Jennifer Lopez: 'When Marc and I first got married, my mother rang me every day asking if there was any news. I come from a big Latino family where it's all about having children. So the pressure was huge from the start.'

You purposely didn't announce the news until you were five months pregnant. That must have been hard...

Jennifer Lopez: [Laughs] 'Believe me, it was! But I know people have criticised me a lot in the past for talking about my personal life openly, and I'm the first to admit it's taken me a long time to get the balance right - I've learnt not to reveal too much.'

Do you think your success came at the cost of your personal life in the past?

Jennifer Lopez: 'I think I was so hungry to succeed that when fame first started to happen for me, I just kept going and going. I was singing, I was acting, I was in the fashion world and I was flying all over the place with no rest and no time for either myself or the people I wanted to be with. I was on this spinning carousel.

It was all a bit mad so I had to get off that ride and make big changes to my life. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself, because for a girl like me from the Bronx, wearing gorgeous clothes and having all that attention was just amazing. It was like being a princess. But...'

But it didn't make you happy?

Jennifer Lopez: [Long pause] 'Well, it didn't take me long to realise that sort of fame can be scary. The more the circus builds up around you, the more you start to lose what got you there in the first place. For me, it was always about being a good performer and working hard, doing movies and making music. But that began to get lost in all the crazy stuff. I stopped being myself and believing in the things I'd always believed in. I felt as if I was the same person on the inside but the outside was so different.'

Was this at the same time as all the so-called 'diva demands'?

Jennifer Lopez: [Laughs] 'All that diva stuff was just so unreal. I never made demands like that. I would never ask for rooms to be painted white and I don't even know how to count the threads on sheets! [One of Jennifer's most widely reported 'demands' is that her hotel beds have to have Egyptian cotton sheets with a count of at least 250 threads per square inch of fabric.] Sometimes you can get stuck in a world and you don't know how to get out because it's all so crazy. But you learn - boy, do you learn. Hey, I'm the Queen of Mistakes!'