there are four things almost
everyone already knows about Angelina Jolie: she's the daughter of Jon
Voight and French actress Marcheline Bertrand.
She has what has been referred to ad nauseam as "bee-stung"
lips.
She likes tattoos and has a bunch of them in places that keep men awake
at night kicking themselves that they didn't check off the "tattoo
artist" option on the back of that matchbook. (One of her tattoos
is a Tennessee Williams quote on her left arm that reads: "A
prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.")
She collects knives and other antique and
idiosyncratic bits of weaponry.
Here are some things you may not know about Jolie. Not only does she
collect knives and has done so since she was a kid, she also has a
penchant for other things on the, shall we say, cutting edge.
These other things include a fascination
for things a little on the dark side - death, for instance. One of
Jolie's oft-quoted remarks is: "There's something about death that
is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to
appreciate your life now."
She also has a willingness to do just about anything required of her to
ace a role. If you don't think this is true, check out her performance
as the bisexual, drug-addicted model known as Gia (in the HBO movie of
the same name) that first got her noticed - big time - in Hollywood. Or
sit down to watch her Emmy-nominated, Golden Globe-winning performance
in TNT's George Wallace.
And, oh yes, she has just recently been
released from a mental institution in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The mental hospital in question was a real one, although Jolie wasn't a
real patient. She was playing a sociopathic patient named Lisa in the
film version of Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir, Girl,
Interrupted.
Kaysen's book is about the two years during the late '60s that she spent
in a mental institution after being diagnosed with severe depression as
a teenager. There, she lived in the ever-changing company of other
dysfunctional females, including a charming, albeit not altogether sane,
ringleader named Lisa. The character of Kaysen is played by Winona
Ryder.
Jolie took some delight in playing the brash, over-the-top Lisa after
beating out almost every other young actress in Hollywood. They all
wanted to play what Girl, Interrupted writer/director James Mangold (Cop
Land, Heavy) terms the "show-off part."
But as the audition process for Girl,
Interrupted wore on, Mangold, - who told Premiere magazine he always saw
the part of Lisa being played by a sort of "Jack Nicholson
in drag" - was beginning to worry about whether or not he'd ever
find the perfect Lisa - until Jolie showed up.
"Angie walked in one day, sat down,
and was Lisa," says Mangold. "I felt like the luckiest boy on
earth."
Jolie had already read Kaysen's book and when she took it down off her
book shelf after getting the role, she noticed that she had underlined
numerous passages in the book - all of them dealing with Lisa.
"Lisa is somebody who lives purely
on impulse," Jolie says. "She's very angry at people for not
being who they are - for living with masks on."
Jolie, on the other hand, is not one to live with a mask on, not yet,
anyway. "I read things I've said and I don't realize I'm being a
'bad' girl," she says. "I do like being sexual. I do collect
knives, I do like tattoos. I like dark things. But there's a side to me
that's soft, too."
It was probably her soft side showing
through when, at the ripe old age of 20, she married her Hackers costar Jonny
Lee Miller ("the second man I was with," says Jolie).
Miller stayed with her during the filming of Gia, a role she says she
was reluctant to take on because of the emotional carnage she knew it
would wreak on her soul. But take it on she did. Afterwards, she gave up
acting and moved to New York City where she began taking classes at New
York University's film school. (Miller moved to London - where he
eventually landed a role in Trainspotting - and the
couple, now divorced, never got back together.)
But, eventually, Jolie's psychic wounds healed and she returned to
Hollywood to play Billy Bob Thornton's unfaithful wife in Pushing
Tin. More recently, she was seen scouring the sewers looking for
dead bodies under the
tutelage of Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector.
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