Angelina Jolie has had quite an evolution after decades in showbiz.
However, the director and Oscar-winning actress has also faced numerous personal hardships
throughout her life.
This is the tragic real-life story of Angelina Jolie.
It was apparently love at first sight when Jon Voight met actor Marcheline Bertrand,
Angelina Jolie's mother, at the Beverly Hills Hotel one evening.
Voight told Men's Journal,
"I was quite taken with her and in the conversation I said, 'You know, I could have two children
with you.'
She didn't blink, and neither did I. Sure enough, I had two children with that gal."
Sadly, things didn't work out.
Voight had an affair, and he told Express that the fallout caused his family, quote,
"a lot of hurt and anger."
It also had a long-lasting impact on Jolie, who was still a baby when Voight and Bertrand
separated.
Jolie told Elle in 2014,
"I never thought I'd have children, I never thought I'd be in love, I never thought I'd
meet the right person."
The actress was credited as Angelina Jolie Voight in her first film, but 1982's Lookin'
to Get Out would be the last time she'd use her dad's name professionally.
When she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast in 2017, Jolie said
that she dropped the "Voight" part because she didn't feel close to her father and wasn't
comfortable being hired as an actress simply because she shared his last name.
Angelina Jolie is one of those not-so-rare cases of a celebrity that wasn't very popular
in high school.
At least, that's how family friend Cis Rundle remembers it.
Rundle was pals with Jolie's mother and claims to have been an occasional caregiver to the
future star, who apparently had a difficult time at Beverly Hills High School.
Rundle told Radar,
"They made fun of her because of her lips and the girls were mean to her."
According to Rundle, Jolie's mother used to worry about her daughter, and not just because
Angelina was getting bullied.
Rundle went on to say,
"Marcheline got scared that [Angelina] wasn't eating."
Rundle also claimed that Jolie's mother carried Angelina into the hospital during what Rundle
described as an "anorexic stage" her Angelina was going through.
Additionally, Jolie's older brother James Haven once admitted that his sister, quote,"doesn't
pay much attention to food."
For that reason, Haven became extremely worried about Angelina after the death of their mother
in 2007.
Jolie admitted that the ordeal had indeed left her looking thinner than usual.
Shortly after her mother's death, Jolie told London's Evening Standard,
"I've always been lean and this year I lost my mom and I've gone through a lot."
If you are struggling with an eating disorder, or know someone who is, help is available.
Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at
1-800-931-2237.
You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).
According to Jon Voight's brother, Chip Taylor, the actor became very concerned when he learned
that his estranged teenage daughter had started cutting herself, something Jolie has never
denied.
In fact, she's been shockingly open about her fascination with knives, of which she's
an avid collector.
She once told Barbara Walters that she utilized knives in the bedroom during her first relationship,
though she's also used them to inflict harm upon herself during darker times.
Ok!
Magazine quoted the actress as saying,
"I went through a period that when I felt trapped I would cut myself.
I have a lot of scars."
In the aforementioned Barbara Walters interview, Jolie confirmed that she stopped self-harming
when she adopted her first son, Maddox, from Cambodia in 2002.
Speaking to Cosmopolitan the following year, the actor revealed that her knives were now
"out of reach at home."
However, she also went on to add:
"But [the knives aren't] gone.
And yes, when I was 14, I cut myself and went through that phase, and I haven't revisited
that phase and I'm not going to, especially now that I have Maddox."
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text
Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI
(6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.
Angelina Jolie probably didn't even know what a bill was when she made her movie debut alongside
her dad in 1982's Lookin' to Get Out.
However, when Jolie returned to acting as a young adult, she was very much aware of
what it took to keep a household running.
In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, Jolie revealed that
she only re-entered the industry because she needed to start helping her single mother
make ends meet at home.
"My mother was a full-time mother.
She didn't have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences, her own, you
know, everything was for her children."
However, Jolie quickly realized that becoming an actor like her father wasn't going to be
a walk in the park.
She managed to make more than enough money to help her mother out, but the rigors of
celebrity life were already taking a toll on the young starlet.
Speaking about her early days as an actress, Jolie would later admit,
"I was miserable.
I was completely unhappy."
Angelina Jolie married her first husband, Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller, in 1996,
but she grew apart from him and everyone else in her life when she starred in 1998's Gia,
an HBO TV movie about tragic supermodel, Gia Carangi.
While promoting the film, Jolie told Entertainment Weekly,
"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."
Sadly, the latter came true.
The actor became suicidal making the movie and even came up with a plan to end her life
guilt-free.
Jolie told IMDB,
"This is going to sound insane but there was a time I was going to hire somebody to kill
me.
[...] With suicide comes all the guilt of people around you thinking they could have
done something.
With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility."
Luckily, the hitman she tried to hire had a heart.
According to Jolie, the man insisted that she think the whole thing over for a month.
She took the man's advice and after a month, Jolie's mental health began to improve.
The overwhelmingly positive response to Gia, which earned Jolie her second Golden Globe,
was ultimately what helped her get better.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.
Angelina Jolie has a history of hard drug use that she's made little effort to hide
at times.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the actress revealed,
"Heroin has been very close to me in my life."
And heroin is far from the only drug she's dabbled with.
Jolie admitted to having done, quote, "just about every drug possible" during one particularly
candid interview in 1998.
In that freewheeling interview, which was chronicled in an article by The Daily Mail,
Jolie reportedly told the interviewer,
"Coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything.
[...] I remember taking LSD before I went to Disneyland.
I started thinking about Mickey Mouse being a short, middle-aged man in a costume who
hates his life.
Those drugs can be dangerous if you don't go into it positively."
Jolie went on to say that she had stopped using drugs "long ago," but that wasn't true
according to the man who claims to be her former supplier.
In 2014, convicted drug dealer Franklin Meyer released a video of Jolie looking worse for
wear.
Meyer claimed he shot the video with Jolie's permission during a drop-off at her New York
pad in 1999.
Meyer told the National Enquirer,
"Angie was a client of mine for several years.
I sold her heroin and cocaine."
The actor took legal action against the Daily Mail for using the video, The Times later
revealed.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available.
Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact
SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
According to the man who claims to be Angelina Jolie's ex-dealer, the superstar actor took
drugs right before a big promotional interview during the height of her Hollywood wild child
phase.
"Things that maybe are dangerous that make you feel alive.
Make you feel, you know, free."
One-time dealer Franklin Meyer told Life & Style magazine that Jolie was high when she sat
down opposite Charlie Rose to talk about her film Girl, Interrupted, for which she won
Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars.
Meyer alleged in a 2010 interview with the outlet,
"[Angelina Jolie had] taken coke.
[...] She did the show and then she came back over after."
When 60 Minutes caught up with Jolie in Budapest the following year, she admitted to veteran
CBS correspondent Bob Simon that she was dancing with the devil during her hard-partying days.
Jolie told Simon,
"I went through heavy, darker times and I survived them.
I didn't die young, so I am very lucky.
There are other artists and people that didn't survive certain things."
Jolie went on to say that she took "too many chances" with her life back then, and that
she, quote, "came close to too many dangerous things" as a result of that reckless behavior.
Jolie also had this to add,
"I'm still a bad girl."
"Yeah?"
"You know, I still have that side of me, it's just, it's in its place now."
Jon Voight played Angelina Jolie's long-lost, presumed-dead father Lord Richard Croft in
2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, sharing the screen with her in an emotional dream sequence.
Jolie said that working on the video game adaptation together gave them a chance to
engage in some real "bonding time," though the ceasefire didn't last very long.
Jolie told Radio Times magazine,
"We seemed to understand each other and it was fun, but afterwards he returned quickly
to old habits of being judgmental."
Their renewed relationship all started to go wrong again right before she left the country
on a United Nations mission.
According to Jolie, Voight decided to come along to the airport with her, and on the
ride over he handed his daughter a mysterious letter.
In her interview with Radio Times, Jolie described her reaction upon receiving the strange letter:
"I was unaware of what he'd written and said, 'That's wonderful, I love you, see you later.'
Then I opened the letter.
He'd written I was a bad person.
I was upset and thought of 100 replies, and then decided I don't value this person's opinion
so it's okay."
As if that didn't make her position clear enough, Jolie added:
"I no longer see us as father and daughter."
Unsurprisingly, Voight didn't reprise his role in the 2003 sequel Lara Croft Tomb Raider:
The Cradle of Life.
Angelina Jolie separated from her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, in 2002, around three
to four months after they adopted Maddox together.
The pair met on the set of 1999's Pushing Tin and got hitched in Las Vegas the following
year, becoming major tabloid fodder in the process.
Thornton, it turns out, just "wasn't ready" for adopting, Jolie later said to Vanity Fair.
After she and Thornton split, Jolie quickly regrouped and prepared for life as a single
mom.
However, she was dealt another blow when her father took part in a highly publicized TV
interview that potentially jeopardized her recent adoption.
A few months after Jolie and Thornton called it quits, Jon Voight told Access Hollywood
that he knew the marriage was doomed and that his daughter had some, quote, "serious mental
problems."
When Jolie sat down with Barbara Walters the following year, she was still angry about
her father's comments.
Jolie told Walters,
"The most difficult thing, in him doing that, is that it could have affected my relationship
with my child.
[...] They could have decided: 'He's right, she's crazy, let's remove that child from
her custody.'
And that's unforgivable."
It's hardly surprising, considering her complicated history with her father and the shady circumstances
in which she and Brad Pitt got together, but Angelina Jolie has admitted to having major
trust issues.
In 2007, the actress told Vogue,
"I don't trust anyone.
This is going to make you think that maybe I should get some therapy, but trust is such
a bizarre word."
The actor revealed that she was even wary about putting too much faith in those closest
to her, adding,
"I'd like to say that I trust my mother, but I also don't know if she might do something
that she thinks is in my best interest.
I trust that Brad will never do anything...
I don't know.
I don't trust anybody completely."
Her faith in Pitt would be tested when rumors of an affair with his Allied co-star Marion
Cotillard emerged a few years after they tied the knot, rumors that a source claimed were
indeed accurate, according to the New York Post's Page Six.
According to the insider, Jolie hired a private investigator to spy on her hubby as he filmed
the WWII pic in the UK.
The source told Page Six,
"She felt that [Brad] was fooling around with her on the set, and it turns out, he was."
However, the source also claimed that no infidelity was ever proven.
The actual reason for the split, Jolie later confirmed to Vogue India, was what she called
"the wellbeing" of her family.
In 2013, Angelina Jolie revealed via an op-ed in The New York Times that she had undergone
a double mastectomy after doctors discovered she was at high risk of cancer.
Jolie wrote in the piece:
"I carry a 'faulty' gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer
and ovarian cancer.
My doctors estimated that I had an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian
cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman."
She referred to the procedure as, quote, "like a scene out of a science fiction film."
However, Jolie also said that after having reconstructive breast surgery, she doesn't
feel like, quote, "any less of a woman."
Two years later, when blood tests revealed a potential sign of early cancer, Jolie had
her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as a preventative measure.
Jolie once again documented her surgery experience in The New York Times, writing,
"It is not easy to make these decisions.
But it is possible to take control and tackle head-on any health issue."
Studies have also shown that by being so open about her preventative surgeries, Jolie has
had a significant impact on the number of women coming forward to ask about genetic
testing.
Angelina Jolie made headlines during a trip to Pakistan in 2010, and not because of the
stellar work she was doing as the UN's Goodwill Ambassador.
The A-lister was in the country to help victims of flooding, but it was an offhand comment
she made about Brad Pitt that ended up filling column inches back home.
The Oscar winner admitted to reporters,
"I don't have a lot of friends to talk to.
Brad is really the only person I talk to."
Rumors about Jolie being isolated in Hollywood began to pop up as soon as Pitt was no longer
in the picture, and even the star's estranged step-grandmother was expressing concern about
her apparent lack of a social circle.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2016, Elke Bertrand said that Jolie didn't have "many people left
in her life" after her third divorce, adding:
"I know she's got her father, but I don't know how close they are."
You'd think that the coronavirus pandemic would have made things worse for Jolie in
terms of feeling isolated, but sources say that she actually began reconnecting with
old pal and fellow actor Ellen Pompeo during lockdown.
In 2021 one insider told Us Weekly,
"Their kids are really close.
Angie has a tight support system that largely consists of her household staff, her brother,
James, and a handful of very trusted friends."
The one person that Angelina Jolie would have loved in her corner during her divorce and
the global pandemic that followed is her mom.
It was Marcheline Bertrand's death from cancer at the age of 56 that led to Jolie getting
her preventative, potentially life-saving surgeries, and the Oscar winner has always
tried to follow the example Bertrand set as a mother.
When the Maleficent star gave an interview to Elle France in 2017, she was in the midst
of her split from Brad Pitt and missing her mother more than ever.
Jolie told the outlet,
"She would have thrived as a grandmother.
I would give anything for her to be with me at this time.
I've needed her."
The A-lister opened up about her late mom again in 2021, revealing that Bertrand was
a, quote, "very gentle" mother and that she's exactly the same with her six kids.
Jolie told The Sydney Morning Herald,
"I can be many things in my work and in life, but I am very warm and gentle with my children.
That kindness and warmth is a foundation that's unbelievably important."
The kids apparently returned that kindness during the coronavirus pandemic, helping her
around the home during the COVID-19 lockdown.
In an interview with British Vogue, Jolie joked,
"I feel like I'm lacking in all the skills to be a traditional stay-at-home mom."
Angelina Jolie had a huge falling out with her father after she split with her second
husband, Billy Bob Thornton, and it took another divorce to bring them back together again.
Jon Voight stepped up during Jolie's highly publicized separation from Brad Pitt, not
only for his daughter but for his grandkids, too.
Jolie told Vanity Fair in 2017,
"He's been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time.
I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around."
According to Jolie, she's drilled her dad on how to, quote, "be a cool grandpa who's
creative," something he doesn't have a problem with.
Voight is still actively working in Hollywood, and when he appeared on CBS Sunday Morning
in 2021, he revealed that he'd love the chance to appear in one of his daughter's films:
"She would be tough.”
“Yeah?”
“But yes of course I would love to work with her."
He may be one of the root causes of her tragic past, but — for the time being, at least
— Angelina Jolie's dad seems fully committed to helping her achieve a bright future.
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