Despite these homosexual inclinations, Angelina maintained that her desires did not necessarily change her sexual orientation. ‘I don’t want to be provocative and say I’m bisexual, but I understand the love of one woman [for] another because I’ve felt it. I believe you love people whether they’re a man or a woman. I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.’
We can only assume that it was a problem for Jonny too, but his chasing Angelina paid off in the end: Jolie finally expressed the commitment he had long been seeking, and married him. Miller described their wedding day as ‘very romantic’, while Jolie has said of the nuptials, ‘We didn’t have a big white wedding, we had a small black wedding.’
As showbiz weddings go, it was definitely one of the more ‘out there’ ceremonies, with Angelina wearing black leather trousers and a white shirt with her husband’s name scrawled on the back in her own blood. ‘I consider it poetic,’ she said after the wedding. ‘Some people write poetry, others give themselves a little cut. It meant a lot.’
Although Jonny had admitted that he was ‘involved with an American girl who lived in LA’ and Angelina was open about the fact that they’d shared an apartment throughout the Hackers shoot, the couple had tried to keep their relationship under wraps initially. This all changed after the wedding, however, and, in her typically candid style, Angelina would be completely open in interviews about her life with Jonny. Of their hasty marriage, she said, ‘The way we both feel about life is to live in the moment and not think of the future. Even if we divorce, I would have been married to somebody I really loved and know what it was to be a wife for a few years. Marriage is no bigger deal than signing a piece of paper that commits you to someone forever.’
From this statement alone, we can detect that, for Angelina, the marriage may have been more of an experiment than a lifelong commitment, and ultimately it was her lack of commitment that would drive the union into an early grave. She had rather flippantly commented that she ‘would have married Jenny if I hadn’t married Jonny’ and Shimizu said of her lover, ‘I don’t think there’s any way of controlling Angelina. She goes looking for excitement all the time. I can’t imagine her just being married and being happy.’
Miller was a bit more optimistic about the marriage, saying simply, ‘When you love somebody, you want to be with them. We are a couple who are into extremes and the extreme is to get married. Having this eye-opening and honest relationship really opens doors within yourself.’
Perhaps one of the metaphorical ‘doors’ Jonny was referring to was the fact that he and his wife enjoyed a very experimental sexual relationship. Equally unconventionally, the couple even had a pet albino corn snake living in a tank at the end of their bed. ‘It was kept in a glass cage in the bedroom,’ said Jonny. ‘We had to find it another home in the end because we couldn’t give it the love and attention it deserved. You’ve got to give a snake a lot of love, or they turn into right bitches.’ He also revealed that they fed the snake mice that he had killed for it, saying, ‘I won’t tell you how I did it, because I will have all sorts of people leaving bombs on my doorstep, but I will say I’m very, very quick.’
While many men might have been intimidated by Jolie’s S&M tendencies and affection for pet snakes, Miller was clearly more than a match for the actress. She once described him as ‘pretty wild’ and on another occasion commented, ‘The English might be repressed but they’re good in bed!’ There aren’t many Hollywood actresses who would openly discuss their sex lives, but, as part of her quest to be as honest with her fans as she possibly could be, the young Angelina willingly went into detail about how she liked things to be in the bedroom. ‘I have always felt really naughty. I got involved in an S&M lifestyle and there were some people a lot further down that road than me. I had to be careful because I am an actress and recognisable. It fascinates me, though. I always felt that, if someone approached me to try something, then I would be the last person to walk away. I’d have a go.’
She also talked about her fascination with domination. ‘I used to think dominating was the thing to do. But then I realised that the person who was dominating was really the slave, because they did all the hard work. They are exhausted, while the other person was lying there enjoying it. I thought, “I’m not getting anything for me.” So I changed to thinking on the lines of being both master and slave.’
Whether Jonny was her ‘master’ or her ‘slave’, it’s clear that he was willing to experiment, and, while promoting Dracula (in which he starred) in 2001, he admitted that he had sucked his ex-wife’s blood and that, ‘She digs that kind of thing.’ And he certainly enjoyed the reputation she gave him for being wild in the sack, admitting after the marriage was over that her S&M anecdotes were ‘good for my image’.
Jolie was Miller’s first long-term serious relationship, and there’s no doubt that he was madly in love, but even he was aware of the relationship’s downfalls. ‘It’s been up, down and crazy. It does help her being an actress. You understand each other and the need to have your space.’
For a while, things were good between the two, with Jonny moving into Angelina’s LA apartment as soon as they were married. This was a big change in environment for the Surrey boy, but he explained that it was a professional decision as much as it was a personal one. ‘Being nuts about her had something to do with it [the move] but I also had to think it was a great opportunity to explore other worlds and to move and to work in Los Angeles with a purpose. Otherwise I might have been thinking “what if” for the rest of my life.’
Due to the whirlwind nature of their relationship, Miller didn’t actually meet Angelina’s father until after the wedding and was understandably nervous about his first meeting with Jon Voight. ‘It was a pretty weird experience, saying, “Hello, I’m your son-in-law” to Jon Voight. But Jon’s a nice man and we all breathe the same air.’ Of his own parents’ reaction to the bizarre nature of his wedding, Jonny has said, ‘Well, they do actually have a photo album of the wedding. It wasn’t as gruesome as it sounds. I think [people] imagine some kind of satanic ceremony. It wasn’t like that.’
Unfortunately, it was the aforementioned need for ‘space’ that would hinder the relationship in the end, with Angelina admitting that she wasn’t able to give her husband the time and attention he deserved. ‘It’s just that I wasn’t being a wife. I think we really needed to grow and we always talked about getting remarried. But he really had to put up with quite a lot. Certainly, my career is first. And, for some reason, I seem to meet a lot of men who say they are like that but, for some reason, it just doesn’t turn out that way.’
We can deduce from this that Jonny was willing to put his relationship before his career, but the same could not be said of his wife. And Angelina would be the first to admit that her strong desire for independence could well have been a direct result of her parents’ divorce. ‘I don’t know if my childhood was any worse than anyone else’s, but it is disturbing and sad when you see one parent figure not respecting the other. That probably had a great effect on me wanting to be self-sufficient. I was raised feeling that I didn’t want the ground to be taken away from me, and so, by the age of fourteen, I was already working [as a model]. I didn’t want to ask for help from anybody, and that extended into my own marriages.’
As much as she loved Jonny, Angelina was unable to give herself up entirely – unfortunately for him, he met her at a time when her career was of the utmost importance to her. ‘I’m not present enough, physically or emotionally, in relationships to get serious. It’s not fair to the other person that I’m so busy with my career and that I’m often distant even when I am with someone.’
For a while, the couple continued to live together, but emotionally they were miles apart. Angelina said, ‘We were living side by side, but we had separate lives. I wanted more for him than I could give. He deserves more than I am prepared to give at this time in my life, but there is a very good possibility that we could get married again some time in the future.’
In the end,