When she was 12, Jennifer Aniston was sent to her room for not being interesting enough. "My father told me I had nothing to say," says the 27-year-old actress. "He made me leave the table. "From there, she went into her teens, her mouth shut but her eyes open, fixed on screens big and small, where actors, even those with nothing to say, are furnished lines and emotions. "I decided I wanted to be an actress. I remember dreaming about it, about being on TV."

As she grew up in New York, Aniston passed through grades and jobs, hairstyles and attitudes. Now she was bookish and smart, now flirty and impulsive. After graduating from high school, she went West, and she appeared in a handful of television series, getting canceled and dumped but keeping on until, two years ago, she found her way to Friends, an NBC sitcom that became a monster hit and did for Aniston just what she always knew such a hit would do - make her the most fascinating person at the table.

During the last week of 1995, Aniston finds herself in Aspen, Colo., that Mecca of celebrity, hounded by fans and photographers. Interesting is a word that seems to cling to her like a sweater. Her face is on the cover of several national magazines, including People, which is calling her one of the year's 25 Most Intriguing People. She has come full circle: Fifteen years ago, confined to her room, Aniston was trying to figure out what went wrong. Today, dragging her skis toward the day's first lift, she's trying to figure out what went right. "I'm baffled," she says. "I mean, you think you're just the most uninteresting person in the world, and then all this happens, and you have to wonder, 'Is any of it real?' "

Like so many of her friends, Aniston was shaped by divorce. At first, all was placid in her childhood home, an apartment in Manhattan. She lived there with her older half brother, Johnny Melick, her mother, Nancy Aniston, who had some small success as an actress and fashion model, and her father, John Aniston, an actor who for years has portrayed Victor Kiriakis, a tight-lipped villain on Days of Our Lives. ("He's a strikingly handsome man," says Jennifer. "He's got a mustache.") Jennifer's godfather was her father's friend Telly Savalas. "I was close to Telly when I was younger," she says. "He was one of the nicest people." Back then, Jennifer could answer the question "Who loves ya, baby?" without thinking twice: everyone.

When Jennifer was about 9, though, this world began to unravel. Her father moved out, her parents split, and that was that. "It was awful," she says. "I felt so totally responsible. It's so clich?, but I really felt it was because I wasn't a good enough kid. And then on top of that, my dad wasn't great with kids. He loves kids, he loves me, but, you know, I've seen guys that are great with their daughters."

"I knew the divorce was hard on her," says John Aniston. "And I'm sure I could have done a lot of things to make it easier, but it was very difficult."

From the beginning, though, Jennifer may have found shelter in her imagination. "From the minute she popped out, she was the queen of make-believe," says Melick. "She was always walking her Barbies through scenes. And later, when she started watching TV, she was the Bionic Woman."

Jennifer's desire to become an actress was confirmed by a trip to the theater. "I went to see Children of a Lesser God on Broadway," she says. "I was sitting in the second or third row, and I was just so blown away, and I walked out saying, 'That's what I want to do.' "

Maybe this love for acting had something to do with a desire to beat her father at his own game. Or maybe she wanted to please him. Or maybe Jennifer, dividing her time between her parents, wanted to pretend she was someone else, somewhere else. "My father did not want me to be in this business," she says. "It's so full of rejection."

"Well, I wasn't terribly thrilled," says John Aniston. "I don't think a father who knows anything about this business would be thrilled to have a daughter who is in it."

"Growing up, we saw our parents struggle," says Melick. "My father didn't really lock himself into a steady income until Jennifer was 5. And we were all worried about her going through that."

When she was 15, Jennifer was accepted by New York's High School of Performing Arts, the school where kids danced on tables in Fame. Her first stage was the back row of the classroom, where she blossomed as a wise guy. "I did it for attention," she says. "As sick as it sounds, it was the only way to get my father and my mother in the same room."

Still, some faculty members saw promise in her antics. "When Jennifer was in high school, I sat her down and told her she would be in a sitcom," Anthony Abeson, a former acting teacher at the school, tells me over the phone. "Even then she had a gift for comedy, an energy that's not easy to legislate. Some funny people are exhalers. Funny all the time; always on. They crowd people out. Jennifer was good as an inhaler as well as an exhaler. Like the tide, she always had the ability to go in and out." He pauses. "If you could see me, I'm making a sort of in-and-out motion with my hand."

After graduating from high school in 1987, Aniston spent about a year living at her mom's. College was as ill-suited to her plans as the Army or clown school. "I wanted her to go to college, and she just didn't want to," says John Aniston. "She was anxious to get on with it. Once she decided what she wanted to do, she was very driven."

"I guess I missed the personal things about college, like that whole coming-of-age thing," Aniston now says. Instead, she spent her days auditioning, her nights waitressing. Whereas her character on Friends fills orders at Central Perk, a fictitious downtown cafe, Aniston worked at Jackson Hole, a pseudo-down-home burger joint on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

When she turned 20, Aniston went West, where she fell in with that lost breed of actors who live in the hills surrounding Los Angeles, working as messengers, receptionists, whatever. (Aniston took a telemarketing job, "selling my soul," she says.) After a year, she found her way to Laurel Canyon, a hamlet of actors and writers, where she met many of the people who are her friends today. In the low-roofed houses that line the canyon, they shared wine, griping about jobs lost, opportunities missed. "Everybody just kept moving up there," she says. "In all these houses were all our friends. And everybody watched out for everybody. We never left the hill. We were the hill people."

"That was a great time for her," says Melick. "You could tell something was happening, that she was spreading her wings."

It was during these years that Aniston met future co-star Matthew Perry. When asked what time has taught him about the actress, Perry narrows his eyes and says: "That she's the worst driver in the history of drivers. If I know she's going somewhere, I stay home."

Now and then, the female hill people would head off into the woods and form a circle, which they filled with candles and personal mementos, hold hands and talk. "Women have to become nicer to each other," Aniston says. "There's such catty bullshit that goes on, and my girlfriends and I just started this circle. I remember the first time we did it, this one girl was silent through the whole thing, and then at the end she was just weeping. She just had this huge sort of enlightening kind of experience being with these women, and it was, like, women are awesome, especially together as a group, so kind and warm and wonderful."

All the while, Aniston was pushing on, getting cast as a regular on a handful of sketch shows and sitcoms - Molloy, Ferris Bueller, The Edge, Muddling Through - on which she often played the annoying sister. All these shows fizzled. "She spent five years working on shows that weren't great, but she learned how to stay in there," says actress Andrea Bendewald, a friend since high school. "It made her a veteran."

Looking back at those days, when she lived in anonymity among the anonymous, Aniston talks of failure as almost romantic, as something to be endured - like a hangover. "You always miss parts of your past," she says now. "Back then it was familiar and safe, and now you have no idea what's around the corner."

As the months rolled by, Aniston transformed herself. She used to be poor; now she's rich. She used to be the same; now she's different. She used to be fat; now she's famous. She got fat the way everyone gets fat: going nowhere, watching TV, eating from the fridge, spooning from the jar, drinking from the carton. "I ate too many mayonnaise sandwiches," Aniston says, sighing. "Mayonnaise on white bread - the most delicious thing in the world."

One day for a call-back, Aniston was told to show up in a leotard and tights. Before the audition, she met with her agent. Moving a hand along her chunky frame, Aniston joked, " 'Well, this should blow it for me.'

"And my agent said, 'Actually, I've been meaning to talk to you about that.' "

For the next several minutes, Aniston heard her own body discussed in the abstract way people discuss cars. "My agent gave it to me straight," she says. "Nicest thing he ever did. . . . The disgusting thing of Hollywood - I wasn't getting lots of jobs 'cause I was too heavy."

Over the coming months, Aniston gave up mayonnaise, pre-meal snacking, white bread, post-meal snacking and butter. After going through Nutri/System, she delivered a testimonial for the program on The Howard Stern Show. She eventually lost 30 pounds. Now she almost never appears on TV without at least some part of her stomach showing. "It was amazing to see this thing emerge," she says, looking at her chest. "I never knew I had this body in me."

One thing offered the thin Aniston that the fat Aniston would probably never have gotten was a shot on a new NBC sitcom: In the fresh-scrubbed, datable world of Friends, there's little room for a fat one. "It happened so fast," says Aniston. "I went in, read the script, laughed out loud, got home and an hour later had the part."

"She was the part," says Kevin Bright, an executive producer of Friends. "She was funny. She was pretty. It all came through in one big stroke."

And Aniston knew the show would be special. "It's all about relationships," she says. "And people really need to see something that they can relate to - real-life situations." What's more, Friends offers someone for everyone: a tall, dorky, insecure guy (David Schwimmer); a ditzy, guitar-strumming blonde (Lisa Kudrow); a handsome, jean-clad palooka (Matt LeBlanc); a sarcastic, 9-to-5-ing funnyman (Perry); a dark-haired, blue-eyed Veronica (Courteney Cox); and a spoiled suburban princess just finding her legs (Aniston). Aniston also became the friend with the hairdo, a wispy shag that falls around her face in an oval, a style imitated by every identity-seeking woman in America. "It's a great haircut," says Kudrow. "But most women just don't wear it as well as Jennifer. They can cut it however they want, but they still won't be her."

While masquerading as a kind of urban realism, Friends, with its sprawling apartments and surplus of leisure time, is as far-fetched as Star Trek. The show reflects average lives without blemishes. And it works. So far in the 1995-96 season, Friends is No. 3 in the ratings. In bookstores, Friends trivia and recipe books are stacked in pyramids. More than a hit, Friends has become something for people to emulate, a model for working stiffs getting tanked at happy hours. Across the land, those of us who are loners, who stand in corners, who won't dance, are now faced with the spectacle of strangers exchanging witticisms and high-fives with their pals, thumping each other hard on the back, being supportive and doing just about everything else to let us know that, yes, they are friends.