Smiling Again
A bad breakup laid actress Molly Sims low, but family and friends restored her spirits.

Plenty of good things have happened to Molly Sims in the past couple of years. Her TV show Las Vegas got renewed for its fourth season. She settled into her new home in Hollywood Hills. She landed an ad-campaign for Jimmy Choo shoes and renewed her Cover Girl contract. But she also split from her live in boyfriend of six years, Enrique Murriano (of Without a Trace). “I was completely and utterly devastated for the first time in my life,” says Sims. What went wrong? “I think we just at a time when we would have gotten married or ended it”, she says, later adding, “Women tend to lose themselves. We saw we love Heineken when we can’t stand beer. We say we love watching sports when we absolutely couldn’t give a s----. You can’t do something just to please someone. It only works for a little while”.

That Sims can even talk about the split is a testament to the many people who suppor5ted her through the heartbreak. Meet the four families of Molly Sims, connected to her by blood and shared experience. All have helped her find happiness again.

Her biological family
Sims attributes the confidence she has to day to her down-home upbringing upbringing in sleepy Murray Kentucky. I was brought up with the attitude that if you have a goal, you can do anything., she says. Her mother Dottie had a particularly large influence on her. “The best thing about my mother is that she was my mother, never my girlfriend. She’d tell me when I did something wrong, and I trusted her with everything. Good or bad, she stood by me.” After Sim’s breakup, Dottie transplanted her life fro m Kentucky to Los Angeles to be by her daughter’s side. “She stayed with me for a month in my bed”, Sims says.

And just as her mother tries to protect her, Sims now does her best to shelter her 14 year old cousin, Madelyn Hayes. Although they are 20 years apart, the two look remarkably alike, which is why modeling agents have been hungrily pursuing Hayes. Sims has been trying to deflect the frenzy, at least for now, because she knows from her own days as a model how hard it can be to maintain your sense of centerdness as a young pinup. “I worry about her; I mean your whole being is based on what you look like? It’s very f--- up. I started modeling when I was 22-they said I was 20, but I was 22 –and than God for that, because had I started when I was 15, there’s no telling w here I’d be\= now.

Her TV family
Playing Delinda Deline on Las Vegas has its pros (star on a primetime drama, kiss Josh Duhamel) and its cons (excruciating hours and more excruciating hours). But the best part says Sims, is her costars James Caan, Duhamel, James Lesure, Nikki Cox and Vanessa Marcil. Not only did they support her in her transition from modeling to acting, but they helped her through her break up too. After the split Sims would cry so hard on the set that she couldn’t speak. She could barely eat. Once, she was so weak with grief that the show’s executive producer, Gary Scott Thompson, had to hold her up during a press interview so she wouldn’t collapse. Her cast mates taught her how to smile again she says, “They hug your. They kiss you. They listen to you. They make you laugh….The thing I love about the show is that we love one another.”

Her Family and friends
In Hollywood, friendships seem to fluctuate with ratings, so Sims takes pride in her long-standing relationships. “I have very few friends. But the ones I have would go to the ends of the earth for me,” she says. After her breakup her friends insisted that she talk to a therapist. “I m from Kentucky, and people there don’t really do therapy, so it was kind of strange, but I talked to her every single day for three months and I have never done better,” she says. For the re cord, she’s also dating again, and actor six years her junior (whose name she prefers to keep private). “I feel like Demi Moore”, she jokes.

Her adopted family
Sims says she hears the ticking of her biological clock loud and clear. “I want a herd of kids, three at least. If I have them naturally –God bless me, let’s hope so-or if I adopt, do in –vitro, use a surrogate, whatever happens, I always want children –and not having a man in my life would not keep me from doing it”, she says. Until she’s ready, she feeds her maternal instincts, through Friends of El Faro, a group that visits Casa Hogar Sion orphanage in Tijuana Mexico. Every month, Sims travels to visit the 100 children, among them 15-20 abandoned babies. .”We do drumming circles, arts and crafts. We did makeovers on all of the girls that Cover Girl gave me. Seeing these kids changes you, because you realize the count on you,” she says. “You realize you do have power”.