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 she 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 public and critical successes that are 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. She was due, in her words, to "a couple who were eating their mouths in an excessive way."
When they became aware of her presence and disengaged, Candela discovered, astonished, that they were Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. He had settled in the hotel when her fiancée Laura Dern discovered the affair and kicked him out of the house, and there he 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 much faster than her career path would suggest. One of the first films she worked on - and her first success - hers 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 her shirt. Example number two: her past, better than any invented by a publicist. The daughter of a movie star (Jon Voight, star of Midnight Cowboy) tormented during her adolescence suffering from depression, she 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 hers. Angelina was the personification of everything forbidden and also had a unique physique.
Phase 2: the recognized actress
That physicist helped him to convincingly play the model Gia Carangi in the film for HBO that earned him his second Golden Globe balloon. This award recognized his effort by pushing to the limit the teachings of the method he had learned studying acting with Lee. Strasberg and that he had left her emotionally drained. In 1999 she was filming another tormented role: the Lisa from Inocencia interrupted was such a magnetic, candid and intimidating madwoman that the world surrendered to her work, giving her the Oscar for best supporting performance. Angelina came dressed as Morticia Addams and accompanied by her brother James hers, although she already had a relationship with Billy Bob Thornton. The same year 2000 they got married, sealing their love by wearing two pendants with each other's coagulated blood. Angelina could allow herself to be as eccentric and sinister as she wanted, because the whole gamut 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 credit to Jon Voight's statements in 2000 in which he said that her daughter was not right in the head) 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 looks for 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. She is a unique case: she is one of the most famous and admired actresses without having behind her no movie that goes down to posterity, no iconic character, no success with the public and critics that is culturally relevant. He doesn't need her: she stands above any of her jobs thanks to that unique blend of physical and personal attractiveness. 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, she marked a before and after as it meant the adoption of Maddox, a Cambodian orphan. Her 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 protagonist 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 hitherto 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 is, could never play.
Time and common sense put things in her 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 is equal to 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 1950s or as if Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts had imitated them in the early 1990s.
PHASE 6: THE SUPERWOMAN
Let's review: Angelina donates 30% of her income to various humanitarian organizations. This commitment has earned her an honorary Oscar (she 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 humanistic message, and she is directing her husband Brad Pitt in a third. Together with him, he forms a wandering interracial family because, although their professions force them to work in different parts of the world, they decided to always have their children 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 for 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 the Maori culture.
At the same time, in which 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. She was the brutal sincerity of her when telling in an open letter to the New York Times her decision to remove her breasts (and more recently also her ovaries and fallopian tubes) to minimize the chances of suffering from cancer. has become human. She 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 of her specific case of hers, 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 ends her statement with "information is power."
Angelina personifies the glamor of old Hollywood and the subversion of the newer; She leads a lifestyle as far as possible from that of ordinary mortals, but she knows how to show herself –or pretend herself– 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 cancer or her daughter Shiloh Nouvel.
When Shiloh was three years old, Angelina stated 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 children). 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 before the world. Another one.
