Angelina Jolie @ The Daily Show

Mother Angelina
By Mike Goodridge, Evening Standard 14.06.07

What is Angelina Jolie, Hollywood’s top-dollar goddess, doing in a lowbudget, post-9/11 drama by a British director known for controversial political films?

The question was on everyone’s lips when Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt, arrived in Cannes last month to a firestorm of flashbulbs.

The film is Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, a harrowing account of the real-life kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (played by Dan Futterman) in Pakistan in 2002.

Jolie is at its centre as Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, trying to find out who is holding Danny and how she can get him back alive.

It is a performance, said most critics after the film festival premiere, that proves Jolie can act as well as pout - but some remained sceptical.

After all, with her much-publicised “rainbow family” - including three adopted children from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam plus the daughter she had with Pitt last year - and her conspicuous ambassadorial work for the UN Refugee Agency, Jolie seems to be trying to prove she is more than one half of Hollywood’s most glamorous couple.

Produced by Pitt, the movie does a neat job of recasting her as a heavyweight actress with serious humanitarian credentials.

Might this be her way of proving that she, too, has a mighty heart?

The fact that Jolie arrives at our meeting alone - looking stunning in a black lace Moschino cocktail dress - speaks volumes for her self-possession.

Unlike the majority of Hollywood stars, Jolie does not employ a personal publicist and is happy to answer questions candidly.

She is, unsurprisingly, effusive about Mariane Pearl, whose memoir the film is based on.

“I’ve been able to spend time with her, she is just an extraordinary woman,” she tells me.

“She’s had a very full life and handles everything with immense dignity and grace.

She and Danny were so open to other cultures and other people.

She’s nutty, a great mom and a great woman.”

Jolie seems to see in Mariane a kindred spirit- and it’s the “great mom” aspect that she keeps returning to.

Now 32, she is keen to stress that motherhood is of more importance to her than maintaining the Brangelina brand.

By the time the kids are old enough to really understand all this, hopefully we will be less in the public eye,” she says.

“We will do fewer films, we will not be that couple.”

It was Mariane’s plight as a mother-tobe, she says, that really touched her. “I had just been through pregnancy and I was highly aware of how beautiful that time should be for a woman.

I remember so clearly the moment of giving birth and looking at Brad and the love in that room and the hope for the future.

For her to lose all that and have to suffer as much as she did and then to have no self-pity is just extraordinary.

I met a great friend during this film and she and her little boy continue to teach me about the world.”

Adding to the scepticism, there has been outrage from black groups in America that Jolie should play Mariane, who is of mixed Afro-Cuban and Dutch race.

Allegedly, the actress wore make-up to darken her skin - this has not been confirmed - and the film has been cited as an example of Hollywood discriminating against black actresses and accused of obscuring the Pearls’ interracial marriage.

She’s clearly aware of the potential criticism, and those regarding Pitt’s involvement, too (he has also helped produce Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and the forthcoming adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife, through Plan B, the film company he set up, originally with Jennifer Aniston).

“I was very nervous about this film
because having your partner producing can sound like a good idea but can also make the pressure much harder.

To do right by him - and by Mariane - became a pressure that I lost sleep over.”

In the event, Jolie’s performance satisfied Mariane Pearl herself and Jolie’s authentic rawness in the part goes some way to dismissing the idea that the film is her vanity project.

Sporting a wig of short black curls, a fluid French accent and - five months after giving birth herself - a pregnancy bump, she adapted well to Winterbottom’s fast hand-held film-making style, already seen to such powerful effect in Road to Guantanamo and In This World.

She is cool and collected throughout, which makes her shrieks at the news of Danny’s death all the more heartbreaking.

Jolie’s howls of despair alone in the bedroom morph in the next scene into her howls of pain in the delivery room of a hospital where she gives birth to her son, Adam.

“I couldn’t get my head round how to play the scene,” she recalls.

“I felt it would be indecent to ask Mariane to tell me exactly how she received the news or how she cried.

We all felt horribly sad the night we filmed it.

A man was killed in such a brutal way and this little boy we had all met on the set had lost his dad. So those sounds sort of happened organically.”

She needed a bit more help with the birthing scene, she explains.

Like most Hollywood mothers, Jolie had a Caesarian when she gave birth to her daughter, Shiloh, a year ago last May.

“Michael [the director] had to try to explain labour to me because he was with his wife when she had children.

It was very funny having a bunch of men explaining how to scream at the top of my lungs in a quiet floor of a real hospital in India.

We were all screaming back and forth at each other - it was bizarre.”

It has been an emotional 12 months for Jolie, however you look at it.

The death of her mother, Micheline Bertrand, from cancer earlier this year left her distraught.

Bertrand and Jolie’s father, the actor Jon Voight, separated when she was one, and Jolie and her brother James Haven were brought up by her mother.

She attributes her worryingly thin figure to the trauma she has gone through.

“Someone saying to me that I’m thin is not a compliment,” she says.

“I’ve always been lean and this year I lost my mom and I’ve gone through a lot.

I have four kids and I finished breastfeeding - it’s been hard to get my nutrition back on track.

Instead of people saying I look like a person dealing with something emotionally, they assume it’s because I want to fit into skinny jeans.”

Her mother was clearly an inspiration.

“Both my parents were very focused on charity and I was always raised by my mom to see the joy she had in doing things for others,” she says, as if to stress that her benevolent globe-trotting is a natural continuation of her own upbringing, rather than a way of assuaging Hollywood guilt or drawing attention to herself.

Even through the period of her mother’s illness, Jolie remained estranged from her father and the two haven’t been in contact since 2002 when Voight said on US television that he wanted her to “get help” for “serious mental problems”.

“I am hoping my relationship with my father will be more private in future,” Jolie says.

“At the end of the day, we both wish the best for each other and we’ll try to start communicating in some way.”

Acting was always in Jolie’s blood.

Voight, of course, was a major film star when she was born, Bertrand was also an actress and Jolie’s brother, two years her senior, studied film-making.

She began studying acting at the age of 11 at the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York, having made her film debut at the age of five in the 1980 comedy Lookin’ to Get Out, with her father.

Her teen years were spent acting in music videos and modelling, but she returned to the big screen in the long forgotten Cyborg II: Glass Shadows when she was 18 in 1993, moving on to cyberthriller Hackers (1995) with young British actor Jonny Lee Miller - and a brief marriage to him from 1996 to 1999.

Her career took off in the late Nineties with roles in small films such as Foxfire and Playing By Heart, and two notable TV performances in George Wallace and Gia for which she won back-to-back Golden Globes.

By 1999, when she won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, Jolie was a tabloid legend, making headlines for her unpredictable behaviour, penchant for tattoos and revelations about her bisexuality-Her marriage to the equally eccentric-Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 sealed her fate as a media icon, not exactly quelled by the fact that the two carried vials of one another’s blood around their necks.

The couple separated in 2002, and Jolie was by then starring in major blockbusters like Gone in 60 Seconds and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which established her arguably as the first female action star.

Not that all the films were hits. She racked up her fair share of duds: Original Sin, Beyond Borders, Life Or Something Like It and Alexander.

After shooting Tomb Raider in Cambodia, Jolie made trips to the global hotspots of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Pakistan, and was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

In 2002, she adopted a seven-month-old Cambodian orphan whom she named Maddox.

Then in 2004, she stepped in for Nicole Kidman in the action thriller Mr and Mrs Smith and met Brad Pitt.

The romance between the two was downplayed while Pitt extricated himself from his marriage to Aennifer Aniston. Sympathies at the time lay with Aniston, and Jolie had to fend off accusations of being a husband-stealer-Angelina, man-eater” ran one headline.

The pair’s bond soon became obvious and Pitt started accompanying Jolie on her missions to Third World countries.

They adopted Zahara from an Ethiopian orphanage in 2005, had their biological child, Shiloh, last year, before earlier this year adopting a three-year-old Vietnamese orphan whom they named Pax.

“Pax is a great kid,” she says.

“When we first met him, we thought he was really shy and quiet but after two days at home we’ve discovered that he is one of the loudest members of the family.”

Jolie loves talking about her children and their backgrounds and encourages them to remain loyal to their origins (Pax and Maddox are both regularly visited by Vietnamese and Cambodian women to keep up their native languages-She says that Pitt’s parents have been very welcoming of all the children.

“When I first met them, I came in with two adopted children from other countries and I didn’t know how they were going to be. But they are equally loving with them.”

So how many more are the Jolie-Pitts planning to adopt?

“There are certain kids on the periphery that we want to help through school, whose lives we are starting to be involved in as well,” she says.

“In our home it is all about how much we balance making sure that everybody has individual time, and right now four of them have very special daily individual time.

We never want to have so many kids that we can’t do that.”

In the meantime, Jolie hasn’t stopped working on movies.

After A Mighty Heart, she will appear in the action-adventure Wanted opposite James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, which she completed this summer; as the voice of the Queen of the Darkness in animated fantasy Beowulf; and under the direction of Clint Eastwood in The Changeling, the true story of a mother whose son was kidnapped in 1920s Los Angeles.

“I take films very seriously,” she insists.

“I love being able to tell a good story or just to entertain, and I don’t look down upon it.

It’s just that at the end of the day, when I die, I feel that the more significant contribution to have made would be to save a life or change a law that’s going to affect people and their children and their country and their rights in the future.

“I want to raise children who will be good people and be a positive influence in this world.

Everything else I have been able to do in my life through entertainment has certainly helped facilitate the other.

I do love being an artist but it’s not the core of who I am as a human being.

I would say being a mother comes first.”

The future doesn’t look so bad for the rainbow brood.

A Mighty Heart opens on 21 September.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-23400606-details/Mother%20Angelina/article.do

Great woman, inside and out !

I just finish watching her interview with larry king.For an actress she very inteligent and articulate.Make me proud to be fan.
love bampzs.
Have a nice day ladies.

testing

Donating to charity is good for the brain, according to study

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-altruism_15jun15,1,4484407.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

From the NYT this morning:

By SHARON WAXMAN
Published: June 15, 2007
LOS ANGELES, June 14 — The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. But not, apparently, when celebrity gossip is part of the equation. Then the pen has to deal with a lawyer.

The international celebrity do-gooder Angelina Jolie found herself in a strange situation this week when she insisted that journalists at the premiere of her new movie about a murdered journalist — a screening that was in itself an event on behalf of persecuted journalists — sign an agreement limiting their questions and their use of her answers.

The agreement, while not unprecedented in Hollywood, did not go down well with the journalists. Ms. Jolie was granting interviews regarding her new film, “A Mighty Heart,” in which she plays Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan. The film will be released by Paramount Vantage on June 22.

The movie premiere on Wednesday night at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York was a benefit for Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based nonprofit organization that champions press freedom around the world.

Reporters hoping to interview Ms. Jolie were asked to sign a document forbidding them to ask her about her personal relationships. The agreement went on: “The interview may only be used to promote the Picture. In no event may Interviewer or Media Outlet be entitled to run all or any portion of the interview in connection with any other story.” And, “the interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning or derogatory to Ms. Jolie.”

Most of the media outlets, including The Associated Press, declined to sign, Paramount said.

Ms. Jolie’s lawyer, Robert Offer, said that the statement was the fault of a “bone-headed, overzealous lawyer” — meaning himself — and that his client was unaware of the move. “This was my creating something to protect her from the press’s talking about personal matters, a document that would limit discussion to the film,” he said. “But it was drafted overly broadly. It was well intended, but I understand how it was received.”

Ms. Jolie herself declined to comment.

Still, this wasn’t the first time such an agreement was used. Mr. Offer said journalists were asked to sign a similar agreement around the release of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when Ms. Jolie and her co-star Brad Pitt caused a media firestorm over their apparent affair and the collapse of Mr. Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston.

At the time, Mr. Offer said, journalists signed the agreement.

Ms. Jolie’s manager, Geyer Kosinski, said the new document was meant to “guide” journalists, not control them, because Ms. Jolie has a tendency to speak frankly. “She is an incredibly candid, honest person, who is undeterred herself in answering questions,” he said. “Our collective intention was to protect her.”

A spokeswoman for Paramount Vantage denied an accusation on the Foxnews.com Web site that Ms. Jolie had banned Fox from the red carpet at the premiere, and that it was given a spot only after the studio intervened. “It was an omission,” the spokeswoman said, “an honest mistake.”

Hey AG — you’re welcome. Sorry I missed you again.

Coalharbouqt — Thanks for responding and not making me think that I talk to myself! ;) My PC is not in my bedroom so I came out just twice to post. For each commercial I kept looking at the time and saying OMG it not enough time!!!!!!!!!!!! lol I tried to stay up for TDS but I just could not hang. I recorded it thoughso I will catch it later on.

http://208.179.27.213/flash/SPTNY5V140607K.swf

The razzi is in love with her lol

Exclusive

Angie’s $26 dress wins over city gals

BY AMY DILUNA
DAILY NEWS FASHION EDITOR

Friday, June 15th 2007, 4:00 AM

Angelina captured hearts of New York women Wednesday night.

With one frugal frock - a $26 silk velvet vintage ’40s-style wrap dress - the superstar, in town for the premiere of “A Mighty Heart,” won over the harshest critics in the country: style-savvy New York women.

Because if there’s anything bargain-loving Big Apple girls love, it’s putting together a cheap-chic outfit that would fool the pants off the paparazzi.

Jolie took a radiant turn down the Ziegfeld’s red carpet in the little black dress, purchased for a song at Los Angeles vintage boutique Wasteland. Jolie paired the stylish steal with $800 Christian Louboutin open-toed crystal-heel pumps.

“I had a friend of mine go in and look for baby clothes,” Angelina told “Access Hollywood” of the Melrose Ave. treasure hunt. Her friend found the dress. It fit perfectly and the rest is red carpet history.

One of the biggest stars on the planet, Jolie need only ask and a $30,000 dress from any of the world’s fanciest designers is hers for the wearing. But the outré actress has made a career out of breaking all the rules. This week, she bucked the celebrity couture trend and looked great doing it.

Not since Sharon Stone mixed a white shirt from the Gap and floor-length ball skirt at the Oscars in 1996 has there been such a frugal fervor (the L.A. shop that sold the dress reported phone call fatigue yesterday after news broke about its high-profile sale).

Let’s name this trend The Age of Angelina - where affordable has become the new black

Angelina is an amazing women.A human being who truly inspires.Thanks jared,i read your blog everyday and use it in a positive way to voice my admiration for this kinda and caring soul.

I’m better at putting my thoughts on paper.LOL

i have a feeling that were missing out on a lot of things even though we think we are not…..angie is giving us a clue that she might be pregnant or at least thinking about it and the wife and husband calling ..every mag is using those two words..i mean why all of a sudden..they go from calling them parteners to husband and wife.this is all so weird to me…im confused

ders no question,shes pregnant!now im gonna help someone crawling to the blue lagoon!oppss!sorry!