Star qualities

INTERVIEW:She's one of the most closely observed actors of her generation, but what do we know of the real Angelina Jolie? Not anywhere near as much as the tabloids might have you believe, writes DONALD CLARKE

WE’RE WAITING FOR one of our era’s signature fictional characters. Imagine you’ve been told that Harry Potter is about to enter the room and you’ll get some sense of our surging excitement.

It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. Over the past five years, somebody called Angelina Jolie has emerged as the unwilling lead in a fantastically repetitive, apparently endless soap opera. The facts are simple to state. In 2005, Brad Pitt, then married to Jennifer Aniston, became romantically entwined with Ms Jolie. One imagines the former Friendwas less than happy with the arrangement, but she did a reasonable job of keeping her opinions to herself.

No matter. The supermarket tabloids were not to be frustrated. Angie was, they claimed, a deranged boyfriend thief whose eccentricities frequently drove Brad to drink. In his lowest moments, Brad would make late-night phone calls to poor, lonely Jennifer. Proof for these inventions came in the form of vaguely appropriate photographs: Brad happily drinking a can of beer, Angelina with her teeth bared, Jennifer staring into middle distance. The most prized image is one featuring Brad and Angelina looking in opposite directions. “Is it all over for Brangelina?” Tripe magazine bellows.

Jolie’s documented behaviour does lend some support to the notion that she has leanings towards the eccentric. When married to Billy Bob Thornton – an actor not renowned for normality – she and her spouse wore phials of each other’s blood around their necks. Her passion for adoption has propelled her towards orphanages in every corner of the known universe. Then there are those increasingly cryptic tattoos.

For all that, the Angelina Jolie of the supermarket checkout remains as much an invention as (one of her less demanding roles) Lara Croft, the popular, pneumatic tomb raider.

Ah, but we're meeting the real thing. Aren't we? Gathered in Paris for the launch of The Tourist, an agreeably featherweight thriller co-starring Johnny Depp, the ladies and gentleman of the press anticipate a rare glimpse of the flesh beneath the not-so-glossy images.

Does the real thing look like Hilda Ogden without the rollers? Alas, you meanies, she does not. Sheathed in something white, her hair as solid and shiny as a curled otter, she could not look more like an old-school movie star if she drove a gold Rolls-Royce into the reception room.

Clearing my throat, before lowering myself into a prone attitude of secular worship, I ask if, now spending much of her time in France, she finds it easier to live life like a normal person. Many stars find they are hassled less in this country than in Britain or the US.

“We don’t read anything about ourselves. We just don’t pay attention to that,” she says. “So it’s hard to say what’s said in one country and what’s said in another.”

Is that possible? The average reader will, even if totally uninterested in the royal couple, find himself or herself involuntarily sopping up information while paying for baked beans or cat food.

“It is possible,” she says. “It’s possible if you just read serious newspapers and you make sure not to look yourself up on the web. There’s no gossip about us on CFR.org. I just do that. I don’t have a publicist or an agent and I just don’t ask about it. I just don’t ask.”

What an existence. You wouldn’t want your worst enemy to live a life confined to CFR.org (The Council on Foreign Relations, since you ask).

Jolie’s status as the most examined icon of her age was confirmed earlier in the day when, during a jolly press conference, Depp explained that he looked aghast at the level of press intrusion that Jolie endured. “There ought to be law against it,” he drawled.

Consider who is speaking. Johnny Depp, the most bankable male star of the era, is taken aback by the pressures on Jolie. This is akin to hearing Bill Gates marvel at the size of his next-door neighbour’s bank account.

Mind you, unlike Depp, born into a fairly ordinary middle-class family, Angelina Jolie was raised for fame. Her father, with whom she has famously unhappy relations, is the great actor Jon Voight. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died in 2007, was also seen on TV and in movies. It’s tempting to assume that there was no other career path open to her. With that sort of background, she was hardly likely to become a plasterer or a quantity surveyor.

“It’s one or the other. If you’re raised by artists and actors you either really do want to be one or you very definitely don’t want to be one. I’m hoping my children definitely don’t want to become one.”

She now has her own sizeable brood – three adopted children and another three biological offspring – which will eventually have to make these very life choices. “They are all strong individuals. So that won’t be an issue. As long as they are happy – as long as they do what they want to do – then I will be happy. I know how difficult it is to have a happy life and career.”

So what would have become of her if the acting hadn’t worked out? She must occasionally ponder her other life.

“No. I don’t think about that too much,” she says. “I would still have been a mom and I would still have loved that. I would have travelled, because I am the sort of person who just can’t sit still. I find that acting keeps me sane.”

Voight and Bertrand separated in 1976, just a year after Angelina’s birth. Raised by her mother, she contracted the acting bug before reaching her teenage years. After a brief period studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute – mecca for the Method – she dropped out and began lurking about street corners while wearing seven shades of black. Soon, however, she gave into the inevitable and took up theatre studies once more.

Jolie has spoken openly about her troubles as a teenager. Though undeniably beautiful, she has always been an odd-looking creature – everything in that face juts out dramatically – and, at school, she suffered from the taunts that always tail outsiders. Nonetheless, she began picking up modelling work before reaching her majority and, in 1993, made her first appearance in a motion picture. Cyborg 2 did not exactly light up the night, but Hackers, made two years later, attracted some modest attention and, in co-star Jonny Lee Miller, provided Angie with her first husband.

By 1999, when she played the troubled inmate of a mental institution in James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted,Jolie had become a mid-level star – "Oh you know, that woman who was in that film with the horse".

Securing a best supporting actress Oscar for Mangold’s film propelled her into the big league and her luminescence has only increased over the following years.

Jolie's extraordinary appearance and colourful home life have triggered more than a few satirical quips. But there is no doubting her talent. Watch her in Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart(playing the wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl) or Clint Eastwood's Changeling(as a woman torn from her child) and you cannot fail to be struck by a formidable capacity for relaying emotional evisceration. The Tourist, the second film from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, director of The Lives of Others, allows her to relax a little. She's very good as a mysterious Englishwoman creating havoc in lusciously presented Venice. It seems a shame that so many people still refuse to take her seriously.

“I suppose. But that sort of thing happens to most people. It’s important to prove – not just to others, but to yourself – that you have more in you. I am 35 now and I hope that I am a more complex person than I was when I was 20. Hopefully, I’ll just keep getting better.”

Is that why she has taken up directing? Jolie’s first feature, currently untitled, is a love story set in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict. The picture has already proved controversial. Certain victims’ rights groups objected to the script and urged the Bosnian government to forbid the shoot. The authorities did eventually come round and filming in Bosnia, Serbia and Hungary finished a few weeks ago. It sounds like an ambitious project for a debut feature.

“I had no real intention of directing, but I wrote something because I was sitting around and then Brad found it on my desk. He liked it and I suddenly found myself directing. That was never my intention.”

She doesn’t seem to have been shaken by the controversy. “It was great. All the cast were local. We shot the film in two languages: in their own language and in English. And they were amazing in both – which is pretty impressive. Budapest is wonderful. The country is wonderful.”

Jolie is, of course, aware that the press are watching, but it’s hard not to be impressed by her poise and charm. She seems articulate. It sounds as if she was raised to have decent manners. She deserves a degree of respect. Of course, the best-looking actors have always struggled to win over critics and eggheads. Some secret rule argues that pretty heads must be empty ones.

Has being, erm, regarded as beautiful . . . Let me rephrase that. Has being beautiful hindered her efforts to be taken seriously? Oh heavens. Now I sound like the world’s oiliest – not to say sleaziest – journalist.

She offers a five-mile-wide smile of indulgence and proceeds to treat the question with more seriousness than it deserves.

"Oh thank you," she says. "As I say, as you get older you get more comfortable in yourself. You see who you are and you learn to appreciate that. I see my mother in myself. I see my little girls in myself. You appreciate that, but you don't – like the character in The Tourist– wake up and focus on how attractive you are. My focus is to be a better person. I hope to be more intelligent. That's what matters in life."

If you were being cynical (why not?), you could regard this as industry-standard sentimental waffle, but, for all her oddness, Jolie does come across as a person of some substance. Nobody forced her to become a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Dealing with that extraordinary level of media pressure requires a fairly robust psyche. And she does seem genuinely devoted to her growing family. Yes, with all her money, she is not short of staff or growing space. Plenty of show-business families have, however, failed to achieve such apparent levels of harmony.

“We do take turns when we are working,” she says. “So we make it work that way. As we speak, Brad is upstairs packing, as we have to get on a plane tonight with the kids. He is an extraordinary father. So I have a great partner and that’s very important.”

Unsurprisingly, you don’t tend to get too deep beneath the carapace when conducting an interview with Angelina Jolie. There are, one assumes, certain question, which, if asked – work them out for yourself – would cause the goon squad to drag you from the room and deposit you bloodied in Rue de Rivoli. (Only joking, m’lud.) But I suspect that, if such inquires were made, she would, before your ejection, shuffle them aside with cool, terrifyingly unruffled elan.

That’s how proper movie stars behave and, in an era when such beasts are becoming increasingly endangered, Jolie stands as the most untouchable and unknowable supernova still burning. It’s probably just as well that we don’t quite know who she is. Gliding serenely across the planet, inhuman lips looming like beautiful draft excluders, she retains the sort of mystery that used to hang about Garbo or Dietrich.

We don't know her at all. Never mind. If you want to know somebody called Angelina Jolie, pick up a magazine with a monosyllabic title. Jen's on the phone every night. Brad's moved on to Wild Turkey. Angie's communing with aliens. Golly, we're a sorry bunch .

The Tourist is on general release