The two faces of Angelina Jolie
She comes to meet me and welcomes me with a smile. She shakes my hand and looks at me sympathetically. She likes to see me again. We have known each other for a long time. She was 22 when I first interviewed her. She was in her punk phase and had just shot a TV movie in which she was dying of an overdose. I remember how her face with her tormented soul and her desperate gaze caught my attention. Yes, I've known Angelina Jolie for a long time, but I still don't dare to hug her. Because she is courteous and kind, but she always maintains a certain distance that she never trespasses.
"What makes me happy? Seeing Brad making pancakes in different shapes for the children and seeing how much they love him. That is true happiness."
We seem to know everything about her because her life is an open book (or, better, a tabloid). Photos of her are posted daily as she catches a plane to Sierra Leone or Bosnia, or alighting from another in London (where she participates in a seminar with an English minister on battered women) or leaving for New York, Vietnam or Cambodia. The photographers immortalize her as she walks down the street with Brad Pitt, her six children and their stuffed animals. She appears in the New York Times telling women about her mastectomy, or is surprised in Sydney, where she shoots her second film as a director, Unbroken, the incredible story of Italian-American Olympic champion Louis Zamperini, staged by none other than Joel and Ethan Coen .
And yet I would like to know more about this 38-year-old woman. The opportunity to do so is given to me by Maleficent, the Disney movie in which she plays the perfidious and beautiful witch from Sleeping Beauty. Angelina, like the sorceress, wears black: patent leather T-shirt, pants and loafers, and very little makeup. Subtle, elegant, almost regal. She speaks in a calm tone and great pauses. She pays close attention to questions about her travels, her youth, and her journey as a woman and mother.
