Brangelina Read Free Page A

father and he wasn’t there. But he’s an artist, and it was the ’70s, a strange time for everybody. To this day, I think my parents really love each other. It’s a beautiful story. I saw them at Christmas; they came to our house.” Jolie even addressed the occasional press report that claimed that Voight had been estranged from his family: “The press likes to use the family angle, because then they get to include this whole other aspect of my life, but they’re always disappointed to hear I’m not trying to hide anything about some huge, sordid estrangement between us. The fact is, he’s very much a part of my life, but I’ve always been pretty independent of him, too.”
    By most earlier accounts, including her own, Jolie’s L.A. childhood was a happy one before she moved east. She loved to watch Disney movies with her brother and play with her pet lizard named Vladimir and her snake, called Harry Dean Stanton, after the actor. “I think a lot of people think I had a very different childhood than I had,” she said years later. “I probably had a more normal childhood than most people would think.”
    To Voight’s delight, when Angelina was twelve years old, Bertrand moved back to L.A. with her children. The details of Angelina’s life in New York are murky, but it was clear that something about her had changed by the time she returned to the West Coast. Angelina Jolie had discovered her dark side.

BACK TO 90210
    By the time Angelina moved back to Los Angeles with her mother and brother in 1986, she was no longer the fun-loving little girl people remembered. This may have been due to her frequent forays into Manhattan, accompanying her mother on auditions. In the city, Angelina had been exposed to a seamier, edgier world, one that she had never experienced in California or in tranquil upstate New York. And she liked it. She began to change herself to fit in with the sort of people that were increasingly attracting her. By the time they arrived back in L.A., she was in full rebellion mode.
    “When we moved back from New York I had really gotten into leather,” she later recalled. “I think I loved Michael Jackson or something. I used to wear the leather jackets with the zippers or collars with studs on them, and I used to ask if I could go to school wearing them.” To complete her look, the eleven-year-old started dyeing her hair jet black.
    The family moved to an apartment building in a middle-class section of Beverly Hills. Once they were settled, Bertrand immediately enrolled Angelina in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute’s Young Actors Program. The legendary Strasberg had passed away four years earlier, but his influential method acting technique lived on. The Method, a refinement of the earlier Stanislavski technique, teaches actors to recall emotions or reactions from their own lives and use them to create lifelike performances.
    Among the actors who studied under Strasberg and who have credited the Method with their success are James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe, who came to regard Strasberg and his wife as surrogate parents and to whom she left the bulk of her estate. Bertrand herself had studied there several years earlier, and for two years Angelina attended the institute regularly on weekends, but she wasn’t entirely convinced it was for her: “They’d ask me to go back five years in my life and relive something, and at age six there isn’t that much to work with.”
    Once again, Voight and Bertrand shared custody, with Angie and Jamie living at their father’s house two nights a week and every other weekend. As before, there is no evidence that the custody arrangements were causing any particular emotional problems. By most accounts, Voight and Bertrand were agreeable with each other, with Angelina later describing them as “each other’s best friend.” Angelina was attending El Rodeo Elementary School, reputedly one of the best