Angelina Jolie pursued a dream to be an actor ... but it was her mother's dream, as she reveals to Amanda Hooton.
May 31, 2014
This is how celebrity works. One duck-egg-blue day in Los Angeles,
you find yourself speed-walking down a terracotta path at the Hotel
Bel-Air. Hustling beside you is the global PR of Walt Disney Studios, a
natty Brit. You thought your interview was in an hour, but no, says the
natty Brit, it's now, and no, you don't have 30 minutes, you have 25,
and no, there's no time to go to the toilet. This is what happens when
you've been flown halfway around the world to meet perhaps the most
famous movie star alive, and perhaps the most beautiful woman on the
planet. The rules of normal life no longer apply.
The natty Brit swings left into a corridor, and takes a
flight of stairs two at a time. At the top, another PR stands in the
gloom, guarding a door. It opens and ejects a journalist. Propelled from
behind, you plunge forward and into the light.
If this story were a movie, such light would signify a
revelation. But in fact, Angelina Jolie is side-on, pouring a glass of
water at a cabinet to your left, so your first, anticlimactic vision of
her is of a slim figure in profile, head bent, one knee cocked. She is
wearing all black: skinny black jeans and a loose black top. She turns,
smiles, steps around a coffee table to a sofa on your right. You shake
hands. You think she seems strong: a strong grip. Tattoos on her inner
arms. Broad shoulders. Slim - but not skeletally slim. All this hits you
in a second. So it is not until your second second that you register
Angelina Jolie's face.
Dynamic duo: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at Kensington Palace in May this year.
Photo: Getty Images
Great beauty is hard to describe. Even Homer only managed
"white-armed Helen"; so much is subject to collective opinion and
individual mood. But Jolie, in the flesh, is a kind of fact. Every now
and then - once in a generation? Once in a century? Once in an age of
heroes? - a face appears that makes the launching of a thousand ships
seem reasonable. Jolie has that face.
Clint Eastwood - not easily impressed - once called Jolie
"the most beautiful woman on earth", and this may, quite literally, be
true. You might say, "No, a more beautiful woman may be living in
darkest obscurity somewhere," but in fact you realise, as soon as you
meet the 38-year-old Jolie, that beauty like this is absolutely
incompatible with anonymity. As soon as a single other Homo sapiens
caught sight of it, the gig would be up.
Jolie's colouring is all in shades of brown:
honey- brown hair, pale-gold skin, amber-green eyes. Even her lips - as
extraordinary in life as on film - are caramel pink. She has not a
single line, mark or blemish on her face, but manages to look as if she
hasn't had Botox or work done of any kind. (She may have, of course,
which means she's found the best cosmetic surgeon in world history,
which in turn raises the question of why more stars haven't done the
same, which in turn suggests she hasn't.) She does seem to be wearing
false eyelashes, but they're like no false eyelashes you've ever seen:
they seem to have been applied one by one, possibly under a microscope
by a highly skilled eyelash genie.
Maleficent: Angelina Jolie with her daughter Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, who was the only young Aurora not to cry at the sight of Jolie.
She also has an unexpectedly lovely voice, low-pitched and
clear. Obedient to the PRs listening at the door, and the loudly ticking
25-minute stopwatch in your head, you ask about her latest movie.
It is her 38th, in a career spanning everything from mental patient in
Girl, Interrupted (for which she won an Oscar in 2000) to pneumatic cartoon heroine Lara Croft. It is a Disney production, entitled
Maleficent,
and revolves around the wicked fairy/queen/witch (Disney doesn't get
bogged down in details) who curses Sleeping Beauty. Jolie plays
Maleficent, notable for her unearthly green beauty, a faint sibilance in
her voice, and her prosthetic cheekbones, even higher and more angular
than Jolie's own.
What is most notable about this film, however, at least in
celebrity terms, is that Angelina is not the only Jolie in it. Her
10-year-old son, Pax Jolie-Pitt, and her nine-year-old daughter, Zahara,
have brief walk-on parts, and the blonde, dazzlingly cherubic child who
plays the young Sleeping Beauty (aka Aurora), is Jolie's youngest
daughter, five-year-old Vivienne. How did this happen?
"Complicated history": With her brother, James Haven, and father, Jon Voight, in 1994.
Photo: Getty Images
"Well, Aurora needs to be a kid who can really, genuinely see
me with love, and not be afraid," explains Jolie pleasantly. "And I'm
there with my horns and my accent and my pointy teeth, saying things
like, 'I hate you! Go away!' "
Children did, apparently, run screaming from the set at the
sight of Jolie in costume. "Two little children broke down in tears, and
one said, 'Mummy, please make the scary lady stop talking to me.' "
Vivienne, however, took it in stride. "She's the mummy's girl: she's the
one who's constantly attached to my kaftan at home." Jolie smiles.
"Actually, she's very good in her scene. It made us slightly
uncomfortable."
The "us" here is, of course, Brad Pitt: mega movie star in
his own right, Jolie's partner of a decade, and the father (adoptive and
biological) of her six children. You know this, of course, but even
this small mention is surprising. Most celebrity interviews are
understood by both parties as a kind of duel to the death: you with your
cunningly disguised "tell me about your personal life" sword thrusts,
they with their elaborate "let me describe yet another intensely boring
detail about my work" defensive ripostes. Yet here is Jolie, rolling
happily on with what interests her, which also happens to be what
interests everybody else, which is real life (strange as it may seem to
apply the concept to a plane-piloting, UN-ambassadoring, nation-hopping,
film- star-partnering superwoman).
Creeping beauty: Angelina Jolie as Maleficent.
"We're hoping, I think, that the kids don't become actors,"
she confides. "We want them to be happy, and do whatever they're
interested in, but I think we're hoping to show them so many other ideas
and other options that they won't want to act. If they do, I hope they
act and also ..." she pauses, perhaps trying to be diplomatic, "... do
something else. I'd like them to do other things with their lives." She
shakes her head. "We're a bit nervous about that."
You try, and fail, to imagine Jolie and Pitt worrying about
their kids like normal people. You also try, and fail, to care about
asking more movie questions. Instead, you ask her if she and Pitt have
an acting-prevention plan. Jolie puts her elbows on her knees, looking
exactly like a mother gossiping beside the school gate - except, of
course, that she looks absolutely unlike any other imaginable mother on
earth.
"Well, we think it's almost good that they come to set," she
says, "and we let them come to a premiere here and there. We don't want
to keep them from it: we want them to see it so they can get bored by
it." She looks triumphant. "And our eldest does seem quite bored about
it all; he finds it a little fun, but he's very into music and he's not
that taken by film."
Ambassador: In Kenya in 2009 as a Special Envoy to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Photo: AustralScope
You can't help thinking that this might mean she and Pitt
will be dealing with a wannabe rock star in 10 years' time, not a
third-generation actor (Jolie's father, Jon Voight, is also an
Oscar-winning actor; his most famous role was in the 1969 hit
Midnight Cowboy), which might not be a notably easier path. How much influence does she think parents really have over their kids?
"I think very much children are exactly who they are when
they're born," she says. "And if there's a trauma, it can drastically
change who they are, but if there isn't, they will most likely be ... We
look at our kids, and if you look at baby photos of them, the way they
were, the way they looked, what their kind of energy was - whether they
were a sweet, elegant, private little person, or a funny, open person,
or a bold person, or whatever - they're still exactly the same. There's
so much that they're born with. And we believe that you have to just
encourage the individual and support them, but don't get in their way
too much.
"And what's fascinating," she goes on, "is that you could
say, 'Well, you'd be more similar to the children who have a genetic
link to you,' but I'm not. Maybe one of them, but then I'm also very
similar to [her adopted son] Maddox. So it doesn't have an impact that
some are genetically connected."
Speaking of genetics, several years ago Jolie explained that
she couldn't imagine having biological children. Now she has three. With
15 of your 25 minutes down, you throw caution to the wind. What changed
her mind? "It took me a really long time," she says easily. "It was
very important to me that I came together with a man to whom it didn't
matter whether we ever had children, and who was completely content to
only adopt. And when I saw Brad with our children and I saw that they
really were his children, and there was nothing missing for him, then it
became clear to me that this was a journey we should go on together,
and that it was another way of being parents.
"It was an additional way, not changing the course of our
family - we would still adopt, and we did. But it was very important
that it wasn't because he felt like something was missing with an
adopted child. I waited for that moment to make sure he didn't see it
that way."
Jolie herself knows about things missing in childhood:
Jon Voight left her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, when Jolie was two.
Bertrand raised Jolie and her older brother, James Haven, as a single
mother, and Voight has been an unreliable, sometimes overtly hostile
figure in his daughter's life, criticising her in the press, once even
suggesting she was mentally unstable. Yet last year, when she received
the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (an honorary Oscar awarded to a
member of the film industry for humanitarian work), he was in the
audience, on the same table as Brad and Maddox. How is their
relationship these days?
"We have a very complicated history," says Jolie, speaking
slowly. "And we got to a place where we made an agreement, so my
children would know him, that we would just never speak about the past.
So we don't really, we just, we don't ..." She pauses. "One of the
things you tend to do, especially in families where you fight often, or
have a deep history or a lot of pain, there's this constant desire for
people to try to correct it, or reinvent it, explain it.
"With us, we just got to a point where there was no going
back, and there was going to be no ... We were never going to come to
terms with certain things, and my mother's no longer alive to defend
herself. So we kind of know each other today, as we are today. And we
don't discuss the past, and it's not really a father-daughter
relationship, as much as we try to be friends to each other at this
time." She pauses again. "It became very simple, that I didn't feel it
was right for my kids not to know him, and him not to know them. But you
know, it has to be kept simple. So we don't go backwards."
Jolie's mother Marcheline, whom she clearly adored, died in
2007, at only 56, after an eight-year battle with ovarian cancer. During
her speech last year in accepting the Jean Hersholt Oscar, Jolie made
an unusual reference to Marcheline in the context of the slick,
everyone's-a-winner awards ceremony. "My mother loved film," she said.
"But she never had a career as an artist; she never had the opportunity
to express herself beyond her theatre class."
Her eldest son Maddox, now 12, was in the audience, and Jolie
went on to address him directly, telling him how happy she was to be
his mother; how wonderful and privileged and fortunate her life was. The
happiness of parents, she seemed to be saying, really matters to
children.
"Yes," she says, leaning forward. "Yes, that's very true.
Exactly. My mom was the greatest mother, and she couldn't do anything
about the fact that we were often in a situation where I was worried
about her, or wanting to take care of her. And I do hope my children
never have to do that. But already they see that their father takes care
of their mother, and that's something that I didn't see. So that's an
extraordinary thing. And I think about it often - I'm very conscious of
telling my kids how happy I am in my life. Even if I seem tired, or
whatever: that I'm happy to do homework!"
She gives a slightly goofy laugh. "I want them to know that
their lives take priority, and their concerns are more important than
any of my concerns. Their needs are more important than my needs and my
turn is passing and their turn is next. And I'm happy to do that."
As a mother, Jolie asks her children to
travel constantly in pursuit of her and Pitt's film work, and exposes
them to the disturbing, albeit absolutely real, problems of refugees and
people in conflict all over the world through her role as a special
envoy to António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. But by
her reasoning, this is far better than asking them to carry the anxiety
of knowing she's unhappy, and feeling, as children, that they need to
fix it. This is what happened to her, she says: she became an actress
because her mother wanted her to.
"Well, you want to be what they think would be the best thing
for you," she says, smiling. "And she really wanted to be an actress,
then she wanted it for me. But it took me only until a few years ago to
realise that I don't know if I ever really wanted it. And that's a weird
thing to realise: you wanted to fulfil a dream - and I've had a great
life and learnt so much - but maybe it wasn't my dream. It was very
interesting to me to try to do something else creatively and realise how
much more it fit me than the thing I'd been doing all my life."
It's hard to imagine Angelina Jolie ever having done anything
she didn't want to do. The very laws of the universe, you can't help
thinking, would rise up and prevent it. But then, the universe is a
fickle mistress. Last year, Jolie underwent a preventative double
mastectomy, having discovered she carried a BRCA1 gene mutation that,
without surgery, gave her an 87 per cent chance of contracting breast
cancer.
It's likely she will have more preventative surgery in the
future, most probably an oophorectomy (removal of her ovaries) to
eliminate the chance of ovarian cancer (the other cancer for which her
mutation puts her at high risk). More immediately, she'll finish the
film she directed recently in Australia,
Unbroken, and co-chair
the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. She might also
get married - belatedly, you realise she's wearing the extremely
enormous, extremely beautiful white-and-yellow diamond ring that Pitt
designed for her in 2012 when the pair announced their engagement - or
adopt another baby.
It feels, sitting there opposite her, that you could ask
about any or all of these things, and Jolie would answer. But then the
door swings open, and the natty Brit is standing there, looking
meaningful. Your time - all 23 minutes of it - is up. You stand up, say
goodbye. She smiles. And out you go, back into the dim corridor. Oddly,
it now doesn't seem so dim, nor the room so bright. It's just that both
fame and beauty polish a person so they catch the light, and in Jolie's
case the dazzle is almost blinding. But the person is there all the
time. Which is a nice surprise about the way celebrity works.
Lead-in photography by Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongi/trunkarchive.com/Snapper Media
Adam B. Vary
