Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (15 page)

To prove her commitment to her new career, Angie took her collection of punk and ska CDs, as well as books by European philosophers and authors like Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and moved out of her mother’s roomy duplex and into a studio apartment above a garage just a few blocks away. The move also enabled her to demonstrate to casting agents and others in the industry that she was “emancipated,” that is to say, independent of her parents and no longer affected by child labor laws. Her mother had for once put her foot down, telling her that she would help her achieve her goals only if she focused on her chosen path, be it acting or modeling or a combination of both. Even Marche was not prepared to take her on another round of sullen auditions.

This period of her life marked a genuine sea change, Angie giving up the aimless days hanging out at Westwood Arcade and the nights taking drugs, watching movies, and socializing. As for Anton, he was now history. She actually gave acting her all, determined to make it without her father’s help. Among all the pleasures of living on her own, perhaps the greatest thrill was that she got to use her own phone. Normally it is teenagers who spend their lives on the phone, but at Roxbury Drive it was Marche, leaving Angie frustrated and irritated that she couldn’t speak to her friends.

If acting was a competitive sport, then it was a competition Angie was determined to win. She got herself in shape by learning to box at Bodies in Motion gym in Santa Monica. “I don’t get in the ring, as I don’t want to get my teeth knocked out. But it’s great for self-defense,” she told Rita Montanez.

Already fascinated with knives and swords, she took up fencing at the Westside Fencing Center under the watchful eye of an instructor who doubled as a movie stuntwoman. After the sessions, she and friends practiced the moves she had learned, using wooden brooms as swords.

For a time the young, black-garbed goth learned the waltz and the tango at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Beverly Hills. (Like her father, she suffers from curvature of the spine, which is why when people meet her they are impressed more by her ramrod straight posture, which she learned in order to correct the defect, than by her “pillow” lips.) Teacher Kent Sterling,
who has been instructing for thirty years, recalls: “She was a fast learner but did not stick with it long enough to really become a dancer.” Still, with her lean good looks and an upright natural grace, the school was keen for her to help sell lessons to potential clients.

Jon Voight was impressed. “It was like she put herself through the Royal Academy of Los Angeles,” he recalled. “She took acting classes, voice lessons, fencing lessons, boxing—whatever she thought she needed as an actress.”

It was her mother, however, who provided day-to-day guidance as Angie went through the daunting process of Method acting, learning, for example, to feel “in orange.”

“I used to work with my mom,” Angie recalled. “She was the most amazing support for an actor. She used to write letters to my characters. She always read the script, made a bunch of notes, and wrote these letters. She was a great person to talk to about things, and she loved the process so much.” Rather like Lee Strasberg himself, who was a better teacher than he was an actor, Marcheline, who never had the sense of timing necessary to make it in movies, proved herself to be an excellent manager and coach for her daughter.

There was an extra dimension that propelled Angie onward. Beneath her public persona of an unnervingly quiet, self-contained, well-mannered, and seemingly docile girl, albeit dressed like a punk, was a young woman desperate to use acting as a vehicle to express and explore her inner turmoil. She placed her passion for acting on a par with her need to cut herself, as a way of communicating her feelings. As she later told James Lipton, “There’s something inside of us that we want to reach out, we want to talk to each other, we want to throw our emotions and our feelings out and hope that we make some sense and we get an answer. The best way to do that is emote and hope that there would be a response.”

As for many young actors, that response was the sound of silence. Dustin Hoffman had been right in predicting it was going to be a tough road. According to Angie’s reckoning, she and her mother attended at least a hundred auditions. At first she went for girlfriend roles or the girl at high school, but she was always rejected. “I was just never that girl,” she says. As far as casting agents were concerned, she was not regular or conventional-looking enough; they told her that she was too dark or too ethnic. “It was
clear that my career was going to be full of very bizarre, strange women—which ended up being the ones I liked anyway,” she recalls, her later bravado masking her intense disappointment at a time when she almost gave up hope of getting a break.

Ironically, when Angie snagged her first gig, in a music video of “It’s About Time” by the Lemonheads, she played “the other girl,” a love-struck schoolgirl. She got the part because she could “tear up” on command.

If casting agents were still to be convinced by her on-screen persona, rock star Lenny Kravitz was certainly intrigued when she appeared in his video. After the shoot, he asked her “stage mother,” Lauren Taines, who she was. “She’s going to be a big star,” said Lauren coolly. “Yeah, I know, but who is she?” Kravitz persisted. “You take one step near her and I’ll cut your hands off,” Lauren replied.

It was easy to understand why Kravitz was fascinated. Angie’s next performance, as an elusive yet beguiling teenage temptress in Antonello Venditti’s steamy music video of “Alta Marea (Don’t Dream It’s Over),” shot on Venice Beach, anticipated her slinky sexuality. After the shoot Angie and her family went to the Redondo Beach home of Chip Taylor’s son Christian to celebrate her minor success.

Although the music videos were a stepping-stone, she had yet to land a speaking part in an actual movie. Though her film career seemed stalled, her modeling work continued apace. In April 1992, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she faced the toughest choice of her fledgling career.

A swimwear company wanted a fresh face to replace supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose celebrity meant that she was better known than the line. After spending hours looking through books of models, photographer Sean McCall was going cross-eyed searching for the right girl. It was only when Rita Montanez, who had now worked with Angie on several shoots, showed him Angie’s Elite card that he realized he had found her. “She was the obvious choice,” he recalls.

While at five feet, seven inches she was short for a top model—though that never stopped Kate Moss—she had the exotic European look he was searching for. With her long limbs, perfect skin—her only blemishes a few scratches on her hand from the cat—and a certain elusive sexual poise, she seemed ideal. There seemed to be no obvious sign of cutting.

As she changed into various swimsuits for the shoot in McCall’s
cramped condo in Brentwood, she was upbeat and self-confident, a real natural. “For her age she was the most natural girl in front of a camera I had ever seen,” recalls McCall. “She was unself-conscious, whereas many teenage girls are like deer in headlights.” At one point she complained about the hot studio lights, and McCall told her that compared to movie lights, these were like candles. “I would go through that for a movie,” she said nonchalantly.

Certainly she was a shoo-in to be the face of the brand. The swimwear executives loved what they saw and arranged for a full-scale shoot on location in the State Park at Malibu, the home of the TV show
Baywatch.
Shortly before she was due to take over from supermodel Cindy Crawford, however, Angie decided against going on the shoot, saying that she had decided to focus on acting. “If that doesn’t work, I will go back to modeling,” she explained. In the end, Californian blonde Caprice Bourret got the gig, going on to become best known as a lingerie model and a favorite of British men’s magazines.

Angie’s decision was risky. If she had gone into modeling full-time, she would quickly have made a name for herself, whereas in the world of acting she was still a nobody. Within a matter of weeks, however, the gamble paid off. Angie had the chance to test McCall’s theory about studio lights when she auditioned for a big-budget sci-fi film initially titled
Glass Shadow.
Then the producers slashed the budget from $40 million to B-movie proportions and changed the title to
Cyborg 2—
making it the sequel to the 1989 original starring muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme. In spite of the film’s vastly reduced scope, there were still three actresses—
Legends of the Fall
star Karina Lombard, martial-arts expert Cynthia Rothrock, and a model named Blueberry—vying for the role of Casella “Cash” Reese, an “almost human” cyborg designed to seduce and destroy. While Angie had a modest show reel (her modeling shoots augmented by five student shorts made by her brother while he attended USC film school), the moment she walked into the casting suite, she nailed the gig. “She sucked the air out of the room, she was so gorgeous,” recalls director Michael Schroeder. “She was special from the get-go, so talented she is a force of nature. She seemed to have the acting chops in her genes. I had a good feeling about this girl.”

Not everyone on the set was so impressed. Her costar Elias Koteas had reservations about a girl just seventeen being cast as his love interest, given
their age difference—he was thirty-two at the time. Since it was a tight twenty-nine-day shoot and she had to appear nude in a love scene, it was important that she was emanicipated and therefore exempt from child labor laws.

While Michael Schroeder soothed the concerns of his leading man, others were equally doubtful about his choice of leading lady. Former world judo champion Karen Sheperd, who was playing an evil cyborg, was asked to give Angie some basic instruction in martial arts. When her mother dropped Angie off at a North Hollywood dojo—a garage turned into a karate studio—Karen, like the rest of the cast, was well aware that this was Jon Voight’s daughter. “She was skinny as a bird, arms like twigs, and she was so young and so brittle I had real doubts and thought, ‘Here we go, Hollywood nepotism.’ I was afraid I was going to hurt her.”

Angie told her that she had “dabbled” in boxing, which Karen took as a way of saying she’d done nothing before. So she expected little from the two-hour session, teaching Angie how to punch without breaking her wrist as well as kicks, blocks, spins, and the basics of holding her body in a fighting stance. “She was lacking coordination and not that agile but really focused.” As well as learning her lines, she was instructed to spend the next few days doing her fighting homework—punching in front of a mirror.

When shooting began on September 28, 1992, Angie quickly impressed her fellow actors with her dedication, her supple grace, and a willingness to work hard and take instruction. While the $2,500-a-week paycheck came in very handy, the experience mattered more to Angie. “She was an old soul,” recalls Karen Sheperd. “Not a flippant girl but mature beyond her years. I’ve worked with up-and-coming actors like Angie and they are punks. They throw tantrums and think that the whole world revolves around them. She wasn’t like that; she was self-controlled but open-minded to ideas on set no matter where they came from.”

Angie had only one rule—her father’s name was not to be mentioned. Even though she used her middle name, Jolie, which her mother had presciently chosen when she was born, Voight’s shadow was ever present. Fellow actor Ric Young had just finished a charity telethon with Jon to raise funds for Chabad, while Michael Schroeder had worked with him on a film about the Chernobyl nuclear accident a couple of years before. Young takes an artistically matter-of-fact view of Angie’s inner turmoil concerning
her father. “Every actor has a scar, some conflict,” he observes. “They are always at war with somebody. If you have a wonderful childhood, there is no conflict. But acting doesn’t work that way; a person has to go through a lot.”

As much as Angie might have disapproved, Jon visited the set a couple of times, pleased that his daughter was in the hands of a “caring” director. At the time, he was rehearsing for his first stage role since playing the title role in
Hamlet,
the play that had cost him his marriage sixteen years before. In November 1992 he starred alongside Ethan Hawke in Chekhov’s
The Seagull
at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. It was a move that was to have bizarre consequences for his tenuous relationship with his daughter.

Notwithstanding her famous father, Angie came to be seen by cast and crew as quiet but not aloof, serious about making a good job of her first movie role. She normally kept to her trailer, resting, smoking, or learning her scenes. One break from the exhausting routine came when legendary Hollywood star Jack Palance arrived on set for a couple of days to film his scenes. Other actors, including Angie, gathered in his trailer to listen to the actor, who is of Ukrainian descent, declaim Russian poetry. For the most part, though, Angie was focused on the work, knowing that this was her movie and her break, and she had to make the best of it. “She was really responsive to direction and could make changes without hesitation,” recalls Michael Schroeder. “Being brought up in the business, she understood instinctively how movies are made.”

Her nude scene with Elias Koteas, which was filmed on a closed set toward the end of the shoot, did give her pause. Michael Schroeder made it as easy as possible. As the cameras rolled, he played a seductive aria from Erich Korngold’s 1920 opera,
The Dead City
. While her nude scene was tasteful and relatively tame, other cast members were concerned. “I felt sorry for her,” recalls Ric Young, appreciating that young actors can be “cursed by beauty,” like Marilyn Monroe was. “Everyone wants a piece of you, yet you have to be ruthless about keeping yourself to yourself. Angie has that inner toughness.”

It was a toughness that might have been helped, or honed, by what psychoanalyst Franziska De George describes as Angie’s ability to dissociate, which was related to the impulse that caused her to cut herself. If it was awkward to do a scene naked, she simply removed herself emotionally,
switched gears, as cutting switched her pain from emotional to physical. Finally, her troubled background could serve an even better purpose than supplying a well of chaotic feelings to draw upon as an actress. It could give her the means to do what she had to, suffer what she had to, in order to succeed as an artist.