Jennifer Aniston had to go on a significant diet before landing the type of roles she wanted in Hollywood.

According to a new book in honour of Friends’ 25th anniversary – Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era – the beauty, her agent told her to shed the pounds.

‘She had to lose thirty pounds if she wanted to stay in Hollywood,’ Saul Austerlitz wrote in his book. ‘Los Angeles was a tough place to be an actress — it was a tough place to be a woman — and Jennifer Aniston’s agent was reluctantly levelling with her.’

Her father is John Aniston, a soap opera vet. And she had dipped her toe in acting with the TV shows Ferris Bueller and Molloy.

‘Aniston was hardly fat — everyone could see she was beautiful — but as the show she would one day become indelibly associated with later made a point of noting, the camera added ten pounds,’ wrote Saul.

Jennifer talked about the pressure to be rail thin in her 1996 cover story for Rolling Stone.

‘I ate too many mayonnaise sandwiches. Mayonnaise on white bread –— the most delicious thing in the world,’ she said. But she knew she would have to make changes.