Angelina Jolie

There is no more famous or enigmatic actress alive today. And her latest biographer, Andrew Morton, knows what it takes to be world famous after writing about the lives of Princess Diana and Tom Cruise, among others. Morton set his sights on Jolie and has produced this just-released, unauthorized 313-page biography. Of course, Angie’s lived a very public life so while Morton’s bio isn’t full of unknown details, there are more than a few revelations to keep you flipping the pages. Here’s our take on a few of the most intriguing insights of the book.

What’s in a Name?

Angelina Jolie was almost born Shiloh Baptist Voight. The inspiration for the name was a truck her father, Jon Voight, and her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, were stuck behind while taking a drive through the woods. (Marche, as Marcheline was known, shot it down, thinking it was “too Hebrew.”) It’s a charmingly insignificant story, considering the symbolic weight names carry for the rest of the biography. Marche gave Angelina the middle name of Jolie and James, her son, the middle name of Haven, thinking they would drop their surnames to go into show business. Ironically, “Voight” probably would have opened doors for Angelina, but Morton says she dropped it in order to succeed on her own merits, a plan her mother foiled by secretly calling agents to tell them Angelina was the daughter of Jon Voight. Later, during a nadir in Angelina’s relationship with her father, she had “Voight” legally struck from her name. But then after years of freezing out her father, she named her daughter Shiloh.

Growing Pains

Angelina had a troubled childhood, the result of growing up with an estranged and famous father and a mother who, despite her laissez-faire parenting style, used her daughter as a vehicle through which to live out her own dreams of stardom. For the first year or so of Jolie’s life, she was kept in a white office five floors above her mother's apartment and tended by a rotation of babysitters (her mother finding her too similar-looking to her just-run-off husband), and then at 14 she was given the run of the master bedroom along with her live-in boyfriend. The idea was that her mother could keep a better eye on the couple that way. As Morton says, this didn't quite work out: "While she thought her liberal behavior meant that she would be able to keep an eye on them, the proximity of the master bedroom to the street made it easy for them to sneak out at night, which they did regularly." (76)

Girl, Interrupted… And Interrupted

Her unorthodox family situation took a psychological toll, as Morton points out. He sets a bevy of psychoanalysts speculating on the psychic damage, none of whom have ever analyzed Jolie or her family. Their diagnosis? That "Angelina Jolie will have experienced profound abandonment, anxiety, and may have experienced depression" (36). To these issues, they attribute most of her behavior, like suicidal thoughts, obsessive crushes, drug use, desire to act, bisexuality, exhibitionism, and kinky proclivities. Or was her astrological sign to blame? Morton contents that her being a Gemini explains a lot—"As a Gemini, the child was destined to have a dual personality, the forces of good and evil, darkness and light, male and female, wrestling with her psyche" (30)—with the help at one point of Princess Di's astrologer (188). Whatever her affliction, she started dressing in black and wearing studded dog collars, which got her mocked in school, and for a time, she aspired to be a funeral director. Less innocuously, Morton claims she started doing some pretty heavy drugs, including coke and heroin.

Sling Blade

Part of her Goth phase involved acquiring an impressive array of swords. "She enjoyed not only their cold, unforgiving beauty and the intriguing stories they suggested, but also the thrill of holding, spinning, and throwing them. Knives, often decorated with ornate symbolism, stained with honor and battle, excited and inspired the collector in her." (63) This, too, one of Morton's army of psychoanalysts attributes to her "the emptiness where the connection to the self is missing." At 14, she used one of these knives to cut and be cut by her live-in boyfriend, and later to cut herself. In 1991, when she was busy fleshing out her theatrical résumé, she channeled her love of blades into the healthier hobby of fencing.