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Biography
While most Hollywood stars
do everything they can to appear cool, professional and squeaky-clean,
diligently concealing all their nasty little secrets, Angelina Jolie
appears wholly unconcerned by controversy. Ever-keen to talk about her
breakdowns, her disorders, her fantasies and her world-famous penchant
for S&M, many would say she's built a career on titillating public
confession.
But she's also an
increasingly fine and award-winning performer, her Oscar for Girl,
Interrupted being only the first in a string of prestigious honours.
Onscreen, as in bed, she is a risk-taker, and perhaps deserves to be
seen as the spiritual sister of such greats as Streep, Pfeiffer and
Lange. Beyond this, her international efforts on behalf of children and
refugees have made her the most public-minded superstar since Audrey
Hepburn.
She was 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'd already split
from her mother, the part-Iroquois actress and model Marcheline Bertrand
(now Angelina's manager), who'd moved with Angelina and her brother
James to the East Coast - to the Palisades, New York, to be more
precise.
Living here, Jolie was a happy child. She collected snakes and lizards -
her favourite lizard being 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 kiss them till 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 Jolie 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 Jolie was 11, her
mother moved the family back to Los Angeles. They had already moved
often, making the young girl 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.
Scarred - yes. 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 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 slam-dancing 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, noticed how he would watch people, talk to them, become like
them. She stopped fighting with him so much too, 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, she became 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 promos
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.
Jolie had appeared in five
of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of
Cinema (he was now known as James Haven), but her movie career proper
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, then riding high after his
performance as Sick Boy in Trainspotting. Miller played a computer whizz-kid
on the wrong side of the law, trying to save the world from a swine
intent upon unleashing a vicious virus, while being pursued by the
Secret Service. Jolie was Acid Burn, one of his team.
The pair fell for each other big-time and were married, Jolie 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 (well, who
else's blood would she use?). In interviews, Jolie 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. Less Maude than
Harold, then.
Now the roles started coming fast and thick. Jolie 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, Jolie 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, added to her own confusion and pain, made living with
Jolie an impossibility. She was breaking down and Miller could take no
more. The couple split, Jolie 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 Jolie had made them wag some more by admitting
to bi-sexuality, and a relationship with actress Jenny Shimizu.
Now came the comedy-drama Pushing Tin, about two air traffic controllers
who engage in macho conflict. John Cusack was one, the other was Billy
Bob Thornton, acclaimed director, writer and star of Sling Blade.
Jolie played Thornton's wife, an extremely sexy sort who sends the guys
crazy and sleeps with Cusack. The film was excellent. More importantly
for Jolie, 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.
Jolie was about to become a huge star. Winona
Ryder has claimed that her character in Girl, Interrupted could have
been her as a young girl. But Jolie's character, Lisa Rowe - insanely
ebullient then horribly depressed, hating but needing some form of
structure to her life, even an institution - really WAS Jolie. Stealing
the show entirely, she won the Oscar, and herein lies a sweet tale. At
the time filming Original Sin down in Mexico, Jolie 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 Jolie 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 Jolie 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 Jolie moved directly from Gone In 60 Seconds on to the
set of Original Sin. Based on Cornell Woolrich's Waltz Into Darkness,
this would be a steamy bodice-ripper where she played a mail order bride
for Banderas' coffee planter in 1900s Cuba, a bride who turns out to be
dominating, manipulative and thoroughly untrustworthy. It was a wonder
he didn't mail her straight back.
Next would come the big one - Tomb Raider. To play videogame heroine
Lara Croft, Jolie 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 Jolie 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.
Here a Chinese crime boss
and evil mastermind would attempt to unleash a deadly plague that, for
some reason, chose to remain in Pandora's Box when all the other bad
stuff sprang forth. Naturally, only Lady Lara Croft (in the original her
aristocratic dad was played by Jon Voight) can save the day. Once again,
Jolie 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 where
she played a Seattle TV reporter seemingly ambitious beyond her
abilities. Stuck in a love triangle with a baseball pitcher and a
cameraman, she's informed of her own imminent death by a street preacher
and must get her life in order before popping her clogs. It doesn't
sound good and it wasn't, Jolie hardly being tested by such weak
material.
Personally speaking, 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 Voight 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, Jolie
would buy herself a house in Buckinghamshire and often be seen out with
former husband Jonny Lee Miller. Despite giving much of her time to the
UN, she was still fairly prolific on-screen. After Tomb Raider 2 would
come 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 rumors.
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. Through a strange and near-psychic process (as well as dogged
police work), she reveals that the murderer, a major self-loather, has
been offing people of gradually increasing age, stealing their
identities and thereby living a series of different lives.
Artist Ethan
Hawke is able to sketch the killer, but will that do any good? 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 Jolie was the scarlet
woman - in fact, it was model Jen Perzow.
Next came Shark Tale, an animation where Will
Smith's funky fish took credit for the accidental death of the son
of shark mobster Robert
De Niro. Now famous, Smith would attract the amorous, glamorous
Angelina (a fish called Lola, of course) who'd tempt him to betray his
long-time gal Rene Zellweger. 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 would come
a real oddity, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow. Inspired by 1950s
sci-fi comics, this would see a crazed German scientist kidnap the
world's greatest minds and then send giant robots rampaging through the
streets of New York City. Teaming up to foil this megalomaniac would be Jude
Law's freelance buccaneer, Gwyneth Paltrow's scoop-hungry hack and
Angelina, a sexy, piratical pilot who may well have caused the break-up
of an earlier relationship between Law and Paltrow. Really, you couldn't
blame him.
Sky Captain, 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 Jolie's next venture, Oliver Stone's epic
Alexander. This saw her as Olympias, mother of Colin
Farrell's great conqueror. Married to a drunken Val Kilmer, she's
beaten and banished, but returns when her young son acquires the crown
of Macedon, henceforth acting as his inspiration as he subjugates the
nations. 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.
Generally slating the movie, the critics paid special attention to the
eastern European accent Angelina adopted. Fans would say this was a tad
unfair - after all, Macedonia borders on Bulgaria which, like Russia,
touches the Black Sea. She wasn't THAT far off. But her career did not
suffer. In fact, she moved on to another major release, 2005's Mr And
Mrs Smith, where she and Brad
Pitt starred as a bored couple whose marriage is both stimulated and
endangered when they discover they're both secret assassins, now
unfortunately hired to kill one another. 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 Pitt and Jennifer
Aniston the world's most famous couple and Jolie Hollywood's most
notorious femme fatale, the tabloids, understandably, went bananas.
Angelina would also make efforts to branch out artistically. The Fever,
directed by Vanessa Redgrave's son Carlo Gabriel Nero, would be an HBO
take on Wallace Shawn's play about a middle-class woman's political
awakening. Ambitiously switching from action to filmed theatre to
into-camera monologues, it would see Redgrave educated in the world's
political hot-spots by journalist Michael Moore and Jolie's angry,
pistol-packing revolutionary. There was also the long-delayed Love And
Honour, where Angelina was to follow that other controversial sex
goddess, Marlene Dietrich, into the part of Catherine The Great.
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), Jolie is one of Hollywood's more complicated
characters. Where she goes now, what happens next, will hopefully not
lend prophetic truth to two of her many tattoos. Alongside the Japanese
sign for death, Billy Bob, H, two Native American symbols, a dragon and
a black cross, she has written on her body a Tennessee Williams line
"A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages", and "Quod
me nutrit me destruit" - What nourishes me also destroys me. Let's
hope she benefits from the nourishment. And the cage. ~ Dominic Wills
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