More interesting still is that they both have a "problem parent". Jolie is estranged from Voight and avoided using his name at the start of her career (Jolie is the French word for pretty and Jolie's mum, of whom she talks in affectionate terms, is partly French). There was a reconciliation with Voight about five years ago and he played Lara Croft's father in the first Lara Croft movie, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. But the freeze was on again when he spoke of his concerns for his daughter. It happened around the time Jolie was adopting her son, Maddox, from an orphanage in Cambodia and, as she later recalled in an interview with S, she was "furious". "People can have strange opinions about me, even my father, it doesn't matter much to me," she said. "But I couldn't believe the timing. I needed the approval of authorities in two countries to [approve my son's adoption and] bring him into this country. What he said could have ruined everything."

Aniston's problem parent, her mother, sometime actor/model Nancy Dow, upset her daughter by writing a tell-all book about Aniston's childhood after Friends and her character, Rachel Green, made her famous. They didn't talk to each other for nine years and Dow wasn't invited to Aniston's July 2000 marriage to Brad Pitt. In the wake of the split with Pitt, Aniston disclosed that she and her mum were talking again. She told S last month that being an innocent bystander at her parents' own bitter divorce had helped her put her split in perspective. Her split with Pitt has been, from all appearances, extremely civilised.

On that split, Aniston told a television interviewer that she and her sexy ex still talked and their break up had been "peaceful". And despite an initial "hurt" period, she has refused to dish any dirt on Pitt.

"I'm not embarrassed by my divorce," she says. "It happened, you grow, you go on. There's a freedom in a weird way. You can just say, 'Here I am. This is it'. My parents divorced when I was nine and it was bitter. So I thank them for lessons in what not to do. I watched my mother become very bitter and very angry and never let it go of it. She wasted a lot of time and energy in the second half of her life. And I'm not doing that."

How does Jolie rate on the "never speak ill of your ex" scale? She's always spoken fondly of British actor Jonny Lee Miller, her husband for three years from 1996. She was initially acerbic about Billy Bob Thornton after they divorced in 2003 - that one too went for three years and was famous for its gothic tone of tattoos and capsules of blood - but motherhood mellowed her: "We just weren't destined to be together."

Insider status always helps in Hollywood and a high-profile godparent or two is like an all-access pass backstage. Both Jolie and Aniston have some impressive names in that department.

Jolie has two star-certified godparents. Her godmother was the British-French bombshell of the 1960s and 1970s, Jacqueline Bisset and, as a role model for sultry screen queen status when it's your turn, you couldn't do much better. Bisset and Voight had worked together. Jolie's godfather was another colleague of her dad's, actor/director Maximillian Schell.

Aniston's godfather is Telly Savalas, the chrome-domed Theo Kojak of the wildly successful 1980s and early 1990s detective series Kojak, and a good man to have on your side. Savalas, like John Aniston, is of Greek ancestry (John Aniston was born John Anastassakis in Crete).

Jolie is 30 and Aniston is 36 - meaning, of course, that Pitt, at 40, is beginning to show evidence of younger woman syndrome - but Jolie has been a lot busier at the altar than Aniston despite that six-year deficit. Her two previous show biz husbands went by triple-barrelled names: Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton. At least Brad Pitt is easier to say.

Is it worth pointing out that both women met their current love interests on a film they were making? Jolie met Pitt in 2004 while making Mr & Mrs Smith with him. Aniston met Vince Vaughn last year making a film called, of all things, The Break Up. Oh, yes, and to go back a bit further Jolie met Thornton on the set of Pushing Tin in 1991. Clearly, pillow talk and talking shop are OK.

Both women are drawn to guys who can be colleagues as well as romantic leads at home. Between them they've had three husbands with a 100 per cent score for actors. Not that they are talking much about them.

And last month, promoting two of her four forthcoming films, Derailed and Rumor Has It, Aniston didn't mention either Vaughn or Pitt except obliquely. But she did say it had taken her several months of being solo before she felt like going out on a date with anyone.

"It took me the best part of a year to go on a date," she says. "It was a slow process deciding to get out there again. But you do eventually find yourself feeling that maybe it's an option again, and it just sort of happens." No mention of who the date was with.

Jolie's decision to allow Pitt to co-adopt the two children she adopted as a single mother is the most formal evidence that the relationship is more than fling. Although both children now have the last name Pitt-Jolie which certainly acknowledges her prime role.

And one of the most widely rumoured reason for the rift between Pitt and Aniston, when they were Hollywood's most adorable couple, was that he wanted to start a family and she was ambivalent about it. It came to a head, so the story goes, when Friends ended. He wanted kids but she wanted a shot at getting her film career up and running first.

When he landed on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith with Jolie - as always, accompanied by her young Cambodian-born son, Maddox - it might well have said to him: instant family. At the time her second adoption, of an Ethiopian-born orphan, Zahara, was under way.

Aniston and Jolie have pretty full mantelpieces and trophy cases; they've stacked up awards big time. Aniston has a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her work on Friends. While Jolie has three Golden Globes, she doesn't have an Emmy. But she does have an Oscar: for her harrowing 1999 portrayal in Girl, Interrupted.

Big US video chain Blockbuster came up with a survey of men a year or two ago about who they would most like to spend New Year's Eve with. The biggest group, 35 per cent, voted for Jolie. These days, with Brad Pitt at home, she probably finds those sort of awards ranks about the equivalent of a wet T-shirt contest.

Last month, with four movies set to hit the cinemas and more film projects in the offing, she told S: "I hope to be on the road to having a family within a year or so."

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