The seed was planted. And her relationship with the punk-rock boyfriend would allow Angelina to push boundaries with the knives that she found so fascinating. She has said of this time, ‘Some people go shopping – I cut myself. I started having sex and sex didn’t feel like enough and my emotions didn’t feel like enough. My emotions kept wanting to break out. In a moment of wanting something honest, I grabbed a knife and cut my boyfriend – and he cut me. He was a really good person, a sweet guy – not threatening, not scary. We had this exchange of something and we were covered in blood and my heart was racing and it was something dangerous. Life suddenly felt more honest than whatever this “sex” was supposed to be. It felt so primitive and it felt so honest, but then I had to deal with not telling my mother, hiding things, wearing gauze bandages to school.’
She has also said, ‘It was a desperate need to feel. When I was young, I didn’t have a “self” of my own. As I grew up, I lived through the characters I played, and became lost in different parts of my personality.’ During one S&M session, Jolie asked her lover to draw a blade across her jawline and there is still a faint scar there today. ‘Looking back,’ says Jolie, ‘he was somebody that I wanted to help me break out and I would get frustrated when he couldn’t help me.’
The cutting couldn’t help her either – in fact, it nearly killed her. After one particular incident where Jolie slashed her neck, cut an X into her arm and sliced into her stomach, she was rushed to hospital. ‘I nearly cut my jugular vein,’ she admitted in 2000. ‘By the time I was sixteen, I had gotten it [self-harming] all out of my system.’
Perhaps it was the getting it out of her system, or the near-death experience, that spelled the end of her relationship with the punk. Whatever the motivation, Angelina clearly felt it was time to move on. ‘When she was sixteen, Angie decided that she’d had it with living with her mum and her boyfriend,’ says Jean. ‘She took an apartment across the street and moved. The boyfriend assumed he was moving in with her, but she kicked him out and that was the end of the relationship.’
Angelina herself has described it as a ‘tough break-up. That relationship felt like a marriage. He cried a lot and it was just a load of high drama that I could do without.’
Whether Bertrand was glad to be rid of her unruly daughter is not known, but the neighbours certainly were. One of them remembers an occasion when the police had to be called because of the loud music coming from the flat in the early hours of the morning: ‘My God, they would wake the dead, dancing and yelling and playing their music. It was a happy day when she moved.’
With hindsight, Jolie is aware of how self-indulgent she was in her teens, worrying about issues that, in the grand scale of things, don’t really matter. Referring to these years, the actress has said, ‘The doctor was probably going on about my father and mother while I was doing acid and bleeding under my clothes. I think now that, if someone would have taken me at fourteen and dropped me in the middle of Asia or Africa, I’d have realised how self-centred I was, and that there was real pain and real death and real things to fight for. I wouldn’t have been fighting myself so much.’
Despite her early aspirations to be a funeral director, it was clear from the time she was a toddler, and putting on shows for her brother, that acting was in Angelina Jolie’s blood. Not that she would admit it. In an interview with People Weekly in 2004, Jolie recalled, ‘Growing up, I couldn’t have cared less about movies. He [James, her brother] used to drag me to them. Jamie always loved film. He should’ve been the one who was working first.’
In the same interview, however, James begged to differ, insisting that it was his little sister who was the more theatrical of the two, particularly when he pointed a camera in her face. ‘I’d tell her to act for me. We did a version of a Subway commercial, of her saying something like, “I’ll punch your face if you don’t buy a sandwich.”’
These were fairly strong words for such a young girl, but Angelina would be the first to admit that she was much tougher than her brother. ‘We’re almost perfect opposites. He never swears. I swear like a truck driver when I’m angry. When it comes to the moral high ground, he wins. When it comes to being loud and crass and tough, that’s me.’
Jolie’s parents readily encouraged her acting aspirations. ‘I remember Jamie pointing the home video camera at me and saying “Come on, Angie, give us a show!” Neither [Dad] nor Mom ever said, “Be quiet! Stop talking!” I remember [Dad] looking me in the eye and asking, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling?”’ Never one to be straightforward, Jolie has explained her theatrical interest in cryptic terms: ‘I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I could know. I loved some kind of expression. I want[ed] so much to try to explain things to somebody… I’m very good at trying to explore different emotions and listen to people and feel things. That is an actor, I think.’
She might not have known what she wanted, but according to her dad it was inevitable she would end up in front of a camera. ‘Looking back, there was evidence at an early that she would be an actor,’ he said. ‘She would take anything and make an event out of it. She was always very busy and creative and dramatic.’
When Marcheline moved her family back to LA, it seemed like the natural thing for eleven-year-old Angelina to enrol in the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute – given that her mother had once studied there. Lee Strasberg was an actor, director, producer and acting coach who had started up his LA drama school in 1969. Among the Hollywood greats who benefited from his teaching were James Dean, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, Al Pacino and Paul Newman. Marilyn Monroe was another: the pair were so close that in her final will she left Strasberg total control of 75 per cent of her estate and, as his favourite student, she actually moved in with him and his family at one point. Strasberg was a big advocate of method acting (the practice of actors drawing on their own memories, experiences and emotions to create a realistic performance) and it was perhaps for this very reason that Angelina quit the school after two years and several appearances in stage productions, claiming that she ‘didn’t have enough memories’ to portray characters in the way she should. Strasberg’s theories clearly stayed with her, though – Jolie would later say of her craft, ‘Acting is not pretending or lying. It’s finding a side of yourself that’s the character and ignoring your other sides. And there’s a side of me that wonders what’s wrong with being completely honest.’
Having left the Strasberg Institute, Angelina went on to attend Beverly Hills High, from where she graduated at the age of sixteen. This was at the same time that she ditched the aforementioned punk-rocker boyfriend and moved into an apartment of her own. It was also around this time that she would start to seek help a bit closer to home and take acting lessons from her award-winning father. According to Voight, ‘She’d come over to my house and we’d run through a play together, performing various parts. I saw that she had real talent. She loved acting. So I did my best to encourage her, to coach her and to share my best advice with her. For a while we were doing a new play together every Sunday.’ Voight never claimed a stake in his daughter’s eventual success, though. ‘I gave her what help I could in terms of acting, but she went out and made a career of her own. It was all her doing and now I do my part by being as supportive as I can and giving advice when she asks for it.’
While most actors actively discourage their children from entering the world of showbiz, Voight was unperturbed by the challenges the film