In August 2002, as Billy Bob was being photographed hand in hand with model Danielle Dotzenrod, Angie was six thousand miles away in London, reprising her role as Lara Croft for a reported salary of $9 million. The fast-paced hokum involved the frantic hunt for a Pandora’s box that had the capacity to wipe out mankind. In her desperate search Angie jumped off Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, fought killer sharks, and rode everything from a horse to a motorbike. The woman who climbed trees as a little girl observed: “This film brought out the tomboy in me.”
Being newly single also brought out the animal in her. The panther was back on the prowl, explaining to Marie Claire magazine that one of the ten things she wanted to do before she died was tell her ex-husband Jonny Lee Miller that she still loved him. “But I think he knows,” she said, declaring later that she hoped the two “might find a way back to each other.”
She soon had the opportunity to tell him in person. According to the Daily Mirror, within days of checking into Claridge’s hotel, Angie was, in scenes reminiscent of her pursuit of Billy Bob, bombarding Miller’s production company, Natural Nylon, with endless phone calls, leaving her hotel name and room number. “Angelina has called up loads of times and sounded very distraught,” a well-informed source was quoted as saying.
When Angie arrived in London, Miller was due to marry his sweetheart from school, blonde TV actress Lisa Faulkner, who had previously dated South Park creator Trey Parker. The couple, who had become engaged the previous May, were in the midst of planning a “fairy-tale” wedding in November. Within three weeks of Angie’s arrival, the wedding was called off. Like Laura Dern, Lisa Faulkner never saw it coming. Faulkner was later photographed sobbing on a friend’s shoulder, breaking down in tears during a shopping trip in central London. Remaining tight-lipped about the reasons behind their breakup, Lisa later tried to be philosophical: “The wedding was a huge part of my life, but I’ve got over it and am moving on. It just didn’t work out. It has been tough, but I have no regrets about the split. Life brings up horrible things and you have to deal with them.”
It was not long before Angie and Jonny picked up where they had left off, the actor squiring her around town for the next few months—when she was not visiting refugee camps or jumping off high-rise buildings in exotic locations. “I’m talking to Angelina on a regular basis,” he told a society gossip writer, adding with a sideswipe at Jon Voight, “She’s very well, and quite sane. She certainly bears no resemblance to the way she is depicted in the press.”
In the first flush of their renewed romance, the couple was seemingly unconcerned about expressing their feelings in public, making out in the crowded dining room of Claridge’s. A fellow diner at the hotel told the Daily Mirror, “They were all over each other. Angelina had draped herself over Jonny and they were giggling away. They seemed oblivious to the fact it was so busy. People were gawping at them.” It was not just dinner dates; he also took her to watch the England vs. France international rugby union match at Twickenham, where she joined in singing the English rugby anthem, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Such was their closeness that when she went on a land mines awareness course in Cheshire in northwest England as part of her work for UNHCR, she reportedly instructed her assistant to hold all cell phone calls except those from Miller.
It is not hard to understand why she was so keen to reconnect with Miller. In many ways they had never really been apart, Miller a friend and a shoulder to cry on even after their separation and subsequent divorce. Of all the men—and women—in her life, he probably seemed the most trustworthy. Unlike Mick Jagger and Billy Bob Thornton, who’d had to betray a partner to prove their devotion to Angie, Miller had never forfeited another to win her love. Until Lisa Faulkner. Perhaps, in a perverse way, his breakup with Faulkner was the final test, which, like all the other men in her life, he had failed. Abandoning his fiancée so abruptly in favor of Angie may have proved his dedication, but it also proved, in Angie’s eyes, that he was no longer worthy. On some level he was now no better than her cheating father, her template for all that was wrong with men.
The only male who had never let her down—baby Maddox—shared her bed most nights. She poured all her love and devotion into the youngster she called “Mad,” insisting on keeping him with her during the filming of the new Lara Croft movie. Over the course of the fourteen-week shoot, Angie and her son flew to Santorini in Greece, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Kenya, and north Wales, where an area of the Snowdonia mountain had been turned into a Chinese peasant village. It is not hard to imagine her distress when in mid-September 2002 the toddler managed to scald himself while staying in her suite in the luxury Seiont Manor hotel in Wales. He was rushed ninety miles by ambulance to the Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, his mother fitfully sleeping by his bed at night and returning to film during the day as he made his recovery. She was exhausted, literally wrung out by the trauma of what at first seemed like a life-threatening injury. After her father’s dire prognostications about her fitness to be a mother, this was the last thing she needed. The fact that she donated $80,000 to the hospital following his four-day stay was a sign of her relief. “Without a doubt, being a single mom is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she ruefully observed.
As if juggling motherhood and a demanding, high-pressure job wasn’t enough, she made it more difficult by trying to do everything herself. She found herself running on empty, on occasion falling asleep on the set. There was an emotional logic behind her behavior—child-care experts emphasize that parents who adopt foreign babies should spend as much time as possible with them, not only to help them bond but also to soothe any deep-seated fears of abandonment.
Meanwhile, she was already looking for a brother or sister for Maddox, admitting that she had completed the paperwork to adopt a baby from another religion and culture. As Dr. Franziska De George observes: “The motivation for Angelina to adopt a child from another country is symbolic of how alien she feels. Metaphorically they are on the fifth floor. Worlds away. She can identify with and responds to their feeling of alienation and abandonment, their helplessness and their pain. Cutting was a way of shifting herself out of her suffering, while adopting children shifts them out of their suffering. Adopting foreign children is her way of easing the suffering no one eased in her.”
Maddox was the center of her universe. “I just can’t bear to be away from him,” she told writer Anna Day. “If that makes me a dull person, then so be it. He is my life. I want to be a great parent. I’ve done pretty much everything in terms of movies but the biggest challenge is raising a child.” She added a tattoo in his honor, a Buddhist symbol and script branded onto her left shoulder blade. Thai artist Sompong Kanphai used the traditional long needles and hammer method, and Angie was obliged to kneel and fold her hands together in prayer during the long, painful process in a hotel room outside Bangkok. She saw it as a rite of passage for herself and a ritual of protection for her young son. In her mind Maddox gave her life meaning, a sense of purpose, and a richness and responsibility she had never known before. The days when she immersed herself in a role, living her character, were now over. Instead she steeped herself in her new incarnation as a mother. “There was a time I lived through my characters,” she said. “I’ve now found that I prefer my life.”
A home life, too. While the duo lived out of a suitcase for much of the year, Angie added to her existing portfolio of properties in Los Angeles and New York, buying a $3.4 million eight-bedroom converted farmhouse in Buckinghamshire, north of London, which she was then renting. Her new home, which had previously been rented by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during the making of Eyes Wide Shut, was convenient because London was much nearer than the U.S. to the places in Africa and the Far East she wanted to visit in her work for the UN. At Christmas 2002, for example, she spent time with a group of women clearing land mines in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and in April she flew to Sri Lanka to see for herself the plight of refugees made homeless by the long civil war. She s
aw England, too, as a sanctuary. “I call England home,” she observed. “Living in Europe makes me feel more connected to the rest of the world.”
In time she would look for another home in mainland Europe, pondering the pros and cons of Spain or Italy. She also bought a twenty-one-acre plot of land in the Cambodian jungle in Maddox’s name, the aim being for him to keep his connections with his home country. “He will have a very fortunate life and I want him to be responsible to his country, to know his language, his people, to do something to make it better for his people,” she commented. “If he, at eighteen, said I don’t want to go there I would have it out with him.”
The contrast between their rural idyll in Buckinghamshire and the site in the Cambodian jungle, complete with forty-eight unexploded land mines and the occasional visiting tiger, where Angie built three simple wooden bungalows could not have been greater. One of the first visitors was her onetime lover Jenny Shimizu. “There’s no special treatment there,” said the former Calvin Klein model. “One electric light for each house. We play cards and go to sleep.”
The endless traveling, ostensibly for filming, promotion, or her UN work, dovetailed with Angie’s roaming personality, her restlessness one of the factors behind the breakups of her brief marriages. “I’m not very settled,” she admitted. “The positive side of that is I’m on fire all the time, to try anything. The negative side is there isn’t a lot of time for me to sit and watch a movie and hold hands. I tend to not be inside my relationships. I tend to be more focused on the world. It takes a certain kind of man to love those things.”
Inevitably, any new man—or woman—would have to pass the Maddox test. Her new mate would have to be an “amazing” father, “independent, compassionate and strong.” The real man of her imagination.
In London endless media speculation about her love life centered on Jonny Lee Miller, but the focus changed when she flew to Montreal in the spring of 2003 to work on Taking Lives, a thriller based on Michael Pye’s novel. Playing an FBI profiler hunting a ruthless serial killer, she was linked to each of her costars: Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, and Olivier Martinez. A classic example was when she and Maddox went to a Montreal Expos baseball game with various members of the cast and crew. She was photographed sitting or standing next to Hawke and Martinez, different tabloids plumping for one or the other as her new lover. While this unwarranted romantic juxtaposition irritated Australian singer Kylie Minogue, then the girlfriend of the French-born Martinez, it gave rangy blonde actress Uma Thurman, wife of Hawke and mother of his two children, rather more to think about. During the three-month shoot her five-year marriage steamed onto the rocks after Hawke was linked to Canadian model Jen Perzow. When the couple separated in September 2003, weeks after filming wrapped, Thurman’s brother Mipam publicly threatened his brother-in-law, telling People magazine: “I want to kill him. I can’t believe what he’s done to my sister.” His mood would have been even darker if he had known that Hawke had enjoyed a fling with Angie as well. Hawke’s public pronouncements about Angie were clue enough. “She’s ravishingly beautiful and never gets old and never gets boring. She is a really incredible woman, and I liked her,” he said, which could hardly have been music to his wife’s ears. “I knew about her affair with Ethan,” recalls Lauren Taines. “At that time she hadn’t seen anyone for quite a while.”
During the publicity for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life that summer, however, she repeated that she was celibate like a mantra. “It’s really funny that I’m still seen as a sex symbol considering I haven’t had sex in a really long time,” she said, amused at the idea that she was “dating everyone.” When she left the cold climes of Canada in fall 2003 for the desert heat of Morocco and Egypt for the filming of Alexander, Oliver Stone’s $160 million epic about the ancient warrior ruler, the burning question once again concerned Angie’s love life. She was linked with her costars, Val Kilmer and Colin Farrell, as well as with Oliver Stone.
Farrell was playing Alexander, and even though, at twenty-eight, he and Angie were the same age, she was cast as his ruthless mother, Olympias. While Stone could see in Angie the “strong and determined” quality he wanted for his queen, he was intrigued by what would happen at the first meeting between screen mother and son. When they sat down for dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan, Stone recalls: “It was funny. He was all over her, he was like the Irish boy—he wasn’t Alexander, he was just falling in love with her, couldn’t help himself.” He realized that he had made the right choice, as Farrell was behaving more like a baby, the infant to her mother. Both wild at heart, they discussed dating but decided they were too similar for a romance to develop. Angie said: “We’d go nuts.” Even so, photographs of them together suggested a closeness and an intimacy that went beyond the professional. After all, why not? They were both unattached Geminis, single parents—he had a son by model Kim Bordenave—who were stranded in the desert. They shared, too, a love of tattoos, once spending hours touring Cairo in search of a tattoo parlor. She ended up with an Arabic script tattoo on her right arm that means “Determination.” It covered up the energy waves tattoo she had done during her days with Billy Bob. “We knew there were going to be millions of rumors pouring out of this movie,” recalls Rosario Dawson, who played Roxane, Alexander’s chosen wife. “Nothing as good as what did happen, I have to say.”
During the ninety-four-day shoot there were practical jokes aplenty—on one occasion Val Kilmer sent an unsuspecting Angie a snake in a basket—and late-night drinking sessions led by “The Regent,” the cast’s nickname for Farrell. Toward the end of the shoot in Thailand, he fell down the hotel stairs in a drunken stupor, breaking his ankle and wrist. “Colin came very close; he gambled,” observed Stone indulgently.
As teasing as she was about her relationship with Farrell, Angie further intrigued her fans when she revealed that she had arrangements with a couple of men she knew well who met her in upmarket London hotels for afternoons of sex. It meant that she could enjoy herself without the need to interfere with her own family life. “It’s an adult way of having adult relationships,” she told the New York Post. Angie declined to name names, but clearly she and her former husband were great friends, so he was an obvious candidate. One man not on the short list was Billy Bob: “We’re not friends. We don’t even talk anymore,” she said. As for her other lover, she admitted she had met him while married to Billy Bob and called him up out of the blue several years later when she came to live in London. Her mystery lover was in fact actor Ralph Fiennes, who had been penciled in to play the lead in Beyond Borders before withdrawing. “Yes, I knew about him,” confirms a family friend. “She saw him occasionally.”
Their clandestine meetings were held in smart London hotels, discreet and anonymous. At that time, Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles, was living with actress Francesca Annis, eighteen years his senior. They separated in 2006 after his reported affair with Romanian singer Cornelia Crisan. A year later, in February 2007, he was involved in another sex scandal when staff aboard a Qantas flight from Sydney, Australia, to Mumbai, India, caught the actor leaving the same airplane lavatory at the same time as flight attendant Lisa Robertson. After first denying allegations of a tryst, Robertson, thirty-eight, later confessed to having sex with the star of The English Patient, whom she had met only a couple of hours before. Fiennes, a UNICEF ambassador, was on his way to an AIDS awareness event. The charity kept him on; Qantas sacked Robertson.
Angie was able to switch back and forth from bad girl to the “other girl,” swatting away inquiries about her sex life one minute, the next standing demurely on a podium in her capacity as UN Goodwill Ambassador. As she told writer Nancy Jo Sales about her forays to Washington: “When I’m here there’s a side of me that I just get into focus. I get my notes, my pen. I get my head together. I do want to cover my tattoos, get into my suits, look clean, don’t dress too sexy, and just try and present the woman that I’m not sure I am but would like to aspire to be.�
�� In June 2003, for example, she joined then secretary of state Colin Powell to launch World Refugee Day, and later stood with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Sam Brownback on Capitol Hill to publicly call on the U.S. Senate to support a bipartisan bill to reform the treatment of unaccompanied minors, including refugee children.
At that time, unaccompanied minors were held at detention facilities without lawyers or guardians to help them with complex immigration procedures, a fact that “really surprised” the Goodwill Ambassador. She told an audience of senators, officials, and media: “As Americans we defend our human rights, we defend our freedoms and we will help the innocent, especially the children, who need our support to protect their rights and their freedoms.” Despite her lack of a college degree, Angie’s profile and “heartfelt plea” on behalf of refugee children impressed legislators. At a private meeting with Senators Arlen Specter (a Yale Law School grad with “more political clout that some sovereign nations”) and Hillary Clinton (an alumna of Wellesley and Yale Law School, and a former First Lady), Angie (a graduate of Moreno High) convinced the two political heavyweights to cosponsor the bill, which came into effect in October 2004. “Jolie seems much more at home these days talking to Powell about the refugee problems in Africa than sitting at the Dorchester hotel and promoting yet another of her movies,” noted celebrity profiler Kevin Sessums.
The collision of her art and her passion came at the world premiere of Beyond Borders in New York in October 2003. Escorted by Jonny Lee Miller, Angie sat through the gala event, which raised $100,000 for UNHCR, in the presence of UN secretary general Kofi Annan and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers. A few days earlier Senators Edward Kennedy and William Frist had hosted a panel discussion in Washington on refugee-related issues, while in New York Kofi Annan gave the film a warm introduction.
Unfortunately, the movie itself was left behind in this caravan of self-congratulation, a refugee roaming the cineplexes looking for a home—and a half-decent review. The opening sequence, which showed an irate relief worker crashing a fancy fund-raiser to scold rich swells for enjoying themselves while their supposed beneficiaries were dying in Ethiopia, left Jack Mathews, of the New York Daily News, “squirming in his seat” given the fact that guests at the premiere itself had invitations to a posh post-screening party at the upscale Cipriani restaurant. “One might have trouble ignoring the irony,” he observed, going on to describe the film as “awful.” The title was a headline writer’s dream: “Beyond Belief,” “Beyond Dull,” “Beyond Boring,” “Beyond Redemption” . . . you get the idea. The high-minded movie made just $2 million in America and failed to find a distributor in Britain, with the UN-approved script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen widely derided.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 29
