Читать книгу Angelina Jolie - The Biography - Rhona Mercer - Страница 8

‘When I was 14, I visited London for the first time,’ revealed Jolie a few years ago. ‘And that’s when I discovered my problem. English men appear to be so reserved, but underneath they’re expressive, perverse and wild. All the insane moments in my life have happened with English men.’

With this in mind, it was perhaps inevitable that, at the age of nineteen, Angelina would fall for British actor Jonny Lee Miller on the set of Hackers. Directed by Iain Softley, this film follows a group of young people who are trying to prevent the unleashing of a dangerous computer virus while being pursued by the US Secret Service. Miller and Jolie play computer-literate teens (Dade Murphy and Kate Libby respectively) who get caught up in the corporate scam after accidentally hacking into the computer system of a huge conglomerate. It was Miller’s first film (he would go on to land the role of Sickboy in Trainspotting, his most famous role to date, a year later) and Jolie’s first experience of a major studio picture.

Film critics were fairly underwhelmed by Hackers and it was something of a flop, but Angelina knew that, as a woman, she couldn’t afford to turn parts down so early on in her career. ‘Dad sticks to this philosophy that any film he does should always say something positive or he won’t do them,’ she said. ‘I want to be the same, but I’ve got to be realistic. There was less quantity and more quality when he started. I’ve got to be less picky. It’s hard being a young actress now; no one wants you to keep your clothes on.’

If anything, Jolie was quite relieved that Hackers wasn’t a huge success, because it meant she was less likely to be typecast in the future. ‘I was a bit scared that, if the movie went really big, it would be something to be remembered by. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working with Iain, but I don’t want to be stuck in that character forever.’

If anything, Hackers is only remembered for the fact that it introduced Jolie to her first husband, because, as Dade and Kate fell in love on screen, so too did Jonny and Angelina.

As soon as they laid eyes on each other, the attraction between the co-stars was evident. And Jolie, who had been celibate since she’d split up with her punk boyfriend three years previously, was more than ready to let a new man into her life. She said of meeting Jonny, ‘We met while filming Hackers and I always fall in love while I’m working on a film. It’s such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It’s like discovering you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deep.’

Little did Jolie know how relevant this statement would become in terms of her future relationships.

The young cast of Hackers spent many weeks together preparing for the film, learning about computers (although Miller admitted that, out of ten, he’d give himself ‘about a quarter’ in terms of computer literacy, even by the end of filming) and it was this quality time that allowed the two young leads to fall in love.

‘We had three weeks of learning how to type and rollerblade,’ says Jolie, ‘and hanging out with the cast, which was heaven – racing Jonny on rollerblades was a big part of our relationship. We read a lot about computers and met computer hackers. With a lot of lines, I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it was fascinating.’

Born in middle-class Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, in 1972, Jonny found filming in New York (the location for the movie) something of an eye opener. He described the experience as ‘brilliant. Filming at three in the morning under Brooklyn Bridge – it’s stuff that you don’t get to do if you’re from Kingston.’ He also joked that it wasn’t much of a stretch playing Angelina’s love interest saying, ‘Yeah, it was terrible. You really have to suspend your disbelief!’

Much as it had been with Angelina, acting was in Jonny’s blood and by the age of seven he knew he wanted his future to be in films. His great-grandfather, Edmund James Lee, was a music-hall performer; his grandfather, Bernard Lee, played M in the first dozen Bond films; and his father, Alan Miller, was a stage actor and, later, a stage manager, so the young Jonny certainly had plenty of people to go to for acting tips. While he was at Tiffin School for Boys, Miller attended drama classes at the National Youth Music Theatre and, as soon as he’d completed his GCSEs, at the age of seventeen, he left school to pursue a stage career.

Miller was twenty-two when he landed the role in Hackers and he’d never met anyone quite like Angelina before. He was bowled over by both her beauty and her talent: ‘She’s smart. She’s resisted the usual stuff that a beautiful young actress would get… I think she’ll rocket. I bloody hope so – she deserves it.’

Although the two actors were quite opposite in nature – she was outspoken and bolshy, he was shy and introverted – the seed of love had been sown and the couple eloped to Los Angeles in March 1996, six months after Hackers was released. This isn’t to say that Jonny had an easy time seducing Angelina. He has since admitted that he ‘chased [Angelina] all over the world. I chased her all over North America until she succumbed. It took a while – a good few thousand miles.’

He also had to deal with the fact that, after falling in love with her on the set of Hackers, Angelina told him that caring about someone so deeply made her sad and that after filming was finished he should forget about her. This was easier said than done, though, and an unperturbed Jonny continued to keep in touch in spite of her trying to push him away.

Next, Jolie went on to make Mojave Moon, a road movie. She played a girl named Ellie who hitches a ride from an older man, Al McCord (played by Danny Aiello), back to where her mother Julie (Anne Archer) lives in the Mojave Desert. Jolie put in a good performance as the lovestruck Ellie, who falls for Al over the course of the road trip, but the film was – again – instantly forgettable and didn’t exactly set the world on fire. She made two more fairly low-key films, before going on to make Foxfire, on which she would yet again fall for one of her co-stars. In the thriller Without Evidence, she plays a junkie, Jodie Swearingen, and in Love is All There Is she takes on the role of the romantic lead, Gina Malacici, in a modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet. In terms of impact, at least on a personal level, Foxfire was the next most significant film Jolie made. Although she and Jonny continued to speak to each other, they weren’t ‘committed’ in the relationship sense, which was probably just as well given that Jolie went on to fall in love with someone else. And this time, it was a woman.

Foxfire told the tale of five teenage girls who formed an unlikely bond after beating up a teacher who had sexually harassed them. In the same way that she bonded with Jonny on the set of Hackers, Angelina became very close to Jenny Shimizu, the Japanese-American model turned actress who is most famous for appearing in the Calvin Klein CK One adverts. Angelina said of meeting Jenny, ‘I fell in love with her the first second I saw her. I wanted to kiss and touch her. I noticed her sweater and the way her pants fitted and I thought, “My God!” I was getting incredibly strong sexual feelings. I realised I was looking at her in a way I look at men. It never crossed my mind that one day I was going to experiment with a woman. I just happened to fall for a girl.’

Jenny was similarly taken with Angelina and described their courtship as being more emotional than sexual in the early stages. ‘During breaks in filming Foxfire, I got to sit down with this person [Angelina] and spend two weeks with them, meeting them and talking with them before anything got sexual. I actually felt like I was caring for someone more than simply just having sex. And I didn’t feel like there was a straight girl that I was just bedding and she was going to freak out the next morning. We had established such a nice relationship that I felt this girl would have me back, no matter what. I knew this person would be loyal and wonderful to me.’

The girls didn’t just hang out on set, but spent a lot of time together after filming was finished. ‘We used to visit strip clubs,’ says Jenny, ‘and there was this tension. After the second week of filming, we kissed. She is beautiful. Her mouth is amazing. I’ve never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angelina. It’s like two water beds – it’s like this big kind of warm, mushy, beautiful thing. She’s a gorgeous woman.’

The only fly in Jenny and Angelina’s ointment was the presence of Jonny in Jolie’s life, and, although men often fantasise about lesbian sex, the reality was that Angelina’s new relationship didn’t turn him on one bit. Jenny said of the love triangle, ‘We were already sleeping together when I met Jonny while on Foxfire. She told both of us how she felt and we all went out to dinner one night. She was honest – that’s how she’s been her whole life.’

As an openly sexual person and someone who isn’t scared to push boundaries, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Angelina had suggested her two lovers get together and indulged in a threesome, but according to Jenny this was never on the cards. ‘We didn’t have a threesome,’ she said. ‘I’m not really into that – it was a friendship the three of us had. But there wasn’t much conversation with Jonny. I think he was very threatened by me.’

And who can blame him? The man was desperately in love and, having chased her halfway round the world, he wanted some commitment from Jolie – not to hear that she was in love with a woman. Jenny’s gut instinct was right and Jonny has since admitted that jealousy in a relationship is one of his least desirable traits. ‘I’ve learned that jealousy is to be avoided at all costs. I’m a really horribly jealous person, but I’ve calmed down now,’ he said after his divorce from Jolie.

By this time, Angelina had established quite a reputation as an S&M queen and Jenny didn’t escape Jolie’s fascination with knives. ‘It’s not so much we were dressed in leather capes and masks and there were chains. It was emotional. I would restrain her with my arms but we didn’t get into buying stuff. We just used whatever props were available if we wanted to. She was a collector of knives and taught me about them.’ Jenny also described Angelina as ‘a very dominant personality. Once she displays love for you, she wants to know how much you care about her.’

Although Jolie says that her attraction to Jenny took her by surprise, prior to meeting Jenny she had admitted that her modelling days had helped her to see women in a sexual light. ‘I did some modelling years ago and shared a cabin with one woman. I was in my black pants and T-shirt, watching television. She was in a little g-string putting lotion on her whole body, with nail care too, making sure every single inch of her legs were shaved. It was sexy for me to see a woman like that. She looked all glossy and I wanted to eat her. You have to live for moments like that.’

Despite these homosexual inclinations, Angelina maintained that her desires did not necessarily change her sexual orientation. ‘I don’t want to be provocative and say I’m bisexual, but I understand the love of one woman [for] another because I’ve felt it. I believe you love people whether they’re a man or a woman. I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.’

We can only assume that it was a problem for Jonny too, but his chasing Angelina paid off in the end: Jolie finally expressed the commitment he had long been seeking, and married him. Miller described their wedding day as ‘very romantic’, while Jolie has said of the nuptials, ‘We didn’t have a big white wedding, we had a small black wedding.’

As showbiz weddings go, it was definitely one of the more ‘out there’ ceremonies, with Angelina wearing black leather trousers and a white shirt with her husband’s name scrawled on the back in her own blood. ‘I consider it poetic,’ she said after the wedding. ‘Some people write poetry, others give themselves a little cut. It meant a lot.’

Although Jonny had admitted that he was ‘involved with an American girl who lived in LA’ and Angelina was open about the fact that they’d shared an apartment throughout the Hackers shoot, the couple had tried to keep their relationship under wraps initially. This all changed after the wedding, however, and, in her typically candid style, Angelina would be completely open in interviews about her life with Jonny. Of their hasty marriage, she said, ‘The way we both feel about life is to live in the moment and not think of the future. Even if we divorce, I would have been married to somebody I really loved and know what it was to be a wife for a few years. Marriage is no bigger deal than signing a piece of paper that commits you to someone forever.’

From this statement alone, we can detect that, for Angelina, the marriage may have been more of an experiment than a lifelong commitment, and ultimately it was her lack of commitment that would drive the union into an early grave. She had rather flippantly commented that she ‘would have married Jenny if I hadn’t married Jonny’ and Shimizu said of her lover, ‘I don’t think there’s any way of controlling Angelina. She goes looking for excitement all the time. I can’t imagine her just being married and being happy.’

Miller was a bit more optimistic about the marriage, saying simply, ‘When you love somebody, you want to be with them. We are a couple who are into extremes and the extreme is to get married. Having this eye-opening and honest relationship really opens doors within yourself.’

Perhaps one of the metaphorical ‘doors’ Jonny was referring to was the fact that he and his wife enjoyed a very experimental sexual relationship. Equally unconventionally, the couple even had a pet albino corn snake living in a tank at the end of their bed. ‘It was kept in a glass cage in the bedroom,’ said Jonny. ‘We had to find it another home in the end because we couldn’t give it the love and attention it deserved. You’ve got to give a snake a lot of love, or they turn into right bitches.’ He also revealed that they fed the snake mice that he had killed for it, saying, ‘I won’t tell you how I did it, because I will have all sorts of people leaving bombs on my doorstep, but I will say I’m very, very quick.’

While many men might have been intimidated by Jolie’s S&M tendencies and affection for pet snakes, Miller was clearly more than a match for the actress. She once described him as ‘pretty wild’ and on another occasion commented, ‘The English might be repressed but they’re good in bed!’ There aren’t many Hollywood actresses who would openly discuss their sex lives, but, as part of her quest to be as honest with her fans as she possibly could be, the young Angelina willingly went into detail about how she liked things to be in the bedroom. ‘I have always felt really naughty. I got involved in an S&M lifestyle and there were some people a lot further down that road than me. I had to be careful because I am an actress and recognisable. It fascinates me, though. I always felt that, if someone approached me to try something, then I would be the last person to walk away. I’d have a go.’

She also talked about her fascination with domination. ‘I used to think dominating was the thing to do. But then I realised that the person who was dominating was really the slave, because they did all the hard work. They are exhausted, while the other person was lying there enjoying it. I thought, “I’m not getting anything for me.” So I changed to thinking on the lines of being both master and slave.’

Whether Jonny was her ‘master’ or her ‘slave’, it’s clear that he was willing to experiment, and, while promoting Dracula (in which he starred) in 2001, he admitted that he had sucked his ex-wife’s blood and that, ‘She digs that kind of thing.’ And he certainly enjoyed the reputation she gave him for being wild in the sack, admitting after the marriage was over that her S&M anecdotes were ‘good for my image’.

Jolie was Miller’s first long-term serious relationship, and there’s no doubt that he was madly in love, but even he was aware of the relationship’s downfalls. ‘It’s been up, down and crazy. It does help her being an actress. You understand each other and the need to have your space.’

For a while, things were good between the two, with Jonny moving into Angelina’s LA apartment as soon as they were married. This was a big change in environment for the Surrey boy, but he explained that it was a professional decision as much as it was a personal one. ‘Being nuts about her had something to do with it [the move] but I also had to think it was a great opportunity to explore other worlds and to move and to work in Los Angeles with a purpose. Otherwise I might have been thinking “what if” for the rest of my life.’

Due to the whirlwind nature of their relationship, Miller didn’t actually meet Angelina’s father until after the wedding and was understandably nervous about his first meeting with Jon Voight. ‘It was a pretty weird experience, saying, “Hello, I’m your son-in-law” to Jon Voight. But Jon’s a nice man and we all breathe the same air.’ Of his own parents’ reaction to the bizarre nature of his wedding, Jonny has said, ‘Well, they do actually have a photo album of the wedding. It wasn’t as gruesome as it sounds. I think [people] imagine some kind of satanic ceremony. It wasn’t like that.’

Unfortunately, it was the aforementioned need for ‘space’ that would hinder the relationship in the end, with Angelina admitting that she wasn’t able to give her husband the time and attention he deserved. ‘It’s just that I wasn’t being a wife. I think we really needed to grow and we always talked about getting remarried. But he really had to put up with quite a lot. Certainly, my career is first. And, for some reason, I seem to meet a lot of men who say they are like that but, for some reason, it just doesn’t turn out that way.’

We can deduce from this that Jonny was willing to put his relationship before his career, but the same could not be said of his wife. And Angelina would be the first to admit that her strong desire for independence could well have been a direct result of her parents’ divorce. ‘I don’t know if my childhood was any worse than anyone else’s, but it is disturbing and sad when you see one parent figure not respecting the other. That probably had a great effect on me wanting to be self-sufficient. I was raised feeling that I didn’t want the ground to be taken away from me, and so, by the age of fourteen, I was already working [as a model]. I didn’t want to ask for help from anybody, and that extended into my own marriages.’

As much as she loved Jonny, Angelina was unable to give herself up entirely – unfortunately for him, he met her at a time when her career was of the utmost importance to her. ‘I’m not present enough, physically or emotionally, in relationships to get serious. It’s not fair to the other person that I’m so busy with my career and that I’m often distant even when I am with someone.’

For a while, the couple continued to live together, but emotionally they were miles apart. Angelina said, ‘We were living side by side, but we had separate lives. I wanted more for him than I could give. He deserves more than I am prepared to give at this time in my life, but there is a very good possibility that we could get married again some time in the future.’

In the end, the couple’s fate was sealed when, after tiring of LA, Angelina wanted to relocate to New York. By this time, Jonny was homesick and, if he was going to move anywhere, it would be back to London; he described New York as ‘too claustrophobic’. ‘I know this sounds mad, but I was missing little things like the Nine O’Clock News, red buses, country smells, the sound of our rock music, Match of the Day. Angie wanted to move to New York instead. I didn’t want to experience a whole new town again, so I came back and moved into a flat in London.’

Initially, the couple visited each other, but Jolie admitted that the distance had caused an even larger gulf between them, and she came to feel that visiting his abode in London just didn’t seem right. ‘It’s not my house, though he wants me to feel right at home. It doesn’t feel right for me to walk in on him in the shower, or for me to wander about naked.’

The couple made the inevitable decision to split, but remarkably they only had good things to say about each other in the aftermath, with Jolie describing their marriage as ‘a great experience’, saying that it had ‘enriched both our lives’ but that she ‘knew it wouldn’t last forever’. She also said that, despite their problems, the relationship hadn’t been a destructive one. ‘Jonny and I never fought and we never hurt each other. I really wanted to be his wife. I really wanted to commit.’

Although he didn’t resent his ex-wife (or, if he did, he certainly never spoke publicly about it), it is clear that Miller was the more heartbroken of the two. He said in an interview afterwards, ‘I think love exists. You don’t know for how long, though. It rarely lasts forever.’ After the divorce, Jonny was asked if he still believed in love at first sight, to which he replied, ‘Yeee-ah. Well, I believe in something at first sight. Love is based on trust, though. You can’t know that on sight.’ The actor was understandably reluctant to attract attention to his feelings, and, when asked if anyone had ever broken his heart, he admitted, ‘Yeah, they have, but I can’t tell you that. Because you’ll know who it was.’ He also admitted that marriage was something he ‘wouldn’t rush to do again’.

As ill-suited as they were as husband and wife, it’s clear that there was a lot of love between these two and, despite getting hurt, Miller definitely didn’t see the marriage as a mistake. ‘There are no regrets. Marriage was something that didn’t work out, and I had to make a decision sooner or later. I decided to make it sooner. We still have a really good relationship. In fact, we’ve found that our new relationship suits us both… One of the main reasons it broke up was that I got fed up of Hollywood. I enjoyed it at first, but realised that Britain is the place to be, both for work and personal contentment. We’re extremely good friends. I speak to her all the time. It’s not black and white.’

And to all the critics who said the union wouldn’t last from the start, Miller had this to say: ‘People find it bizarre and extraordinary that we were together. To me, it’s not. Angelina’s image is of a wild, crazy femme fatale. She’s not. She’s a very nice, very generous person. A big-hearted girl. She just says what’s she’s feeling. She doesn’t get up to any more mischief than your average person… well, maybe a little bit.’

And so, with Angelina in New York and Jonny back in London, the marriage was officially over. No one regretted the end of the relationship more than Jolie, who would admit years later, ‘Divorcing Jonny was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t dwell on it. I was so lucky to have met the most amazing man, who I wanted to marry. It comes down to timing. I think he’s the greatest husband a girl could ask for. I’ll always love him, we were simply too young.’