Angelina Jolie has always been considered more of a celebrity than an actress, even today when the concept of a star is in crisis. In the extensive interview with The Guardian that he gave a month ago, regarding the premiere of Eternals –His new film for Marvel that opens next Thursday in our country– the center of attention is his place as a human rights activist, the publication of the book Know Your Rights, written with lawyer Geraldine Van Bueren and sponsored by Amnesty International, his controversial divorce from Brad Pitt, her role as a mother of six children, her distant relationship with her father, Jon voight, and the experience of growing up in Hollywood, but nothing too important about her work as a performer. In the profiles that are written about her, the cachets or millionaire contracts, her failures at the box office, her mansion in Los Feliz, the loves she starred in her shootings are mentioned, but never the reason for the choice of each of her projects, the change of course over the years between action movies and more committed dramas. Even her work as a director was always seen through the prism of her humanitarian commitment rather than by virtue of her professional aspirations, her aesthetic concerns or her place as an artist behind her status as a citizen of the world.
That shadow not only defined the media coverage of her figure but also her own reflection on the place that being an actress occupies in her life, a role that she herself tends to minimize in relation to her responsibility as an ambassador for the UN or as a special envoy of the organization. to attend to the refugee situation. But the truth is that Jolie debuted at age seven in The big hit in Las Vegas (1982) by Hal Ashby, playing the daughter of a player on the run to the City of Sin – a character embodied by her own father – then filmed several musical shorts, became a model at 16, and at 20 starred Hackers, hackers (1995, available on Google Play and Apple TV) with Jonny Lee Miller, who would become her first husband. The beginnings of his initial career were driven by the forms of popularity of the 90s, which included the perfect combo between physical beauty and youthful rebellion in a decade in which cinema amalgamated the language of video, the crisis of postmodernity and the dynamics of a new youth that synthesized the ambitions of that new era. Even in the preamble to her takeoff as a star, Jolie condensed into Foxfire (1996), based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the keys to her character out of fiction: the blood of her lovers on a necklace, flirting with drugs, and assuming incipient adulthood as a path to emancipation.
Although the years that followed were infected by the turbulent relationship with her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, from whom twenty years separated her, they were films such as Gia (1998, available on HBO Max) for TV, in which he brought to life the tragic story of model Gia Carangi, and Interrupted innocence (1999, available on HBO Max), for which she would win the Oscar for best supporting actress, which proved that Jolie could do even more than she imagined. “It had no rudder. I was looking for freedom, truth, feeling. I wanted to feel deeply and experience deeply “, explains to The Guardian in relation to that time in which the limits between reality and fiction became blurred. Jolie nurtured her creatures with a certain ferocity that expanded their interpretations, made them stand out even in movies like Gia, that they had a more modest destiny. “I grew up in Hollywood. This city is very disturbing. They hurt me in many ways throughout my life. “.
The twilight of the 90s installed the fashion of astronomical salaries as a synonym for stardom, the physical demand as a measure of the demand for a role – Demi Moore’s training for Striptease and To the limit they had set the bar – and reconfigured the industry for the digital age. There Jolie began her stage as an action heroine, resigning the corporality of her own traumas for a virtuality of the exhibition, the video game cinema devoted to its maximum expression. In the 2000s, female empowerment seemed to be that of a woman punching and kicking in a man’s world, assuming that narrative leadership by virtue of a clear appropriation of roles that until now were elusive. However, the underlying ambition in the choice of films such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001, Google Play and Apple TV), Wanted (2008, available on Netflix, Amazon, DirecTV Go, HBO Max and Movistar Play) or Agent Salt (2010, available on Netflix) was not the quality of the productions or the interpretive challenges they implied. What propelled these protagonists was the conquest of a voice based on visibility and, of course, financial support. “His choice of roles suggests that he is primarily acting for money, except for a few anomalies such as All heart (2007, available on Flow, Google Play and Apple TV) -stated The Guardian– in which she plays Marianne Pearl, the wife of the journalist of the Wall street journal disappeared in Pakistan ”.
But there were several exceptions to that dizzying career dedicated to the action of the 2000s: the torn mother in The substitute (2008, available on Netflix, Amazon Prime) under the direction of Clint Eastwood, his flamboyant Olympia at the Alexander the Great (2004, available on HBO Max) by Oliver Stone, one of the milestones camp from the beginning of the millennium; the portrait of the entrails of the CIA in The Good Shepherd (2006, available on Flow, HBO Max) directed by Robert De Niro. Even his work on Mr and Mrs Smith (2005, available on Netflix, Amazon, Star + and Movistar Play), overshadowed by the “Brangelina” earthquake, showed that he could explore his talents as a comedian, putting that same physical ambition at the service of his parody. It was then that the media character ate the actress, perhaps definitely. From there it would be the femme fatale who had stripped Jennifer Aniston of her husband, the mother with serial adoptions, the one who sold the photos of her newborn children to People or Hello!, which progressively withdrew from the screen to indulge in new causes, whether behind the cameras, in writing or on the political scene.
In recent years, Angelina Jolie reappeared as an actress in animation projects such as Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016, available on Netflix, HBO Max) or The magnificent Ivan (2020, available on Disney +), in the solo versions of the villain Maleficent (Disney +), in the prequel to the Peter Pan stories and Alice in Wonderlandaravillas what was it Once upon a time (2020). All films that connected her with the interests of her children, an indirect umbilical cord with her role as mother and “protector of the children of the world”. From a rebellious daughter in her teens, she went on to occupy the role that she had admired in the figure of her mother, who died early from cancer: she decided to uphold that duty to form a broad and integrated family, to defend the rights of children in the reality and fiction. Again a bit of Angelina Jolie seeped into her characters and Maleficent could be the best synthesis: the villain finally turned into a good fairy.
The challenges as a filmmaker, a task in which he had important achievements such as Invincible (2014, available on Netflix), were put on hold due to the long time required for her work as a humanitarian activist in regions of growing turmoil such as Syria or Afghanistan. For this reason, his return to acting by the hand of the giant Marvel, in a film with the exposure that it supposes Eternals, it was all news. Her best role in recent times had been that of Hannah, a Montana town fire department rescuer trying to protect a child from a bloody manhunt in Those who wish my death (2021, available on HBO Max) by Taylor Sheridan. Jolie plays there survival alongside the moral dilemma in a solid and self-conscious way, rooting her interpretation in the same concerns that today define her public figure. Being an actress has become a sporadic formal job but managed as a support for that character who has definitely reinvented her life.
VIDEO | Angelina Jolie takes an important victory over Brad Pitt in his litigation for his children
We wish to say thanks to the writer of this write-up for this incredible material
Angelina Jolie, new helm of the most unusual star in Hollywood