Brangelina Read Free Page B

public schools in the nation, and she did very well there. James credited their mother’s domestic routine. “There was very much that home feeling when we got back from school,” he recalls. “Angie and I would walk in, and we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen. My mom was methodical in making sure we did our homework perfectly, and she would do outlines to help us. When we were younger, she used flash cards, or she’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit so that it was visual as well.”
    For his part, Voight seemed thrilled that his daughter had caught the acting bug and did his best to encourage her new pursuit. “She’d come over to my house and we’d run through a play together, performing various parts,” he told the London Independent in 2001. “I saw that she had real talent. She loved acting. So I did my best to encourage her, to coach her, and to share my best advice with her. For a while, we were doing a new play together every Sunday.”
    Unlike many actors of his caliber, Voight was selective in the films he chose and rarely acted just for the money. “I didn’t want to do the pretty-boy roles they were always offering me,” he explains. As a result, unlike many of his less acclaimed colleagues, he was not affluent. No beach house in Malibu. No swimming pool. In fact, Voight didn’t even own a house. He too, lived in an apartment.
    Despite the claims of his son, James Haven, who has spent much of the past few years attempting to discredit his father, Voight was quite generous toward Bertrand and always paid his alimony. We know this because Angelina herself was publicly emphatic about her father’s integrity right up until their 2003 estrangement. “He always took good care of us and our mother,” Jolie declared to an interviewer in 2001. “He always met his obligations. He just didn’t have a lot of money.”
    This period of Jolie’s life continued uneventfully for almost two years. But then, at the age of thirteen, Angelina suddenly quit the Strasberg Institute and slipped into what she would later describe as “a very bad time.”
    This probably had been brewing for a long time. She describes turning ten years old as a time when her life “started not to be fun” anymore and when she developed a fascination with death. “My mother’s father died when I was nine,” she explains. “He was a wonderful, spirited man, but his funeral was horrible. Everyone was hysterical. I thought funerals should be a celebration of life rather than a room full of upset people. I’m not scared of death, which makes people think I’m dark; in fact, I’m positive.”
    She could never point to a specific trauma as the turning point in her personality, although she describes a day when she was playing a game with a friend. She wanted to get into the fantasy world such games demand, but she could no longer find her way there. Perhaps that’s why she first decided to take up acting initially, to try to regain the comfort of the imaginary places of her childhood.
    Now, though, having dropped out of acting, she talked about wanting to be a funeral director. She even started taking mail-order courses on embalming from the Funeral Services Institute. Before long, her preoccupation with death led Angelina to consider ending her own life, a state of mind that she has spoken about many times over the years. In one interview, she dismissed the idea that her thoughts of suicide were related to depression or sadness, however: “I always thought I was sane, but I didn’t know if I’d be comfortable living in this world. As a child I contemplated suicide a lot—not because I was unhappy, but because I didn’t feel useful. I had insomnia and was up all night, with a mind that wouldn’t stop.” And yet in a different interview, she says of her childhood, “I had a lot of sadness and distrust. I came very close to the end of my life a few