NEW YORK -- As hot properties go, Angelina Jolie must be approaching spontaneous combustion. The mere whisper that she might turn up here at a posh midtown hotel has left every single door to the building - front, back, side, garage, staff entrance, rooftop, probably - mobbed with photographers.
The incandescent Miss Jolie, 31, is indeed in the building, promoting The Good Shepherd, a film about the beginnings of the C.I.A. Directed by Robert De Niro, The Good Shepherd offers a history of the intelligence agency through the experiences of one man, Edward Wilson, who is played by Matt Damon. The film, opening locally on Friday, is a fictionalized version of very real espionage events between 1939 and 1961.
Jolie plays Wilson's wife, Clover, a woman eventually driven to drink by having to live in her husband's world of secrets and lies.
It's a departure. The role of a weak or seemingly defeated woman is unusual for the actress best known on the big screen as the butt-kicking Lara Croft. But the C.I.A. wife, Clover, fights to protect her son in the film, and Jolie says maternal instinct is what she had in common with her character.
"That was the one thing that kept me grounded to her, connected to her, because there was so much about her I didn't identify with," says the actress. "So much of the film for me was a study in that kind of restraint. I live in a time, when, as a woman, I can say, 'I'm leaving, I'm getting a divorce,' and she had to maintain a certain kind of composure, decency, quiet, just settle into that life. It was that time, and it was the C.I.A., and the idea of getting out was just impossible for a woman."
Miming horror at ever being so trapped, Jolie laughs and says, "It was very hard, because instinctually everything in me is just ..." She finishes her sentence by making a 'get-me-out-of-here' gesture.
Jolie, for those who have been living on another planet, is the daughter of actor Jon Voight and his former wife, Marcheline Bertrand. She grew up in Los Angeles and was studying theatre by age 11. By 16, she was modelling and she appeared in a handful of music videos. Her acting work increased in the 1990s with some small films and TV movies, and when she got roles in The Bone Collector and Girl, Interrupted in 1999, her career took off. She won an Oscar for best supporting actress for Girl, Interrupted.
With Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, Jolie's fan base became global. Among her many other films are Gone in 60 Seconds, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Beyond Borders, Pushing Tin, Original Sin, Life or Something Like It, Alexander, Taking Lives and Shark Tale.
Jolie's personal life has generally brought her even more attention than has her professional life. Her wild child behaviour, her tattoos, her marriages to Jonny Lee Miller (her Hackers co-star) and Billy Bob Thornton (they were both in Pushing Tin) - it's all been fodder for the tabloid press. No other celebrity in recent times has managed to be homewrecker and humanitarian in the same week: The scarlet woman who stole Brad Pitt is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. Jolie seems to have embraced her work, advocating for the protection of refugees on several continents. And she has put her celebrity to good use in helping publicize the plight of children in every country she visits.
Given her maneater reputation, it's new to see her play the role of rejected wife in The Good Shepherd.
"Well, I do have two divorces behind me, but I'm still good friends with them," she says, laughing, "so it's still OK. And that kind of relationship with a man," she says, referring to her silent, secretive spouse in the film, "I've never had that in my life 'cause I've always married artists, and they're always talkative and an expressive bunch. So that was bizarre. But I think that was part of the character that was interesting, because she did feel lost and trapped and confused and so I did, as well.
"I do see her in the end as being as strong as a woman could be in that time, but I did like that there were many things about her that were broken. I don't often get to play that part. ... Because she's more subservient, she's more vulnerable, she is very broken. As an actress it was a great challenge, and as a woman, as much as certain things in my life I do feel very strongly about, there are pieces of me that are broken."
Broken?
"I think, that kind of feeling alone. I didn't necessarily feel that in a marriage, but in my life I've often felt ..." Jolie pauses a moment, and says, "She's the only person who's desperate to scream out, and to try to get some reaction, something honest, and I've found that a lot in my life.
"It would break me, I would start drinking or something terrible if I was in a situation where I was surrounded by lies or quiet or secrets and you know, just not a real life."
She expands on the honesty-is-best-policy notion of relationships. "That's the only thing that works. I don't want to have to spend my life pretending to be somebody else. And I don't want the person next to me to have to pretend, ever. Because we have a long life ahead of us."
She laughs quietly. "You want to just be who you are in every moment, and that's the only way you'll be truly happy anyway."
Despite the fact that she's a celebrity and one who travels the planet for her humanitarian work, Jolie seems not to have developed a Bono complex.
She says, "I'm not a politician. I'm just an actor. And I'm supposed to just entertain and tell stories, and I remember that. Certainly, when a project comes along like The Good Shepherd or like A Mighty Heart - the Marianne Pearl story - they are the ones that take a priority in my life and I enjoy in a different way. The thing now that makes the big choice is, how long is it shooting? Because I don't think I've shot more than seven weeks on a movie in two years.
"I need to make sure I have time with my kids."
Those kids are Maddox, the son she adopted in Cambodia, Zahara, her Ethiopian daughter, and Shiloh, her infant daughter with Brad Pitt. The two met while filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Would she ever work with him on another movie?
"Who'd watch the children?" she asks.
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