Childhood |
 Born Angelina Jolie Voight in Los Angeles, on June 4th, 1975 - her name meaning Pretty Little Angel. Her father, Jon, was already an established superstar, having topped the bill in such classics as Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance. When Angelina was 2, he'd scoop the Best Actor Oscar for Coming Home. By then though, he had already split from her mother, the part-Iroquois actress and model Marcheline Bertrand, who had moved with Angelina and her brother James to the East Coast, the Palisades, New York, to be exact. Living here, Angelina was a happy child. She collected snakes and lizards - her favourite lizard named Vladimir, and her favourite snake Harry Dean Stanton - and, oddly, like many females of her age, she had a major crush on Mr Spock. She would wear glittery clothing, including sparkly underwear, and flounce around, already performing, keen to make people laugh, to make them like her. She was a member of the Kissy Girls, who hunted boys down and kissed them until they screamed - until the school was forced to call the parents and the gang broke up. Marcheline would take the kids to the movies often, and Angelina claims this is where she got the notion to be an actress - not from her uncle, Chip Taylor (an actor and composer), not from her godmother Jacqueline Bisset, and definitely not from her father, though at age 7 she did appear in Lookin' To Get Out, a movie about inveterate gamblers, co-written by and starring Jon Voight. When she was 11, her mother Marcheline moved the family back to Los Angeles. They had already moved often, making the young Angelina feel constantly uprooted "I always dreamed", she says "of having an attic of things that I could go back up and look at". Now Angelina decided she wanted to act and, as ever jumping in at the deep end, enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years, appearing in several stage productions. |
As a pupil at Beverly Hills High School, she was not alone in her cinematic ambitions. But she certainly felt alone in the midst of all those good-looking, pampered children, children who teased her mercilessly for wearing braces and glasses and being so painfully skinny. Unlike the other parents, Marcheline was not rich, so Angelina also had to seek her clothes at thrift stores like Aardvark. Her confidence received a further battering when her attempts at modelling proved fruitless. She never got picked - too short, too thin, too fat, too scarred. Perhaps it was the many moves, maybe it was to do with her father, a lonely, detached figure who did not want to live with his family (Angelina always feared she would be like that herself). Maybe it was the relative poverty, or the taunting, or the way she felt that - with her big eyes, big lips, big everything - she looked like a muppet. But Angelina had come to hate herself, to feel absolutely worthless. She felt unworthy, didn't like to be touched (she has stated that she still has this problem sometimes). So, like too many young girls, she started to cut herself. At 14, she dropped out of acting classes and began an existence of fast-living and active self-loathing. She wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in punk boyfriend. They experimented heavily in S&M, Angelina once asking him to draw a blade along her jawline (the scar is now faint, but still there). At 16, her relationship ended. She moved to an apartment opposite her mother and went back to theatre. Now committed to acting, her first role was, unsurprisingly, as a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, noticing how he would watch people, talk to them, become like them. She stopped fighting with him as much, realising that they were both "drama queens". For his part, Voight noticed her talent, being moved to tears by her reading of the part of Catherine in A View From The Bridge. With the braces and glasses gone, Angelina grew into the name Jolie, becoming a model too, working in Los Angeles, New York and London. She also appeared in the video for Meat Loaf's Rock'n'Roll Dreams Come Through - she'd later turn up in videos for Lenny Kravitz, Lemonheads and The Rolling Stones. Her confidence rose, though it would often plummet back down. She tells a story of how once she was so down she actually tried to hire a man to kill her. Being a compassionate sort of assassin, he told her to think about it for a month. Obviously, she didn't call him back.
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Angelina had appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinema, but her movie career began in 1993, when she starred as Casella "Cash" Reese, alongside Elias Koteas and Jack Palance in Cyborg 2. Here, a near-human robot-thing, she was designed to seduce her way into the HQ of her creators' rivals and blow up. Already, her sexual charisma had been noted. Next came Hackers, where she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. The pair fell for each other big-time and were married, Angelina possibly looking for some kind of stability in her life. Now began her explicit openness in the press, as she told lurid tales of their sexual exploits. "You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens", she said jokingly. It was also announced that, when getting married, Jolie had worn black leather pants and a white shirt with Miller's name scrawled across the back in her own blood. In interviews, she explained that her interest in blood and death was of long standing. She not only collected knives, she said, but had a fascination with mortuary science and, as a child, had dreamed of becoming a funeral director. Now the roles started coming fast and thick. She starred with David Duchovny in the nasty, stylish thriller Playing God (she'd later date her other co-star, Timothy Hutton). Then, in the road-movie Mojave Moon, she was a youngster, named Eleanor Rigby, who falls for Danny Aiello, while he takes a shine to her mother, Anne Archer. In Foxfire, she was one of a group of teenage girls who kill a teacher who harasses them, then gradually go wholly out-of-control. Directed by Annette Haywood-Carter, this was very much a girl-thing, as was Jolie's next release, the TV movie True Women, a Herstorical romantic drama set in the West, based on the book by Janice Woods Windle. |
As a child, Angelina had always been encouraged to express her feelings, and now it really began to work for her. In biopic George Wallace, she played the wife of the segregationist Governor of Alabama who was shot and paralysed while running for President. This starred Gary Sinise and was directed by John Frankenheimer, but she more than held her own, picking up a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination. Next came Gia, another biopic, this time of Gia Carangi, a lesbian supermodel from the Seventies. This was crammed with sex, drugs and fearsome emotional drama, as Carangi crashed, burned and was eventually taken by AIDS. For the second consecutive year, Jolie won a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Emmy. At the Golden Globes, by way of celebration, she jumped into a swimming-pool, clad in a hand-beaded Randolph Duke gown. The emotional extravagance of these parts, adding to her own confusion and pain, made living with Angelina an impossibility. She was breaking down and Miller could take no more. The couple split, Angelina living alone in Manhattan, getting her head together, and attending film classes at NYU. Now notorious for her candid quotes, her name stayed in the papers. The sexuality of Gia had got tongues wagging, and she had made them wag some more by admitting to bi-sexuality, and a relationship with actress Jenny Shimizu. | Back to the Movies & an Oscar for Angie |
Now came the comedy-drama Pushing Tin. Angelina played the wife of Billy Bob Thornton. The film was excellent. More importantly for Angelina, she fell for Thornton, 15 years her senior, who proceeded to dump his longtime girlfriend Laura Dern. The pair became infamous for their salacious quotes, Thornton admitting that he liked to wear Jolie's underwear, even to work, as it made him feel close to her. Actually, their quotes were often rude, but clearly loving.Winona Ryder has claimed that her character in Girl, Interrupted could have been her as a young girl. But Angelina's character, Lisa Rowe - insanely ebullient then horribly depressed, hating but needing some form of structure to her life, even an institution - really WAS her. Stealing the show entirely, she won the Oscar, and herein lies a sweet tale. At the time filming Original Sin down in Mexico, Angelina flew to the Oscar ceremony (she'd attended before, age 12 and all glammed up in lace and pearls, with her dad), won, then flew straight back, arriving at 4.30 am and going straight to sleep. Suddenly, she was awoken by a mariachi band, hired by co-star Antonio Banderas and director Michael Cristofer. Stumbling from her trailer, she was handed a single rose by every member of the crew, many of whom, along with Cristofer, had worked on Gia and, remembering her at her lowest ebb, wished to recognise this moment of triumph. In the press, meanwhile, her victory was quickly overshadowed by freakish reports that she was having an affair with her own brother. They must have assumed she'd try anything once. This is a big part of the Angelina phenomenon - she has a searing reputation for being sexually voracious and promiscuous, yet says she's slept with only a tiny handful of people. After Girl, Interrupted came the psycho-thriller The Bone Collector, where she aided a bedridden Denzel Washington in his pursuit of a killer, then Gone In 60 Seconds, where Angelina played Sarah "Sway" Wayland, ex-girlfriend of super-car-thief Nicolas Cage. She didn't have much to do but be charismatic, which she managed with ease - though she did look thin and drawn, something noted by Cristofer when she moved directly from Gone In 60 Seconds on to the set of Original Sin. | Enter Lara Croft, Maddox & Humanitarianism |
Next came the big one, Tomb Raider. To play videogame heroine Lara Croft, Angelina had to master a Brit accent and upper-class manners, plus kick-boxing, street-fighting, yoga, ballet, car racing and dog-sledding. Few actresses have the outlandish features and sheer physical power to pull off such a character, but she managed it with some aplomb as Croft criss-crossed the globe, trying to prevent the Illuminati from using a magic triangle to control Time Itself. She would revisit the part in 2003 with the superior Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life. Once again, Angelina impressed with her straight face, dry wit and comically unbreakable British resolve - she certainly gained more prestige than she would have done had she instead taken the role in Charlie's Angels eventually filled by Lucy Liu. Before the sequel, though, would come Life Or Something Like It, the film wasn't too good, Angelina hardly being tested by such weak material. This was a hard time for Angelina. Having in 2001 adopted a Cambodian boy named Maddox, and having made clear her sympathy for nations much poorer than her own, she was made a Good Will Ambassador for the United Nations. It was a role she took seriously, visiting Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan and the Western Sahara. She examined first-hand the plight of refugees from Thailand and Chechnia, called for peace in Sri Lanka and pledged $5 million to a wildlife sanctuary in Cambodia (having been paid $12 million for Tomb Raider 2, this was something she could well afford). Unfortunately, her relationship with Thornton did not survive this burst of activity. He, she later claimed, was more interested in his career (he was at the time concentrating on his music) and left her and Maddox to go out on tour. The couple would officially split up in May 2002 and divorce a year later, after almost exactly three years of marriage. And the split would bring about another when father Jon used TV interviews to reach out to a daughter he said had "serious mental problems". Angelina did not appreciate his words or tactics. |
Having worked extensively in the UK on the Tomb Raider movies, Angelina would buy herself a house in Buckinghamshire and often be seen out with former husband Jonny Lee Milller. Despite giving much of her time to the UN, she was still fairly prolific on-screen. After Tomb Raider 2 came Beyond Borders, long delayed after the sacking of Kevin Costner (for being too demanding) and the subsequent departure of Oliver Stone. Interestingly, the movie would see her as the daughter of a rich industrialist, meeting a renegade doctor (Clive Owen replacing Costner) and, inspired by his impassioned desire to save lives, helping him do just that in war-torn Africa and beyond. There were clear parallels with her own life. 2004 would bring a welter of work and another tumult of rumours. Onscreen, she'd open the year with Taking Lives, playing an intuitive American detective called up to help Montreal cops track down a serial killer. The movie was quite complex, full of clues, shocks and sly cheats, but it was rather overshadowed by the break-up of Hawke's marriage to Uma Thurman. Naturally, rumours abounded that Angelina was the scarlet woman - in fact, it was model Jen Perzow. Next came Shark Tale, critics would complain that the film's welter of references to the likes of Jaws and The Godfather would put it beyond the ken of most kids. Nevertheless, without challenging the monolithic success of Shrek, it was still a big hit. After Shark Tale came a real oddity, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, an FX marvel that had seen the actors working mostly against green screens, was a cinematic wonder, but not a hit. Much the same could be said of her next venture, Oliver Stone's epic Alexander. It was an odd movie, glorious in its scope, thrilling in its battle sequences, but undermined by the complexity of its message and its shy handling of Alexander's bisexuality. Indeed, it was undermined to the extent that, having cost $150 million to make, its US box office takings stalled at $34 million. Ouch. But Angelina's career did not suffer. Branching out artistically, she'd moved on to The Fever. | Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad & the Kids |
Angelina then took on another major release, 2005's Mr And Mrs Smith. Even before its release the film would cause something of a stir. Firstly, extra shoots meant that Jolie could not carry the Olympic torch through Athens - her work for the United Nations High Commission For Refugees was to have seen her represent the world's refugees. And there were the inevitable rumours of sexual misbehaviour. With Brad pitt and Jennifer Aniston, the world's most famous couple, and Angelina, Hollywood's most notorious femme fatale, the tabloids, understandably, went bananas. For once they had good reason. Mr And Mrs Smith was, understandably, a massive hit, taking $186 million at the US box office. Much of the press surrounding it, though, concerned the stars themselves, the couple eventually being forced to ban questions about their relationship. For a full year they remained tight-lipped. Pictures of them together sporadically appeared, one set making upwards of $500,000. Pitt officially split from Aniston, divorcing in 2005. Only in 2006 would they come clean, with Pitt adopting Maddox and Zaharah Marley, an Ethiopian girl Angelina had herself adopted the year before. By the end of May they would have a child of their own, Shiloh Nouvel being born in Namibia. With Pitt now helping Jolie in her ambassadorial duties, it came as no surprise when they agreed to sell exclusive photos of the new arrival and donate all proceeds to charity. | Charity Work & Motherhood |
Charitable work and motherhood would now took up most of Angekina's time. Having in 2004 been made an Honorary Citizen of Cambodia due to her efforts in the region, she'd visit post-earthquake Pakistan and involve herself in the huge Live 8 concert. She'd also address the World Economic Forum, highlighting the plights of Darfur, Afghanistan and Nepal. But there would be the occasional cinema release. 2006 would see the long-anticipated premiere of The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro. Angelina's next outing would see her return to the modern day with Michael Winterbottom's hard-hitting A Mighty Heart. Based on the memoirs of Mariane Pearl, concerning the kidnap and murder of her journalist husband Daniel. It was intelligent and moving, winning Angelina another Golden Globe nomination. She then moved on to two animations. First came Beowulf, where she played one of history's most notorious female monsters, Grendel's mother. Angelina would steal the show with her extraordinary entrance, rising from the waters of an underground lake, with a golden body and weird stiletto feet. Clearly enjoying herself, she'd be wholly viperous, sinister, unpredictable and dangerous. She'd have far less to do in the comic Kung Fu Panda where she'd be just one of five potential heroes required to save the animals of the Valley Of Peace from a marauding Ian McShane. At this stage Angelina was choosing her roles carefully, fitting them around what had become an intensely busy personal life. In early 2007, she'd been hit hard by the death of her mother, then had adopted a Vietnamese boy, named Pax. She and Pitt had then moved to New Orleans, where they'd offer aid to those still homeless after Hurricane Katrina. Extra funds would be raised by her work for Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido and knitwear fashion house St John. She and Pitt would continue to engage in charity work, in early 2008 giving $1 million towards the upkeep of children suffering in Iraq. |
Back onscreen, 2008 would bring another action hit in Wanted, Jolie saying she'd needed a physical role to take her mind off of her mother. After Tomb Raider and Mr And Mrs Smith, she'd become well used to such roles and the public clearly liked her in them, Wanted steaming through the $100 million barrier in the US. With all its frenetic action and CGI effects, it would be very different from her next outing, Clint Eastwood's tough drama Changeling. Based on the true story of Christine Collins, this would see Jolie back in the late 1920s, playing a single mother whose young son disappears. Both distressed and determined, Angelina would be impressive as she fought for her son and her rights in a painfully sexist system, and would be rewarded with nominations for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. The same year, 2008, would see Jolie give birth to twins, Knox and Vivienne, official pictures of which would bring an amazing $14 million. all of which would be donated to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, the charity she'd set up with her husband to help in "humanitarian crises throughout the world". She'd furthermore be (sort of) reunited with her father after a 6 year split. Still struggling with herself, and still publicly discussing her pleasures and pains (as well as her ever-increasing charity work - covered in part in her 2003 book Notes From My Travels), Angelina is one of Hollywood's more complicated characters. She may have found stability with Brad Pitt, but, both a sex object and an international diplomat, an action star and an Oscar-winning thespian, she's a constant contradiction. | |
