From the Archives: Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie has dirt under her unpolished fingernails. This is comforting, being that the rest of her - unblinking blue eyes, the lush and pillowy mouth, the lithe but buxom figure - is envy-inducing. The dirt is also unsettling: where did it come from? What is it doing there? Despite her talent for high-wattage glamour at awards ceremonies, Jolie does not give the impression of being a girlie girl. She is all woman, and a dangerous one at that.
Perhaps you've heard of her knife collection. Or her tattoos, which include a dragon on her left shoulder and a Latin motto ("That which nourishes me also destroys me.") engraved just above her bikini line. Or of how when she married Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller she did so wearing black rubber pants and a white shirt with her husband's name scrawled on it in her blood. Or some of her more provocative comments - how she uses knives as part of sex play and how she is the actress most likely to have sex with the straight women who choose her as the actress they'd most likely have sex with. Yet more than all this - and the plaque by her bathroom sink which reads "Some Days It's Not Worth Chewing Through the Leather Straps in the Morning" - it is her voice that most unsettles. It's a low, tigerish growl, a growl of machismo.
"She's a very tough kid," confirms producer Martin Bregman, who fought hard to cast her opposite Denzel Washington in the chilling suspenser The Bone Collector. "We needed somebody young, someone vital and somebody you hadn't seen before. There [is] a toughness and also a vulnerability about her. It was an interesting combination." Bergman, who launched Michelle Pfeiffer's career when he cast her opposite Al Pacino in Scarface, pitched his choice to Washington, who had casting approval. Washington viewed the tape Bergman had given him and deemed, "Ooh, this girl is really good." The tape was Gia.
Gia, the HBO-produced cable pic, is Jolie's calling card and the source of all her subsequent good fortune and industry buzz. She had appeared in films like Hackers (where she met hubby Miller), Foxfire and Playing God, but it was her incendiary playing of doomed supermodel Gia Carangi that made everyone take notice. No other actress had displayed such fire, such sexuality, such fearlessness. The role won her a Golden Globe Award, a feat she repeated for her supporting role as George Wallace's second wife in TNT's Wallace.
Since then, Jolie has been singled out for her performances in the romantic ensemble Playing By Heart and Mike Newell's dark comedy Pushing Tin. She is already gathering buzz for her role in Girl, Interrupted, the mental institution drama starring Winona Ryder and has wrapped up Gone in 60 Seconds, the Nicolas Cage chase film due out next summer. In January, she reunites with Gia director Michael Cristofer for Dancing in the Dark, the Cornell Woolrich turn-of-the-century noir that has her starring as a mail order bride who may not be who she claims. It is The Bone Collector, however, that offers her her first starring vehicle in a major studio film, and she invests her trademark grit in the role of Amelia Donaghy, the rookie cop who aids Washington's paralyzed detective in tracking down a serial killer.
"She's the lead in this picture," Bergman notes. "Denzel is the center but it's her arc, it's her that you follow. It's an exciting role and there aren't that many women's roles that are written anymore where it's about the woman." Jolie agrees with his assessment. "A lot of women's roles are very angry or they're not feminine at all, they're not emotional enough. She was all of that and strong. She was a well-rounded character."
Jolie immersed herself in the role, meeting with New York policewomen and poring over crime scene pictures. "I went to forensic labs here in New York and saw pictures of things…things that I just never knew anybody could do to another person. I'd never seen anybody beaten to death or burnt." Her instincts as an actor pushed aside any disgust she may have felt. "You see the chipped nail polish and you realize that a week ago this woman wanted to go out and find a boyfriend. You see her stretch marks and you realize this is a woman who was beaten by her husband to death and she had his children at some point. You see her glasses broken." Jolie also began seeing the brutalities with a forensic investigator's gaze. "You start to see that blood was splattered that way, that hit must have been there."
Jolie so submerged herself that she often forgot that was only an actress playing a cop. "I had to remember that I wasn't a cop," she laughs. "I'd come home from work and…there was an accident on the side of the road and I actually got out and talked to the person that was moving traffic and thinking, Why aren't they blocking off the scene?"
"You get this feeling while you're watching her work that you're really watching the beginning of a brilliant career," shares director Phillip Noyce, who introduced Nicole Kidman to American audiences in Dead Calm. "She was just wonderful to work with - hasn't learned to fear yet, hasn't learned any airs, doesn't need a stand-in, just comes to the set, is there before she's called."
As unaffected as Jolie can be, it is clear she's no pushover and made it known to both Bergman and Noyce that there were certain concerns she had, namely that she was unwilling to shed her clothes or be part of the sex scene originally featured in the script. She and Bergman went head to head on this and some other points - she won some, lost some and compromised on some - but neither harbors any enmity towards the other. "She knew how hard I fought to get her in the movie," says Bergman.
"We compromised," Jolie acknowledges, though she still doesn't understand why it was necessary to explain that Amelia was a former child model. "It's hard enough for me to be introduced as a female cop, but to introduce me naked… It needed to be about her work."
Jolie found less turbulent ground with costar Washington, though she was initially anxious that he would find her unworthy to be in the film. "I know he's very clear about what he likes, what's right for something, what's wrong for something," she says, explaining her apprehension. "I didn't know if he would interview me and not like me as an actress. I didn't know if he would enjoy my work or somehow connect to it or if he would like my choices or if I had the strength for her or if I was woman enough to play opposite him. I didn't know. But it just meant so much, it always means so much when you meet another actor that has moved you."
Jolie, who's divorced from Miller with whom she remains good friends, has recently been linked to Playing God costar Timothy Hutton though their relationship has come to naught. Jolie, the daughter of actor Jon Voight and former French actress Marcheline Bertrand, admits, "I'd love more than anything to be a mother. I don't know if I'd have them. There are a lot of children in the world that need homes. I'd love to be a mother. But I've always thought…I certainly now feel that I have so much and feel so complete in many ways, but also not in many ways."
Originally published November 5, 1999
