Читать книгу Angelina Jolie - The Biography - Rhona Mercer - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWhile Jolie’s professional confidence was boosted by her warmly received TV roles, she had yet to become a big hitter on the Hollywood circuit, despite going out of her way to fight for roles that didn’t just require her to look beautiful on screen. ‘I’m having to do a lot just to keep my clothes on and not be cast in girlfriend roles,’ she admitted in an interview she did with her father in June 1997.
Ironically, when Jolie made this statement she was in the middle of filming Hell’s Kitchen, in which she played Gloria McNeary, the girlfriend of a robber, and had just finished filming Playing God, where she played Claire, the love interest of both Eugene Sands (David Duchovny) and Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton). Playing God follows a drug-addicted surgeon (Sands) who gets involved with a crime lord (Blossom) and falls in love with his girlfriend (Claire) along the way. It was panned by critics, described by one as a ‘miserable experience’ and a ‘piece of garbage’. Despite the onslaught of criticism, however, Jolie had a ball making the movie, describing the experience as ‘very rock ’n’ roll and fun and loud’.
Once again, Jolie found herself benefiting from the film on a more personal than professional level and, in the aftermath of her relationship with Jonny Lee Miller, she found herself falling for yet another one of her co-stars, this time in the shape of Timothy Hutton. Born in California in 1960, Hutton was 15 years Jolie’s senior (when she was only five years old he won Best Supporting Actor for Ordinary People). Between the years of 1986 and 1990, Hutton was married to the actress Debra Winger and the marriage produced a son, Noah. Despite the substantial age gap, Jolie and Hutton had a great deal in common and, when they met, they felt like kindred spirits. Hutton also came from an acting background and, like Jolie, he had starred in a film – Never Too Late – with his dad Jim Hutton at the tender age of five. Timothy was also from a broken home and had moved around a lot as a child after his parents divorced when he was an infant.
Having come out of a relationship that suffered from a lack of maturity on both Jolie and Miller’s part, the actress relished being in the company of an older man and loved Hutton so deeply that she had the letter H tattooed on the inside of her left wrist as a symbol of her affection. Angelina later stated that the H also represented her brother James Haven, which was fortunate considering her romance with Hutton would last no longer than a year. ‘It was great while it lasted,’ she said. ‘He is a lovely sensitive guy and we could read each other very well, but in the end it just didn’t work out.’
The H wasn’t the first tattoo Angelina had had done. Since she had been a teenager, she had taken a great interest in body art. Unfortunately for her, it was yet another hobby of hers that was viewed with suspicion and only served to enhance her morbid reputation. ‘People interpret things strangely,’ she mused. ‘I see tattoos as dark and romantic and tribal. And, anyway, I do feel as if all that stuff has been like some sly move on my part so that people will focus on the tattoos and knives and that way [they] won’t really know anything about me. Yet everyone thinks they know personal stuff about me.’ She also likes to think that her tattoos were an indication of her spontaneous nature. ‘For me, they’re all about the moment. Like when you jump out of a plane. I got one of my tattoos done in a tattoo parlour in Scotland by myself in the middle of the night. I don’t regret it. It will always be a reminder of that moment.’
As well as the aforementioned H, Angelina had a Tennessee Williams quote on her left forearm (‘A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages’), a Latin cross on the lower left of her abdomen, a large tiger on her back, a dragon under the tiger, ‘Know your rights’ under her neck between her shoulders, two pointy black tribals on her lower back, ‘strength of will’ written in Arabic on her right forearm and ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit’ (Latin for ‘What nourishes me also destroys me’) below her navel. She later went on to have ‘Billy Bob’ tattooed on her left arm as a tribute to her second husband as well as a tattoo on her right forearm with a secret meaning. After the two split, Jolie had the tattoos removed with the help of laser treatment and then had the co-ordinates representing the locations where her children were from tattooed on the place where ‘Billy Bob’ had been. One of the tattoos that Jolie has talked about most is a window she had done on her lower back, which represented the fact that she was always searching for something better in life. ‘I had it done because at the time I was always looking out the window,’ she said. ‘I always wanted to be somewhere else. Now I don’t. Now I’m happy.’
Jolie also marked Maddox’s adoption with a large protection prayer on her left shoulder. The work was carried out by monks and was one of her particular favourites. ‘There are five vertical rows of ancient Cambodian script, which are designed to ward off bad luck. I like it a lot. It looks very sacred.’
Although Angelina’s tattoos proved to be a bit of a nightmare to cover up for make-up artists on film sets, she liked the fact that they often reduced the amount of nude scenes she’d be required to do, and felt that directors had to be more creative with sexy shots rather than just ordering her to take her clothes off. In terms of her career, a big concern of Jolie’s had always been that she was hired on the basis of her looks and, by customising her own body, she felt like she regained some control and reduced the opportunities for her to shed her clothes.
In terms of the low-key films she made in the late nineties, Playing By Heart proved to be the most substantial for Jolie, if only because her performance as the LA clubber Joan won her the Best Breakthrough Performance By An Actress award from the National Board of Review. This romantic comedy follows the lives of eleven people living in LA who are all searching for love and, although the characters are seemingly unconnected, their stories converge by the end of the film. Jolie, who played the youngest female character opposite Ryan Phillippe (Keenan), was in good company in this ensemble drama and was joined by the likes of Patricia Clarkson, Sean Connery, Dennis Quaid and Gena Rowlands. As her award proves, Jolie more than held her own and the film was something of a sleeper hit.
With The Bone Collector, however, Jolie finally had a film role she could really sink her teeth into and focus on playing something other than the love interest. That said, this crime thriller does have a love story at the heart of it, but it is an unspoken and unconsummated love, which simmers slowly beneath the central plot. Here we see Jolie play a rookie cop, Amelia Donaghy, who reluctantly gets involved in solving a murder case with a quadriplegic homicide detective, Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington). Confined to his bed and only able to move his head and one finger, Washington’s character employs Amelia as his eyes and legs in order to solve the crime. Over the course of the film, the two characters develop a mutual professional respect for each other and subsequently enjoy a deep emotional connection. ‘To me, they have the sexiest, most romantic love affair of any film I’ve ever done,’ said Jolie. ‘The disgusting truth is that you can have sex with anyone, but you can’t have that connection where somebody can look into your eyes and see you and push you to be the best that you are. Though Denzel was a quadriplegic and we never touched, having him look into my eyes was more scary than having someone eat me.’
Jolie may have enjoyed the subtlety of the unspoken love between Lincoln and Amelia, but not everyone agreed with her. One unimpressed critic said, ‘The only mystery in this movie worth solving is why it can show a woman being tortured and a man having his face devoured by rats but it can’t show a black crippled cop kissing a white woman.’
Others also criticised the film for being ‘formulaic, mindless and gory’ and accused the plot of having ‘more holes in it than a New York junkie’.
As harsh as the criticism was, very little was directed at Jolie and Washington, who were generally thought to have done the best they could with a weak script. And Jolie certainly did her best when it came to researching the role. Indeed, after visiting some real-life police officers to get a feel for their profession, she took home pictures of real corpses, in situ, so she would become accustomed to seeing such gruesome sights. We can only assume that this theory helped Jolie deal with some of the tougher scenes, but, given how depressed she had become after filming Gia, she would have known by then that sometimes she took her method acting a bit too far. ‘I need to learn to relax and not prepare too much, just enjoy life,’ she said. ‘I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.’
One person who applauded her dedication was the film’s director, Phillip Noyce, who, like many other directors, had seen Angelina in Gia and felt that she was capable of anything. ‘We were looking for a very specific actress for The Bone Collector,’ he said. ‘She had to be young, in her mid-twenties, with the strength to play a New York cop as well as a very special vulnerability. What I saw in Angelina’s performance in Gia was all those qualities.’
With several big-name actresses begging for the role of Amelia, he really had to fight to get her on board, and was confronted with questions such as ‘Angelina who?’ from film bosses when he put her name forward. If The Bone Collector was considered a failure, it certainly wasn’t down to Jolie’s efforts – she had proved to everyone that she was capable of playing someone who wasn’t just a pretty face. And, if we needed any more proof of Jolie’s capabilities, she was to provide it in her next movie – which would turn out to be the most significant film in her entire career.
