Angelina Jolie’s kids are off playing nearby. “They’re with their dad,
actually. Around here somewhere,” she says with a wave of her hand. “And I’m
going to hook up with them in a couple of hours. When I’ve done this.” This
sounds like a perfectly normal domestic agenda, until you remind yourself
that we are sitting in a cabana in the grounds of one of the fanciest hotels
on the French Riviera, and that the play-day father in question happens to
be Brad Pitt. Thus, outside the front gates of this imposingly posh hotel, a
posse of paparazzi the size of a small army await the couple’s movements.
Indeed, such is their star power that just down the road, Cannes, a town
geared to the presence of movie actors, seems to take to the streets and
hold its collective breath when the couple sweep in later that evening,
cocooned inside a motorcade of limos. For now, though, there’s an interview
to navigate, and then it’s family time.
“Oh, Brad’s a great father, a very hands-on father,” she smiles. “We’re very
hands-on parents, believe me.” Together they form Brangelina, a celebrity
soap opera that straddles the globe from Pakistan and India, where they were
based as she made her latest film, A Mighty Heart, to Pittsburgh and
Peterborough. Everybody knows all about them, don’t they? If you were to
follow the American tabloids, there’s a version of their lives that is
played out in relentless weekly episodes; there are “stories” – speculation
mingled with half-truths and, frankly, rubbish – of rows, her “dramatic”
weight loss, and petty jealousies about exes.
His ex, of course, is Jennifer Aniston, the girl-next-door type who lost Pitt
to the altogether more exotic and vampish Jolie. Hers is Billy Bob Thornton,
of which more later. But to read such material – one report even detailed
the number of hotdogs Brad ordered for the kids and how many had ketchup
(three) – leaves you briefly wondering if they really are constantly at each
other’s throats, why nobody wanted mustard or onions and, mostly, how on
earth anybody could live in such a goldfish bowl. This is celebrity watching
gone nuts. “I don’t see those magazines and I don’t watch those TV
programmes,” says Jolie. “I really don’t know about that stuff, and I don’t
want to know. It’s funny. Sometimes somebody will reference something as if
I understand what the rumour has been for the last month, and I have no idea
what they are talking about. Mostly, I’m sure, it’s nonsense.”
The woman before us today, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana white wraparound dress,
is undeniably beautiful. Her brown hair is swept back from that remarkable
face and those extraordinary lips are free from lipstick and as full as
ever. (One story had them “disappearing”, like a magician’s rabbit.) She
does, though, look thinner than the last time I interviewed her some two
years ago, but certainly not the anorexic waif others have made her out to
be. She tells me that life is “great”, although she is still grieving from
the loss of her mother, French actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in
January this year, aged just 56, after a long battle with ovarian cancer.
“I am my mother’s daughter,” she says. “Very much so. My love of children, my
values, caring about what goes on in the world, all of that comes from her.
She was the most wonderful woman and a fantastic role model for me. I miss
her terribly every day. I try to raise my children the way that my mother
raised me. I didn’t really have a father around.” Her father is actor Jon
Voight, who married Bertrand when she was 21 and a rising star. They had two
children – Angelina has an older brother, James Haven – but were divorced
when their daughter was just three, and while Jolie is a second-generation
Hollywood star, her relatively modest home life apparently left her feeling
isolated from her altogether more privileged schoolmates at Beverly Hills
High School.
As a teenager, Jolie took up modelling and appeared in pop videos, but quickly
broke into the movie business. Indeed she did some of her best work early on
in her career, playing a supermodel who dies of Aids in Gia (which
won her a Golden Globe), and a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted
(which in 2000 won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Her acting
credentials established early on, Jolie has always been happy to combine
more commercial films – Foxfire, The Bone Collector, the Tomb
Raider movies – with more serious roles, such as Beyond Borders
(a project dear to her heart, about refugees), and The Good Shepherd,
directed by Robert De Niro.
But that impressive early career also came with a reputation for wildness and
Jolie has what might be called a colourful past. She has been married twice
– briefly, to British actor Jonny Lee Miller (after they starred together in
Hackers, an early break-out role), and then famously, for three years, to
Billy Bob Thornton. If Jolie seemed to have gone a bit off the rails in her
youth – cutting herself and dyeing her hair – that marriage made her seem
even wilder. At one point these two took to wearing necklaces with vials of
each other’s blood, and there were interviews where she talked of her
fascination with knives and her bisexuality. Voight and Jolie, who had
always had a fractious relationship, but appeared together in Tomb Raider
(with him playing Lara Croft’s father), fell out again when Voight publicly
questioned her exploits. In short, for a while Jolie was Hollywood’s
favourite bad girl.
Jolie recently said, “I am still at heart – and always will be – just a punk
kid with tattoos.” But today, at 32, she sounds all grown up, and indeed has
four children: Maddox, 6, who she adopted as a baby (while married to
Thornton), Pax, 3, and two-year-old Zahara, who are also adopted, and
16-month-old Shiloh, her biological daughter with Pitt. So has being a
mother changed her? “Yes, but not so much that I’m not the person I was
before... certainly parenthood grounds us both in the most wonderful way.”
They take it in turns to work. When we meet, Jolie has taken a few days off
from filming to travel to Cannes to promote A Mighty Heart, which is
based on the book by Mariane Pearl, telling the story of the kidnap and
murder of her husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, by Islamic
terrorists in 2002. Pitt, who serves as a producer on the film but doesn’t
appear in it, is taking a back seat – it’s his turn to look after the
children.
While it would be ludicrous to suggest theirs is a lifestyle that compares
with what the vast majority would consider normal, Jolie’s priority is
clearly motherhood, and she strives to retain a bedrock of values. “You
know, I always wanted to adopt kids. My mother used to say that I talked
about it when I was a little girl. And I’ve always wanted a big family. And
Brad’s the same. We are enjoying the children together. So, as much as it’s
absolute chaos and sometimes we look at each other and think, ‘My God! What
have we done?’, there are many more moments when I couldn’t imagine any one
of them not being here. They are such big personalities, and it’s so
exciting to watch them grow up. Brad and I would like more kids, but we’re
aware that right now we can give special time to each one of them every day,
and we want to make sure we continue to do that.
“I haven’t worked for nine months, so I’ve been balancing kids and doing
everything, and now I’m ready to work,” Jolie explains. “When I work, Brad
stays at home with the kids and vice versa. When we were in India, it was
his job to entertain them and he loves that. So it’s all about scheduling.
Fortunately, they love travelling, so we go everywhere as a family. I kind
of feel that our home is wherever we are.” The children are still too young
to take in all the fuss and the fact that Mum and Dad happen to be two of
the biggest sex symbols on the planet. “Yeah, that’ll make them laugh. To
them we’re two of the dorkiest people on the planet…”
Directed by Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart was Jolie’s most
challenging role yet, a far more serious piece than some of the films she is
better known for – Lara Croft, or the frothy action thriller Mr and
Mrs Smith, in which she co-starred with Pitt and where they first got
together. “Do I think about destiny? A bit. I don’t live my life by it. But
yes, we’ve talked about how we first met and that our lives would certainly
have been different if we hadn’t have been cast together on that one.”
She first met Mariane Pearl a few years ago, when they arranged a “play-date”
for their kids. At the time of Daniel Pearl’s abduction, Mariane was six
months pregnant and now has a much adored son, five-year-old Adam, born
after her husband was murdered. “I knew Mariane a bit because we tried out
play-dates,” explains Jolie. “She had a kid, I had a kid, we got in touch
and it was like, ‘Let’s get the kids together so they can hang out…’
Separately, Brad had bought the rights to the book, and then they got
together and started to talk. It was like, ‘OK, we’re going to make the
movie, what do you think?’ And when it came to casting she mentioned me,
which was fantastic.”
