The role that almost made Angelina Jolie quit acting: “I didn’t know if I had more to offer”
The term ‘nepo baby’ has gained much currency in recent years, often used in a pretty negative light, thanks to several examples of celebrity offspring acting fecklessly on social media and not really offering much at all to society, despite the kind of start in life most of us dream of. But it certainly isn’t a new phenomenon in Hollywood; the likes of Michael Douglas, Jamie Lee Curtis and Keifer Sutherland all used their famous-parent connections to get a step up in the movie business. Another is Angelina Jolie.
Her father, Jon Voight, was one of cinema’s biggest names in the late 1960s, starring in award-winning hits like Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance.
Jolie, to her credit, is one ‘nepo baby’ who has not in any way rested on her laurels, or even allowed her early success to dull her work ethic. While she did make her film debut as a kid alongside Voight Sr all the way back in 1982, it was another decade until she began her career in earnest and attracted real attention after her portrayal of supermodel Gia Carangi in 1998’s Gia.
That role was controversial at the time due to some explicit scenes and the themes of drug taking and AIDS, but it showed that even at such an early stage, Jolie wasn’t shy of taking on a challenge. That paid off a year later when she appeared in Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder in a performance that bagged her not just a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar at the age of 24, but a Golden Globe award and a Screen Actors Guild award too.
By this point, she was rapidly becoming one of the most famous women in the world; her astonishing beauty and air of danger (probably helped by her getting married to Jonny Lee Miller at 21 while wearing a T-shirt with her groom’s name written on it in blood), led to her being a constant presence in tabloid newspapers.
In fact, the slightly weird blood thing continued when Jolie quickly split from Miller and got married to another actor, Billy Bob Thornton in 2000, with the pair wearing vials of each other’s vital fluids around their necks during the ceremony.
It signalled a period for her in which she was known more for her private life than her considerable talent, and the movies she made for the next five years or so were perhaps reflective of that. Although she stepped into Lara Croft’s shoes with success in the first Tomb Raider film, she didn’t have another real hit until 2005’s Mr and Mrs Smith, the married-couple assassin comedy that pulled in almost half a billion in box office revenue.
Jolie followed it up with some searing performances in movies like the bullet-bending comic book smash Wanted, and by the end of the century’s first decade, she was the highest-paid woman in Hollywood. A sign of her ambition, though, was that she wasn’t satisfied with just that. Aside from doing an enormous amount of humanitarian work, adopting children, donating millions to good causes, becoming a UN ambassador and tirelessly campaigning for human rights, she went into film directing in 2011 with In the Land of Blood and Honey, a bleak romance set in wartime Serbia.
She followed it up with Unbroken, another war-themed movie and then wrote and directed By the Sea opposite husband Brad Pitt. She has, without doubt, made a huge impact on the movie industry, and while she has slowed down a little due to a fierce battle with cancer, she continues to do so. Last year, she wrote and directed Without Blood, starring Salma Hayek and will soon reprise her role as the titular Maleficent in Disney’s third instalment of the franchise.
But that impact could very nearly have been curtailed right back in the ’90s, as far back as that breakout role in Gia, in fact. She explained, “It took me a really long time to accept the part of Gia. My manager was not going to work with me anymore if I didn’t take it. But I was scared of it because I thought it was such a challenge and so much to confront”.
Adding: “I was ambivalent about acting after it because I felt like I’d exposed so much, and I felt quite vulnerable after it. I just didn’t know if I had much more to offer because I had to learn about life more. I needed to kind of grow up and feel like I had more to put out there. And I was just feeling very vulnerable.”
Almost three decades on, movie fans are still reaping the benefits of her decision to carry on regardless.
