Perfect pair: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose together at the premiere of 'The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford' during the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, September 08, 2007.
Attitude wins here: With loads of attitude and great penache comes in the reverred couple Brangelina at the premiere of 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' at the Elgin theatre during the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival that runs from September 6 to September 15.
If looks could kill: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pose together at the premiere of 'The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford' during the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday at the at the Elgin theatre.
No comments: Matt Damon rushes smart at the premiere of 'The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford' during the Toronto International Film Festival on, Saturday, September 8, 2007.
That's me: Helen Hunt attends the premiere of 'The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford' during the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, September 8, 2007.
All's fine: Actors Angelina Jolie gears up for the gala screening of 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' during the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, September 8, 2007.
Angelina Jolie is expecting a baby this summer with Brad Pitt, PEOPLE has confirmed. "Yes, I'm pregnant," Jolie told a charity aid worker in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Monday. The pregnancy has since been confirmed by representatives of both stars.
This is the first biological child for Jolie, 30, who is already the mother of son Maddox, 4, whom she adopted from Cambodia, and daughter Zahara, 1, adopted from Ethiopia in July.
Jolie, who has often spoken about expanding her family, added that she’d like to adopt again. In October she told PEOPLE: "There's something about making a choice, waking up and traveling somewhere and finding your family."
She is currently in the Dominican Republic filming The Good Shepherd with Matt Damon. She is also working with Yele Haiti, a charity for the empowerment of Haitian citizens.
Pitt, 42, who recently took steps to adopt Maddox and Zahara, including changing their names to Jolie-Pitt, has talked of wanting a family for years. He has no children from his 4-year marriage to Jennifer Aniston.
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In July, Pitt accompanied Jolie to Ethiopia, where she completed the adoption process for Zahara.
More recently, the couple have been spotted all over the globe, including Kenya, England, Ethiopia, Canada, Tokyo and Pakistan, where they spent Thanksgiving.
Jolie has never been happier, say friends. "This is a woman who values her relationships with her children more than anything," a source tells PEOPLE. "Now she is creating a family in the context of an adult relationship."
Angelina Jolie: 'Brad Pitt Never Uses The L-Word'
Hollywood beauty Angelina Jolie insists her long-term partner Brad Pitt has never told her he loves her.The Tomb Raider star admits they avoid talking about their feelings for each other in fear of becoming too sentimental.
She says, "I don't think we have ever said it. I mean I guess we must have done, but we'd always punch each other on the arm first.
Angelina Jolie’s kids are off playing nearby. “They’re with their dad, actually. Around here somewhere,” she says with a wave of her hand. “And I’m going to hook up with them in a couple of hours. When I’ve done this.” This sounds like a perfectly normal domestic agenda, until you remind yourself that we are sitting in a cabana in the grounds of one of the fanciest hotels on the French Riviera, and that the play-day father in question happens to be Brad Pitt. Thus, outside the front gates of this imposingly posh hotel, a posse of paparazzi the size of a small army await the couple’s movements. Indeed, such is their star power that just down the road, Cannes, a town geared to the presence of movie actors, seems to take to the streets and hold its collective breath when the couple sweep in later that evening, cocooned inside a motorcade of limos. For now, though, there’s an interview to navigate, and then it’s family time.
“Oh, Brad’s a great father, a very hands-on father,” she smiles. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me.” Together they form Brangelina, a celebrity soap opera that straddles the globe from Pakistan and India, where they were based as she made her latest film, A Mighty Heart, to Pittsburgh and Peterborough. Everybody knows all about them, don’t they? If you were to follow the American tabloids, there’s a version of their lives that is played out in relentless weekly episodes; there are “stories” – speculation mingled with half-truths and, frankly, rubbish – of rows, her “dramatic” weight loss, and petty jealousies about exes.
His ex, of course, is Jennifer Aniston, the girl-next-door type who lost Pitt to the altogether more exotic and vampish Jolie. Hers is Billy Bob Thornton, of which more later. But to read such material – one report even detailed the number of hotdogs Brad ordered for the kids and how many had ketchup (three) – leaves you briefly wondering if they really are constantly at each other’s throats, why nobody wanted mustard or onions and, mostly, how on earth anybody could live in such a goldfish bowl. This is celebrity watching gone nuts. “I don’t see those magazines and I don’t watch those TV programmes,” says Jolie. “I really don’t know about that stuff, and I don’t want to know. It’s funny. Sometimes somebody will reference something as if I understand what the rumour has been for the last month, and I have no idea what they are talking about. Mostly, I’m sure, it’s nonsense.”
The woman before us today, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana white wraparound dress, is undeniably beautiful. Her brown hair is swept back from that remarkable face and those extraordinary lips are free from lipstick and as full as ever. (One story had them “disappearing”, like a magician’s rabbit.) She does, though, look thinner than the last time I interviewed her some two years ago, but certainly not the anorexic waif others have made her out to be. She tells me that life is “great”, although she is still grieving from the loss of her mother, French actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January this year, aged just 56, after a long battle with ovarian cancer.
“I am my mother’s daughter,” she says. “Very much so. My love of children, my values, caring about what goes on in the world, all of that comes from her. She was the most wonderful woman and a fantastic role model for me. I miss her terribly every day. I try to raise my children the way that my mother raised me. I didn’t really have a father around.” Her father is actor Jon Voight, who married Bertrand when she was 21 and a rising star. They had two children – Angelina has an older brother, James Haven – but were divorced when their daughter was just three, and while Jolie is a second-generation Hollywood star, her relatively modest home life apparently left her feeling isolated from her altogether more privileged schoolmates at Beverly Hills High School.
As a teenager, Jolie took up modelling and appeared in pop videos, but quickly broke into the movie business. Indeed she did some of her best work early on in her career, playing a supermodel who dies of Aids in Gia (which won her a Golden Globe), and a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted (which in 2000 won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Her acting credentials established early on, Jolie has always been happy to combine more commercial films – Foxfire, The Bone Collector, the Tomb Raider movies – with more serious roles, such as Beyond Borders (a project dear to her heart, about refugees), and The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro.
But that impressive early career also came with a reputation for wildness and Jolie has what might be called a colourful past. She has been married twice – briefly, to British actor Jonny Lee Miller (after they starred together in Hackers, an early break-out role), and then famously, for three years, to Billy Bob Thornton. If Jolie seemed to have gone a bit off the rails in her youth – cutting herself and dyeing her hair – that marriage made her seem even wilder. At one point these two took to wearing necklaces with vials of each other’s blood, and there were interviews where she talked of her fascination with knives and her bisexuality. Voight and Jolie, who had always had a fractious relationship, but appeared together in Tomb Raider (with him playing Lara Croft’s father), fell out again when Voight publicly questioned her exploits. In short, for a while Jolie was Hollywood’s favourite bad girl.
Jolie recently said, “I am still at heart – and always will be – just a punk kid with tattoos.” But today, at 32, she sounds all grown up, and indeed has four children: Maddox, 6, who she adopted as a baby (while married to Thornton), Pax, 3, and two-year-old Zahara, who are also adopted, and 16-month-old Shiloh, her biological daughter with Pitt. So has being a mother changed her? “Yes, but not so much that I’m not the person I was before... certainly parenthood grounds us both in the most wonderful way.” They take it in turns to work. When we meet, Jolie has taken a few days off from filming to travel to Cannes to promote A Mighty Heart, which is based on the book by Mariane Pearl, telling the story of the kidnap and murder of her husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, by Islamic terrorists in 2002. Pitt, who serves as a producer on the film but doesn’t appear in it, is taking a back seat – it’s his turn to look after the children.
While it would be ludicrous to suggest theirs is a lifestyle that compares with what the vast majority would consider normal, Jolie’s priority is clearly motherhood, and she strives to retain a bedrock of values. “You know, I always wanted to adopt kids. My mother used to say that I talked about it when I was a little girl. And I’ve always wanted a big family. And Brad’s the same. We are enjoying the children together. So, as much as it’s absolute chaos and sometimes we look at each other and think, ‘My God! What have we done?’, there are many more moments when I couldn’t imagine any one of them not being here. They are such big personalities, and it’s so exciting to watch them grow up. Brad and I would like more kids, but we’re aware that right now we can give special time to each one of them every day, and we want to make sure we continue to do that.
“I haven’t worked for nine months, so I’ve been balancing kids and doing everything, and now I’m ready to work,” Jolie explains. “When I work, Brad stays at home with the kids and vice versa. When we were in India, it was his job to entertain them and he loves that. So it’s all about scheduling. Fortunately, they love travelling, so we go everywhere as a family. I kind of feel that our home is wherever we are.” The children are still too young to take in all the fuss and the fact that Mum and Dad happen to be two of the biggest sex symbols on the planet. “Yeah, that’ll make them laugh. To them we’re two of the dorkiest people on the planet…”
Directed by Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart was Jolie’s most challenging role yet, a far more serious piece than some of the films she is better known for – Lara Croft, or the frothy action thriller Mr and Mrs Smith, in which she co-starred with Pitt and where they first got together. “Do I think about destiny? A bit. I don’t live my life by it. But yes, we’ve talked about how we first met and that our lives would certainly have been different if we hadn’t have been cast together on that one.”
She first met Mariane Pearl a few years ago, when they arranged a “play-date” for their kids. At the time of Daniel Pearl’s abduction, Mariane was six months pregnant and now has a much adored son, five-year-old Adam, born after her husband was murdered. “I knew Mariane a bit because we tried out play-dates,” explains Jolie. “She had a kid, I had a kid, we got in touch and it was like, ‘Let’s get the kids together so they can hang out…’ Separately, Brad had bought the rights to the book, and then they got together and started to talk. It was like, ‘OK, we’re going to make the movie, what do you think?’ And when it came to casting she mentioned me, which was fantastic.”
A Mighty Heart tells the story of how Mariane, also a journalist, met and fell in love with Daniel Pearl and of their life on the road as he worked as a foreign correspondent. At the time of his kidnap, just a few months after 9/11, he was in Karachi, investigating a story about “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. When Pearl left to meet a shadowy contact, his wife and her best friend, Asra, were preparing for a dinner party and expected him home later that evening. When he didn’t return, Mariane instinctively feared the worst and within hours alerted both the Pakistani and American authorities.
Over the next few days, the Pearls’ temporary home in Karachi became the hub of the investigation to find out what had happened to him – with Mariane, ever the reporter, at the centre of it all. The assembled team featured several nationalities – Pakistani, American, Indian, while Mariane herself is of Cuban and French descent – and many different faiths. Jolie plays her friend with a huge curly wig and contact lenses to turn her blue eyes brown, and in passing, they look alike. But what convinces about her performance is how she captures the sheer will and determination Mariane Pearl showed; her refusal to cave in and hide in a corner, and, ultimately, her raw, terrible grief.
“I’ve never been so nervous about anything,” says Jolie. “The night before shooting I was tossing and turning, imagining everything that could go wrong. I felt bad that I was even assuming that I could play this woman that I respected so much, and I felt humbled to a point of being unable to move. But her faith in me really helped.”
Jolie is good in this – very good. There’s one vividly memorable, chilling scene where Jolie, as Mariane, is told that her husband is dead and she lets out a piercing wail which lasts almost a full minute. “It had nothing to do with acting,” she says. “It was just the thought that somebody would do that to another human being and what it must have been like for Mariane and what that moment will be like for Adam, when he finds out what happened to his father. It was a very emotional night for all of us. It was the response to Daniel being beheaded and it was very much me allowing myself to think about it all and in that moment it made me sick.
She made the film shortly after giving birth to Shiloh. “On a practical level, I think if you’ve never been pregnant, you can over-play pregnant. It was almost unfathomable to me how she could get through it all as a pregnant woman. It’s a huge deal and in the last few months you need less stress, more sleep, all of that. But Mariane has no self-pity and I’m sure that if you ask her, she would say that she could never allow herself to think that he wasn’t coming home. And she knew she was pregnant; she is a responsible woman, and she had to remind herself to eat, to take care of herself and her baby and get through it and focus on trying to find Daniel.”
Even though the audience knows the tragic conclusion of the film, Winterbottom injects it with such urgency that it’s like watching a gripping, real-life documentary. Jolie believes that there is a message of hope in there, mostly because Mariane Pearl herself has refused to give in to blanket bitterness.
“One of the things that drew me to it, separately from her, was this idea of this mix of faiths and backgrounds. We are so quick to judge each other and be so full of fear, and here you had a house full of people who were Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist,
Muslim, together trying to help this other person from another background. And the way Mariane handled this thing was incredible. Just a few days after she heard that Daniel had been murdered, she came forward to say, ‘I love Pakistan, there are ten other people that died and they are all from Pakistan, so they are suffering as much as we are.’ I mean, who comes to that that quickly?”
Jolie herself had been to both India and Pakistan several times before and has travelled widely through her work as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, becoming involved after filming in Cambodia for the first Tomb Raider film back in 2001. It was an eye-opening experience. “I hadn’t travelled very much. I didn’t know much about Pol Pot or the extent of the devastation he’d caused. And I didn’t know much about refugees. It made me rethink everything I knew.”
It is easy to snigger at celebrities going all Albert Schweitzer on us. But Jolie has become a committed humanitarian to an extent that goes way beyond heart-warming photo-opportunies – visiting refugees, as we go to press, on the Iraq/Syria border – and has demonstrated a seriousness that has gained her the respect of major figures in the field. As her friend Trevor Neilson, who has worked with Bill Clinton, Bono and Bill Gates and is a former executive director of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, puts it, “Several years and 30 countries later, Angelina is a real expert on these issues.”
Jolie is a Davos regular, is now studying international law, and has joined Washington DC’s prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, but there have been times – she singles out visiting refugee camps in Sierra Leone, where the mutilated survivors of the civil war live in appalling conditions – when what she has seen has reduced her to tears. “It was all horrifically new to me. I did cry. Frequently. But it’s no good crying – and these people weren’t crying – you have to pull yourself together and try to do something.”
It’s nearly time to go and find Brad and the kids. We’ve strayed on to more serious matters and she lightens visibly when I mention her family again. “You know, when I’m having a really bad day, I just think, they are all healthy, they are all well and nothing else matters.” And with that she goes off to find hubby and her brood. Not quite, perhaps Mr and Mrs Smith, but a lot more real than the Brangelina soap opera, too.
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