Hollywood’s favourite rebel hasgrown up ~ UN ambassador, domestic bliss with Brad Pitt, and now a powerful new film about the murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl. Angelina Jolie talks to James MottramThis is what you call a Hollywood moment. I’m sitting in the grounds of the H?tel du Cap, a venue so reassuringly expensive even A-list stars probably think twice before ordering the lobster for lunch. In front of me is Angelina Jolie, she of the bee-stung lips and body so lithe it could make the beautiful people feel the need for a nip-tuck. In the background are the azure waters of the French Riviera, a calm counterpoint to the maelstrom that is the Cannes Film Festival a few miles down the coast. There, Jolie’s new film A Mighty Heart, the harrowing story of the kidnap and murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl, has just been unveiled to considerable acclaim. Such a film deserves serious and sombre consideration, something that’s reflected in Jolie’s outfit for the day ~ a cream skirt, translucent blouse and beige heels that lend her a commanding and elegant air. Yet as I look up, a procession of Hollywood’s cr?me de la cr?me rolls past. Flanked by a gang of burly security guards, the Ocean’s 13 stars are all being led off to press some flesh. It’s like being front row at the Oscars, as a dapper looking Don Cheadle is followed by the boyish Matt Damon. Then I see him. Wearing a beige suit he seems to have lifted straight from the wardrobe of his Ocean’s character Rusty Ryan, Brad Pitt walks by, turning his head briefly to glance at the woman who turned his world upside down. I’m half expecting him to come and pull up a chair. After all, he produced A Mighty Heart for Plan B, the production company he originally shared with his wife Jennifer Aniston, before splitting from her in January 2005. When Jolie and Pitt finally went public with a relationship rumoured to have begun on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith the previous year (when Pitt was still married), “Brangelina” was born. And be it to cover their high-profile philanthropic work or their ever-swelling “rainbow” family, the media circus has not stopped following their every move ever since. Still only 32, Jolie has matured immeasurably since she adopted her first child Maddox from Cambodia in 2002. Perhaps not so coincidentally, it was the same year her second marriage, to her Pushing Tin co-star Billy Bob Thornton, fell apart after just two years. Up until then, whether it be her knife collection, penchant for S&M, or her ever-growing number of tattoos, she cultivated a reputation as Hollywood’s bad girl du jour. With behaviour that would make Lindsay Lohan blush, she famously married her first husband Jonny Lee Miller, whom she met on the set of 1995’s cyber-thriller Hackers, in a white shirt with his name daubed in her blood on the back. When she and Thornton wed, they wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks. The archetypal Hollywood rebel, then, it’s surprising to note that just a few years later, comparisons are now being made with other film-star campaigners, such as Jane Fonda and Mia Farrow. Ironically, Jolie began this transformation to respectability when she was cast as Lara Croft, the living embodiment of every teenage boy’s favourite cyber fantasy, in Tomb Raider. Her experience shooting the film in Cambodia changed her life irreparably. “ I knew nothing about refugee camps,” she says. “I knew very little about Pol Pot ~ only that by reference he was a bad guy, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I did one scene and they said, ‘Don’t go over there ~ there are land mines.’ And I thought, ‘That’s insane!’ I had many, many moments like that.”Almost overnight she shed her punk snarl as she took on a role as a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees goodwill ambassador, travelling to such danger zones as Sierra Leone and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. “I think with anybody, as we grow up, there’s a certain time in your life when you realise that if you’re not useful to others, and not being actively involved with the world, then you’re not doing anyone a great service,” she says. “You’re just making entertainment and it doesn’t feel very good at the end of the day to go to sleep like that and feel that this is all you are. I wanted to get a great education in the world. I felt I didn’t get one growing up, so I wanted to travel and be in these countries. I just wanted to be a student of the world.” If anything has suffered during this period, then it’s been the quality of her work, as if she was so spent giving her time to charitable causes that acting became an after-thought. Long gone were the days when she won a Golden Globe for playing the Aids-ravaged supermodel Gia Marie Carangi in TV movie Gia. In came terrible genre movies such as Original Sin and Taking Lives, or experimental flops like CGI-heavy Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Some choices were downright bizarre, like her extended cameo as the mother of Colin Farrell in Oliver Stone’s period flop Alexander. While Mr & Mrs Smith, with a worldwide gross of nearly $400m, kept her stock high, even recent prestige projects, such as this year’s Robert De Niro-directed CIA drama The Good Shepherd, failed to impress. But with its title sounding like a movie-of-the-week bio of Jolie herself, A Mighty Heart is different. Offering her most important work since 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, when her blistering performance as an asylum inmate, Lisa Rowe, won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, she is undeniably an early front-runner for a statue next year. She plays Daniel Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who wrote the memoir on which the film is based. At the time, Daniel and Mariane, then pregnant, were journalists based in Pakistan. After covering the American bombings of Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, Daniel, a bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was researching a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid when he was kidnapped in January 2002 by Islamic militants. His subsequent beheading, just over a week later, shocked the world. Directed by Britain’s Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart is seen through the eyes of Mariane during those horrendous days, as she waits and worries while attempting to track down her husband (played by Dan Futterman) with the help of the Pakistani authorities. Shot almost like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Jolie does her bit for verisimilitude, donning brown contacts and a wig. While it’s undeniably a gruelling watch, it’s also a stirring tribute to Mariane’s indefatigable spirit and dignity in the face of such trauma. “She’s not blinded by hate and fear,” says Jolie. “ You can hardly get her to talk about that. She will not bend to self-pity at all. And I think ~ not just in this situation but as a woman ~ that’s a remarkable thing to watch.”
