Initially, the couple visited each other, but Jolie admitted that the distance had caused an even larger gulf between them, and she came to feel that visiting his abode in London just didn’t seem right. ‘It’s not my house, though he wants me to feel right at home. It doesn’t feel right for me to walk in on him in the shower, or for me to wander about naked.’
The couple made the inevitable decision to split, but remarkably they only had good things to say about each other in the aftermath, with Jolie describing their marriage as ‘a great experience’, saying that it had ‘enriched both our lives’ but that she ‘knew it wouldn’t last forever’. She also said that, despite their problems, the relationship hadn’t been a destructive one. ‘Jonny and I never fought and we never hurt each other. I really wanted to be his wife. I really wanted to commit.’
Although he didn’t resent his ex-wife (or, if he did, he certainly never spoke publicly about it), it is clear that Miller was the more heartbroken of the two. He said in an interview afterwards, ‘I think love exists. You don’t know for how long, though. It rarely lasts forever.’ After the divorce, Jonny was asked if he still believed in love at first sight, to which he replied, ‘Yeee-ah. Well, I believe in something at first sight. Love is based on trust, though. You can’t know that on sight.’ The actor was understandably reluctant to attract attention to his feelings, and, when asked if anyone had ever broken his heart, he admitted, ‘Yeah, they have, but I can’t tell you that. Because you’ll know who it was.’ He also admitted that marriage was something he ‘wouldn’t rush to do again’.
As ill-suited as they were as husband and wife, it’s clear that there was a lot of love between these two and, despite getting hurt, Miller definitely didn’t see the marriage as a mistake. ‘There are no regrets. Marriage was something that didn’t work out, and I had to make a decision sooner or later. I decided to make it sooner. We still have a really good relationship. In fact, we’ve found that our new relationship suits us both… One of the main reasons it broke up was that I got fed up of Hollywood. I enjoyed it at first, but realised that Britain is the place to be, both for work and personal contentment. We’re extremely good friends. I speak to her all the time. It’s not black and white.’
And to all the critics who said the union wouldn’t last from the start, Miller had this to say: ‘People find it bizarre and extraordinary that we were together. To me, it’s not. Angelina’s image is of a wild, crazy femme fatale. She’s not. She’s a very nice, very generous person. A big-hearted girl. She just says what’s she’s feeling. She doesn’t get up to any more mischief than your average person… well, maybe a little bit.’
And so, with Angelina in New York and Jonny back in London, the marriage was officially over. No one regretted the end of the relationship more than Jolie, who would admit years later, ‘Divorcing Jonny was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t dwell on it. I was so lucky to have met the most amazing man, who I wanted to marry. It comes down to timing. I think he’s the greatest husband a girl could ask for. I’ll always love him, we were simply too young.’
After Foxfire, Jolie felt utterly disillusioned with the acting world and seriously contemplated giving it up. None of her films had been huge commercial successes and, as yet, she had gone largely unnoticed by critics, although many had noted that the young actress had potential. All this changed, however, when she landed a role in two TV films, which would finally get her the recognition she both craved and deserved.
The first was George Wallace, which starred Gary Sinise as the infamous Alabama governor. Jolie played Wallace’s second wife Cornelia and her superb performance went on to earn her a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Mini Series or Motion Picture Made For Television. Jolie thanked the director George Frankenheimer for being ‘brilliant’ and later gave him the biggest compliment of all by crediting him and the film’s production crew with reinstating her faith in acting. ‘Wallace was the first thing I did where I felt their ideas were better than mine,’ she said. In a speech similar to the one she would make years later when she won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, her family also came out well. Jolie gushed, ‘Mom, stop crying, stop screaming. It’s OK, Jamie, my brother, my best friend, I couldn’t do anything without you. I love you so much. Dad, where are you? Hi. I love you. Thank you so much. Thank you.’
The second TV part that would secure Jolie’s place on the Hollywood map was the lead role in Gia, the HBO biopic about the life of the drug-abusing supermodel Gia Marie Carangi. Born on 29 January 1960, Carangi was a supermodel in the late 1970s and early 1980s and her life story is one of great success and, ultimately, great tragedy. Plucked from obscurity from her hometown of Philadelphia at the tender age of eighteen, Carangi’s meteoric rise in the fashion world proved to be too much for the young model to cope with and, soon after settling into the party lifestyle of New York’s fashion set, she became addicted to cocaine. Carangi, who was of Italian, Welsh and Irish ancestry, was a photographer’s dream, given that the success of Janice Dickinson had stemmed a desire for exotic-looking models. Dickinson and Carangi were regulars at the New York’s legendary Studio 54 disco, and Dickinson later said of this time, ‘We loved it. It was a place for us. A place where we could be with the beautiful, do drugs, be out of our minds and it all seemed normal.’
Unfortunately, Gia’s drug taking went far beyond the point of being ‘normal’ and, by 1980, she was turning up at photo shoots in a terrible state; she’d sneak off to inject heroin, have violent temper tantrums and sometimes even fall asleep in front of the camera. By 1981, she’d fallen out of favour in the fashion world and entered rehab. Gia’s most prominent relationships were with women and, by the time she was trying to wean herself off drugs, she had fallen in love with a student named Elyssa Stewart (who went by the name of Rochelle). Gia’s recovery was not helped by the fact that Rochelle also had a drug problem and Carangi fell off the wagon when Chris von Wangenheim, a fashion photographer who she’d been very close to, died in a car crash.
Carangi would shoot her last cover (for Cosmopolitan) in 1982 with her hands behind her back so as to conceal the scars left on her arms left by heroin injection, but her glory days were over and her good friend Francesco Scavullo, the photographer who worked with her on the shoot, said that the ‘wonderful spirit she had was gone’. By 1983, Gia had started working as a prostitute (she was raped on several occasions) and by 1984 she was diagnosed with AIDS, then a newly recognised disease. The disease eventually claimed Gia’s life and she died at the age of twenty-six on 18 November 1986. Although no one from the fashion world attended the funeral in Philadelphia (her mother had her transferred to Philadelphia’s Hanhemann University Hospital in the final months of her life), everyone she had worked with mourned the loss of the beautiful girl who had once had the fashion world at her feet.
The role of Gia would become all consuming for Angelina – who was never one to do anything by halves. At first, she was hesitant about playing such a troubled and complex woman (indeed, she turned the role down four times) but once she’d accepted there was no going back, and her dedication to the production would even have a detrimental effect on her marriage. Jolie said, ‘Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons or it was really going to mess with me.’
Jolie and Miller’s relationship – already on the rocks – was not helped by her immersion in the life of the supermodel, and when she was filming she would not even communicate with her husband. (At one point, she told him, ‘I’m alone; I’m dying; I’m gay; I’m not going to see you for weeks.’) Although