HOW ANGELINA JOLIE BECAME THE WORLD'S GREATEST STAR
The actress turns 40 tomorrow. She is the most famous of her generation ... without a single culturally relevant role. How did you do it?
Angelina is a unique case: she is one of the most famous and admired actresses without having behind her back any film that goes down to posterity, no iconic character, no success with the public and critics that is culturally relevant
A few years ago, in an interview, Candela Peña recalled the days she spent in Los Angeles promoting Todo sobre mi madre during the 2000 Oscar campaign. She said that one night, at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood, she went out to the garden to smoke and He was surprised by the movement among the nearby hedges. It was due, in her words, to "a couple who were eating their mouths in an excessive way."
When they became aware of her and disengaged, Candela discovered to her amazement that they were Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. She had settled in the hotel when her fiancee Laura Dern discovered the affair and kicked her out of the house, and there she was assiduously seeing the emerging star. The next day Angelina won the Oscar for best supporting actress (and All About My Mother, the Oscar for best foreign film) and ran into the arms of Billy Bob, prize in hand, to continue celebrating her success.
Fifteen years have passed since the young actress gave vent to her passion in public places. By the time Angelina Jolie turns forty, we look back to assess her career and all the public figures she has been up to today.
phase 1: the rare
Angelina became famous at a speed much faster than her career path would suggest. One of the first films she worked on - and her first success - was Hackers, from 1995 (just five years before winning the Oscar). In the two years between filming and the Rolling Stones' Anybody seen my baby ?, video clip, in which she starred, she became internationally known. The explanation is that the world was hungry for such a character: not only was she ragingly beautiful and possessed of obvious sex appeal, she was also a constant source of headlines.
Example number one: She married her Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller in a ceremony where each spouse had the other's name written in blood on their shirt. Example number two: your past, better than any invented by a publicist. The daughter of a movie star (Jon Voight, star of Midnight Cowboy) tormented during her adolescence with depression, self-mutilated by cutting herself and fantasized, before becoming an actress, about owning a funeral home. A textbook goth who spoke freely about her bisexuality and who was haunted by rumors of having an incestuous relationship with her brother James. Angelina was the personification of everything forbidden and also had a unique physique.
phase 2: the recognized actress
That physicist helped him to convincingly portray model Gia Carangi in the HBO film that earned her her second Golden Globe balloon. This award recognized her effort by pushing the teachings of the method she had learned studying acting with Lee to the limit. Strasberg and that he had left her emotionally drained. In 1999 she was filming another role as tormented: the Lisa from Inocencia interrupted was such a magnetic, candid and intimidating madwoman that the world gave up her work giving her the Oscar for best supporting performance. Angelina came dressed as Morticia Addams and accompanied by her brother James, although she already had a relationship with Billy Bob Thornton. The same year 2000 they were married, sealing their love by wearing each other's pendants with the coagulated blood of the other. Angelina could allow herself to be as eccentric and sinister as she wanted, because the full range of Hollywood roles was offered to her.
PHASE 3: an icon bigger than your movies
And what roles did she choose? 60 seconds. Seven days and a life. Original sin. If anything can make us doubt Angelina's good judgment (and give credence to Jon Voight's statements in 2000 in which he said that his daughter was not in the right mind) it is her job choices. Although arrests are not lacking: she has had enough of doing action heroine roles, such as Lara Croft or Salt (which by the way was originally written for Tom Cruise) and has shown that she seeks prestige where she gives it wins it.
Until Maleficent arrived, her most successful film was Kung Fu Panda and its sequel, where she voiced the character of –of course– a tigress. It is a unique case: she is one of the most famous and admired actresses without having behind her back any film that goes down to posterity, no iconic character, no success with the public and critics that is culturally relevant. She doesn't need it - she stands above any of her jobs thanks to that unique blend of physical and personal appeal. Although seriously, Angelina, Alexander the Great? The Tourist? SE busca?
phase 4: the mother
The filming of Tomb Raider in Cambodia, one of the countries with the most tragic history, marked the beginning of her commitment to the UN. UNHCR contacted her as a celebrity to give visibility to her cooperation projects, but the actress's involvement with the organization went beyond what was initially planned and became a collaboration that continues to this day and one of the main concerns of the star, who highlights her philanthropic work as an absolute priority. And on a more intimate level, it marked a before and after as it involved the adoption of Maddox, a Cambodian orphan. Motherhood has marked the most recent stage of her life. She has six children: three adopted and three biological.
PHASE 5: the bad
Certain Hollywood stories are so good that if they didn't exist, they would have to be invented: in 2005 the two most desired movie stars, the star of this article and Brad Pitt, starred in a rather mediocre action movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith and fell in love. They thus made his wife, Jennifer Aniston, a victim. This turned Jolie into "the other", the vortex of hatred of many abandoned by their partners who identified with Aniston, who was also the daily presence of Friends, the next door neighbor, America's sweetheart. A role that the terrifying Angelina, no matter how good an actress she may be, could never play.
Time and common sense put things in their place. Brangelina today form one of those powerful couples that attract the interest of the media and the public wherever they go, a tandem that together is much more interesting than the sum of its elements separately. The living proof that sometimes 2 + 2 equals 5. Besides, they are pure Hollywood. It would be as if Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe had been a couple and had a family in the late 50s or as if Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts had imitated them in the early 90s.
PHASE 6: THE SUPERWOMAN
Let's review: Angelina donates 30% of her income to various humanitarian organizations. This commitment has earned him an honorary Oscar (he is the youngest person to have obtained it). She is not limited to being an actress, she has directed two films that are poorly rated by critics but with a deep humanist message, and she is directing her husband Brad Pitt in a third. He forms a wandering interracial family with him because, although their professions force them to work in different parts of the world, they decided to have their children always with them, facing a certain uprooting and educating the children "at home", outside the traditional school.
Angelina is a person who decided to give birth to her first biological daughter in Namibia as a tribute and thanks to Africa. A person who sells the exclusive of the birth of her twins only to donate that money to more solidarity organizations. A person who marries in her castle in France with a veil scrawled by her six children. A person who, while in Australia, calls an indigenous woman to spend a day telling her children details of Maori culture.
At the same time, when Brad Pitt was working in France filming Fury and she was staying in Australia in charge of the filming of Invincible, they chose as a form of contact to write letters, paper letters to maintain communication in a romantic and old school way, instead of sending WhatsApp icons like the rest of humanity. That's the kind of person Angelina Jolie is. Do you know someone similar?
PHASE 6: THE HUMAN BEING
And yet it has been tragedy and not the glamorous and extravagant life of a global star that has brought Angelina closer to ordinary mortals. It was her brutal sincerity in telling the New York Times in an open letter her decision to remove her breasts (and more recently her ovaries and fallopian tubes) to minimize her chances of cancer that has made her human. It has been talking about death, about the disease that killed her grandmother, her mother and her aunt, when she has obtained more doses of empathy and affection. The impact of her decision on raising awareness in the prevention of this disease has been enormous, as has the debate that raised her drastic surgical decision. In any case, in her letter Jolie did not pontificate; She spoke about her specific case, her genetic predisposition and the importance of knowing the options and making decisions without fear, for oneself. Today, Angelina Jolie is also the sexual icon who dares to say that she is going through menopause and who ends her statement with "information is power."
Angelina personifies the glamor of old Hollywood and the subversion of the newer; He leads a lifestyle as far as possible from that of ordinary mortals, but he knows how to show himself - or pretend to be real; She remains enigmatic and unattainable and at the same time is open and frank about very intimate things in her life, such as with what concerns cancer or with what concerns her daughter Shiloh Nouvel.
When Shiloh was three years old, Angelina declared that she had stopped responding by name, that she demanded to be called John, refused to wear girlish clothes, and recognized herself as a boy, as one of her children (along with her older brothers Maddox and Pax or little Lion Knox). Today, Shiloh always continues to wear children's clothes (he wore a tie and a suit at the presentation of Invincible in Los Angeles, the one that Angelina could not attend due to chickenpox) and although it is a bit premature to talk about a subject as delicate as dysphoria gender, the sincerity and normality that Angelina and Brad have given to this fact appears as an example to the world. Another one.
