Читать книгу Angelina Jolie - The Biography - Rhona Mercer - Страница 6
ОглавлениеDespite her early aspirations to be a funeral director, it was clear from the time she was a toddler, and putting on shows for her brother, that acting was in Angelina Jolie’s blood. Not that she would admit it. In an interview with People Weekly in 2004, Jolie recalled, ‘Growing up, I couldn’t have cared less about movies. He [James, her brother] used to drag me to them. Jamie always loved film. He should’ve been the one who was working first.’
In the same interview, however, James begged to differ, insisting that it was his little sister who was the more theatrical of the two, particularly when he pointed a camera in her face. ‘I’d tell her to act for me. We did a version of a Subway commercial, of her saying something like, “I’ll punch your face if you don’t buy a sandwich.”’
These were fairly strong words for such a young girl, but Angelina would be the first to admit that she was much tougher than her brother. ‘We’re almost perfect opposites. He never swears. I swear like a truck driver when I’m angry. When it comes to the moral high ground, he wins. When it comes to being loud and crass and tough, that’s me.’
Jolie’s parents readily encouraged her acting aspirations. ‘I remember Jamie pointing the home video camera at me and saying “Come on, Angie, give us a show!” Neither [Dad] nor Mom ever said, “Be quiet! Stop talking!” I remember [Dad] looking me in the eye and asking, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling?”’ Never one to be straightforward, Jolie has explained her theatrical interest in cryptic terms: ‘I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I could know. I loved some kind of expression. I want[ed] so much to try to explain things to somebody… I’m very good at trying to explore different emotions and listen to people and feel things. That is an actor, I think.’
She might not have known what she wanted, but according to her dad it was inevitable she would end up in front of a camera. ‘Looking back, there was evidence at an early that she would be an actor,’ he said. ‘She would take anything and make an event out of it. She was always very busy and creative and dramatic.’
When Marcheline moved her family back to LA, it seemed like the natural thing for eleven-year-old Angelina to enrol in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute – given that her mother had once studied there. Lee Strasberg was an actor, director, producer and acting coach who had started up his LA drama school in 1969. Among the Hollywood greats who benefited from his teaching were James Dean, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, Al Pacino and Paul Newman. Marilyn Monroe was another: the pair were so close that in her final will she left Strasberg total control of 75 per cent of her estate and, as his favourite student, she actually moved in with him and his family at one point. Strasberg was a big advocate of method acting (the practice of actors drawing on their own memories, experiences and emotions to create a realistic performance) and it was perhaps for this very reason that Angelina quit the school after two years and several appearances in stage productions, claiming that she ‘didn’t have enough memories’ to portray characters in the way she should. Strasberg’s theories clearly stayed with her, though – Jolie would later say of her craft, ‘Acting is not pretending or lying. It’s finding a side of yourself that’s the character and ignoring your other sides. And there’s a side of me that wonders what’s wrong with being completely honest.’
Having left the Strasberg Institute, Angelina went on to attend Beverly Hills High, from where she graduated at the age of sixteen. This was at the same time that she ditched the aforementioned punk-rocker boyfriend and moved into an apartment of her own. It was also around this time that she would start to seek help a bit closer to home and take acting lessons from her award-winning father. According to Voight, ‘She’d come over to my house and we’d run through a play together, performing various parts. I saw that she had real talent. She loved acting. So I did my best to encourage her, to coach her and to share my best advice with her. For a while we were doing a new play together every Sunday.’ Voight never claimed a stake in his daughter’s eventual success, though. ‘I gave her what help I could in terms of acting, but she went out and made a career of her own. It was all her doing and now I do my part by being as supportive as I can and giving advice when she asks for it.’
While most actors actively discourage their children from entering the world of showbiz, Voight was unperturbed by the challenges the film industry can throw at young people. In an interview in 2003, he said, ‘People sometimes ask me if I’m glad my children got into this business. But I think, if young people have some kind of thing within themselves, a purpose, a dream or a vocation, then it should be acknowledged and encouraged. I always wanted to find out what my children wanted to do and then support them. I don’t think we’ve ever been worried, because every life has its pitfalls.’
He and Marcheline must have had an inkling that their children would have the stars in their sights when they named them: the reason Angelina and James were given such exotic middle names (Jolie and Haven, respectively) was so that if they ever wanted to act they would have a stage name at the ready. He was also keen to encourage his daughter’s imagination: when she was growing up, he let her believe that she was part Iroquois, from her mother’s side, in an attempt to enhance his ex-wife’s exotic background. ‘We always liked the idea of her as an Iroquois and I love that my kids have picked up on that.’ Even into adulthood, Angelina claimed that she had Iroquois blood, and at one point even campaigned for the tribe to allow her to join them in their ‘sweat lodge’!
Of her dad’s opinion regarding her desire to become an actress, Angelina has said, ‘When I decided to become an actress, he didn’t force me; he knew I wanted to do it on my own. I dropped my name [Voight] because it was important that I was my own person. But now it’s great because we can talk on a level few people can talk to their parents on. Not only can we talk about our work, but our work is about our emotions, our lives, the games we play, what goes through our heads.’
Jolie found that by the age of sixteen she had grown out of her awkward looks and was finally able to make a living out of modelling. She signed up with an agency called Finesse Model Management and modelled in both America and Europe, working mainly in New York, Los Angeles and London. She also made money appearing on screen in various music videos, including those by Meat Loaf (‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Dreams Come Through’), The Rolling Stones (‘Anybody Seen My Baby’), Lenny Kravitz (‘Stand By My Woman’), Korn (‘Did My Time’) and The Lemonheads (‘It’s About Time’). Still very close to her brother James, she was more than happy to help him out with his student films for the USC School of Cinema, and appeared in five of the films he directed. She also went back to the Lee Strasberg school after graduating from high school and this is where she would land the first theatrical role that would get people talking.
When Angelina went along to audition for a part in Room Service, a comedy by John Murray and Allen Boretz, she decided that, rather than being conventional and going for a female role, she would challenge herself and land the part of a male dominatrix: ‘I thought, you know, which character do I want to audition for? The big, fat, 40-year-old German man – that’s the part for me.’
Voight was more than a little surprised when he went along to see his daughter’s production. ‘I was a little shocked seeing [Angelina] walk around as Frau Wagner. But the shock came from the realisation that, “Oh my God, she’s just like me.” She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.’
Now financially independent, Angelina relocated to New York and enrolled in night classes (majoring in film) at New York University, but, by the age of eighteen, she had quit modelling ‘because I couldn’t take the pressure of always trying to be taller and skinnier and stuff’ and landed her second film role. And unlike Lookin’ to Get Out, securing the part had nothing to do with nepotism. In fact, it was around this time that Jolie had the Voight dropped from her name, believing that it was ‘important to be her own person’.
Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow was a sequel to Cyborg, the 1989 original that had been a surprise hit at the box office. The original had launched the career of Jean Claude van Damme – or the ‘Muscles from Brussels’, as he later became known. Although he was fairly unknown at the time of the film’s release, the beefy actor may have had something to do with the film’s success; he didn’t appear in the sequel and the film didn’t even make it into cinemas, going straight to video. It was set in 2074 and Jolie played a cyborg (a person who is aided by a mechanical or electronic device) – Casella Reese, aka Cash – who has been designed specifically to seduce her way into a rival manufacturer’s headquarters and then self-detonate. Things don’t exactly go to plan, though: Jolie’s character falls in love with a human being, Colson Ricks, and the couple soon escape their predicament with the help of a cyborg mercenary.
As artistic vehicles go, this wasn’t the best choice for the ambitious Angelina to showcase her acting talents, and unfortunately the most memorable thing about the film is the fact that she bared her breasts in it. The film’s failure left the young actress feeling disillusioned with her craft and catapulted her into a depression so severe that at one point she even considered taking her own life. ‘I didn’t know if I wanted to live because I didn’t know what I was living for,’ she recalled in an interview in 2001. Jolie admits that she was unhappy in New York and felt very alone. ‘I didn’t have any close friends any more and the city just seemed cold and sad and strange… everything that was kind of romantic about New York just got very cold for me,’ she said.
Jolie’s thoughts turned to suicide once more and she even sat down one evening in a New York hotel room and wrote a note to the maid, telling her to contact the police so that she didn’t have to discover the body. At the last minute, however, Jolie found that she couldn’t go through with it. ‘I didn’t know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists,’ she admitted.
Wandering the streets of New York, she spotted a beautiful kimono that she wanted to buy, and suddenly realised that, by killing herself, she’d never actually be able to wear it. It was when she got back to her hotel room that she realised she couldn’t go through with her desperate plan. ‘I kind of lay there with myself and thought, “You might as well live a lot, really hard and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door.” So I started to live as if I could die any day.’
Perhaps it was this ‘seize the day’ attitude that led Angelina to her second significant film role – and, in turn, her second significant relationship.
