by Ian Halperin
McCall’s makeup artist had just worked with a teenage girl whose agency had sent her in to shoot her first theatrical head shots, compulsory for an aspiring actor looking to break into show business. “She told me that she had just seen this girl who was perfect for what I was doing,” he explains. “She knew I was looking for somebody a little enticing and different. She told me the girl happened to be the daughter of the actor Jon Voight, which didn’t impress me that much, but I decided to give her a look. I contacted her through her mother and arranged for her to come in and test.”
The next day, a sixteen-year-old Angelina Voight came to McCall’s condo in Santa Monica, and he knew instantly that he had found his face. “I immediately thought that she had one of the most unique looks that I ever saw,” he recalls. “I didn’t even have to test her. I wanted to do a full-blown editorial shoot.”
Many assume that Jolie’s distinctive look results from cosmetic procedures. Innumerable articles must have been written speculating whether she has had collagen injections to give her those trademark full, sensuous lips, for instance. Yet if one examines the photos that McCall took that day, it is instantly obvious that Jolie’s look has changed very little since the age of sixteen. If she is known today as the sexiest woman in the world, she didn’t earn the title through artificial means. “I’m a professional; I know when people have had work done, when they’ve altered their looks,” says McCall. “Believe me, the Angelina I saw then is the same Angelina the world knows today. I’ve heard that she had her nose thinned since then, but very little else has changed.”
What struck him most that day, he recalls, is how much they had in common. “She was very nice and obviously highly intelligent,” he says. “I think we struck up a conversation about fencing. I had just come from a fencing lesson, and when she heard that, she started talking about swords. She told me she collected knives and swords. I also had all kinds of them, some dating back to the Civil War. She asked me where she could get a sword rack. Then it turns out we knew somebody in common, Jean-Pierre Hallet.”
Hallet was a legendary figure who had devoted his life to saving the pygmy tribe in the Ituri region of Zaire from physical and cultural extinction. As an anthropologist, he had lived among the pygmies and even introduced a new plant for them to cultivate, helping to save them from starvation after deforestation wiped out most of their traditional food sources. He strongly believed the pygmies to be the most ancient people on earth, likely the ancestors of all humanity, and that they had originated many of the ethical and religious concepts that were later adopted by much of the rest of the world. By 1991, Hallet ran one of the world’s largest shops specializing in Central African artifacts, located on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Angelina bought a Masai sword from him there, and they struck up a friendship. She was fascinated with his stories about the African people. “I’m fairly certain that her affinity with Africa, which is well known today, dates back from her association with Jean-Pierre Hallet. I also knew him well from buying swords from him,” says McCall.
In the end, the photographer never used Angelina for his La Perla shoot because her agent called up and said Angelina wanted to focus on her film career instead. “I was very disappointed,” he recalls. “I thought she would have been big. But as it turns out, the girl I chose instead, Caprice Bourret, went on to a huge modeling career and even became the first Wonderbra model … Maybe Angelina’s people were smart to pull her out. The world would have known her face but would have been deprived of her acting talent.”
This seems to have marked a turning point. Although the La Perla shoot would have been her first national campaign, Angelina had modeled successfully since the age of thirteen and had even traveled to London and France for numerous assignments when she was younger, represented by her mother’s best friend, the model agent Jade Dixon (now known as Jade Clark-Dixon). “Angie was an angel, as was her mother,” Dixon says. “She was my first client and she was very poised, very pretty even then. I eventually steered her to acting when I saw her giant talent. It was obvious from an early age.”
Thus encouraged, at sixteen, with her obsession with death, her need to cut herself, and her first sexual experiences all behind her, Angelina now set her sights on an acting career. Although Jolie now attributes her decision more to her mother’s influence rather than her father’s, Jon Voight in fact played a major part in encouraging her interest.
“Looking back, there was evidence at an early age that she would be an actor,” recalls Jon Voight. “She would take anything and make an event out of it. She was always very busy and creative and dramatic.” When she had play dates with her ten-year-old friends, her father went so far as to set up scenes for them. “I wanted to show the kids things about acting,” he explains. “I’d say, ‘I’m going to give you the lines; how are you going to say them?’”
For her part, Angelina explains that her earliest acting ambitions dated back to when she was a young child. “I remember Jamie pointing the home-video camera at me and saying ‘Come on, Angie, give us a show!’ Neither [Dad] nor Mom ever said, ‘Be quiet! Stop talking.’ I remember [Dad] looking me in the eye and asking, ‘What are you thinking? What are your feelings?’ I don’t know exactly what I wanted then, but I knew I could know. I loved some kind of expression. I wanted so much to try to explain things to somebody. I’m very good at trying to explore different emotions and listening to people and feeling things. That is an actor, I think. So that’s what I had to do.”
After Angelina emerged from her obsession with death, her father helped her build on the skills that she had picked up at the Strasberg Institute years before. He gave her weekly acting lessons at the home he rented in the San Fernando Valley where they read or acted out a different play every Sunday.
Voight later described being “moved to tears” when she read from the Arthur Miller play that had given him his first big break three decades earlier. “It was in stages, different stages. There was a point where we read A View from the Bridge, which I did as well as anything I’ve ever done in my life. There’s a scene where this Italian boy comes in and meets this young girl Catherine, and they fall in love. I’ve played with many Catherines. One Sunday Angie read it, and the first time she read Catherine, it was a performance. She was studying acting and sixteen, and it was, I’m telling you, as good as anybody had ever played the part. The accent, the emotion was there, and absolutely perfect. I was overwhelmed. It was very touching to me. That was the first time I knew.
“The next week, I had a friend of mine, Tom Bower, a wonderful actor, come over and we read it again. And same thing, a great performance. Tom’s going, ‘This is great!’ Tom was running the Met Theater in Los Angeles. So she went down with Tom and auditioned for Saturday workshops, which were monitored by Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Amy Madigan, who are [now] like godfather and godmothers to her. And one day, Tom came back from class and said, ‘Jon, she’s really special.’”
Bertrand encouraged her daughter to re-enroll at the Strasberg Institute to hone her talent. For her first production there, the comedy Room Service, she made an unusual choice of roles. “I thought, which character do I want to audition for?” Angelina explains. “The big, fat, forty-year-old German man, that’s the part for me.” She put her own take on the character, however, turning the part of an overbearing hotel manager into “Frau Wagner,” a German dominatrix.
Voight later recalled the surprise of seeing his daughter in the production. “I was a little shocked seeing her walk around as Frau Wagner. But the shock came from the realization that, ‘Oh my God, she’s just like me.’ She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.”
Meanwhile, her brother Jamie had enrolled at University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television (renamed the School of Cinematic Arts in 2006) and was living with his father at his house in the Valley. During this period, he made five short films, all starring his sister and all
financed by his father, who at the time was still very close to his son. One of them even earned a George Lucas Award, whose winners were personally selected by the Star Wars director, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and generous benefactors.
Around this time, Angelina decided to drop the name Voight and started billing herself by her middle name, Jolie. As she later explained, “I love my father, but I’m not him.” Despite this, and despite Bertrand’s subsequent claim that at most auditions nobody knew her daughter’s bloodlines, many of her early casting directors have acknowledged that she was introduced to them as the daughter of Jon Voight, a fact that couldn’t help but open doors in Hollywood.
Still, it was slow going at first. Her first break, if it can be called that, came when director Michael Schroeder offered the seventeen-year-old Angelina a screen test and then a lead role in his science fiction film Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow. This was the sequel to Albert Pyun’s 1989 hit, Cyborg, which launched Jean-Claude Van Damme to fame. Neither Pyun nor Van Damme signed on to the sequel, however, which perhaps destined it to failure from the start.
The script for Cyborg 2 had the world divided between two giant computer companies, Pinwheel Robotics in America and Kobayashi in Japan, both of which engage in violent corporate espionage. Angelina plays the part of Casella “Cash” Reese, an android who has been injected with an explosive liquid that can be detonated by remote control. Her masters at Pinwheel Corporation plan to use her to destroy their rivals at Kobayashi and take over the world. Cash figures out what’s happening when she is tipped off by her martial-arts instructor and a mysterious stranger, played by Jack Palance, who has invaded the Pinwheel computer network. Cash saves the day at the end, giving Jolie her first taste of being an action hero, and foreshadowing her success as Lara Croft years later.
Just before the film was released, Jon Voight was acting in a theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in New York. He gave a TV interview in which he comes off as a proud papa, discussing both his children’s foray into show business. “My son Jamie is nineteen, and my daughter Angelina is seventeen,” he told CNN, “and Marche and I have done our very best to be the supportive parents that we have learned to be and labored to be. And now these two children are both going to be in my world, in the world of film and theater. Angie, my daughter Angelina, has just done a little film. She is so proud that I am on stage. Jamie has been writing. He doesn’t show me everything. He has only shown me three little pieces, one about a five minute piece, then a half- an-hour piece, then a two-hour movie script. But he says to me quietly, ‘you know, Dad, I’ve written eighty works.’”
When Cyborg 2 was finally released in 1993, the critics were harsh, with one newspaper slamming it for “hammy acting and a mumbo- jumbo plot that prompts unintentional laughter.” It went straight to video obscurity and emerged only after Jolie achieved fame, probably because she had a topless scene in it.
Hollywood has always banked on its ability to anticipate coming trends, especially because the average film takes years to make, from conception to release. When the idea for Hackers was first floated, many people still didn’t own a computer and most had never even heard of the Internet. But by the time the script was finally commissioned, Nirvana had brought punk music into the mainstream, and computers were suddenly hot. What better way to combine these two trends than to produce a “cyberpunk thriller”? The concept must have looked good on paper because its producers had high hopes that the film would score big with critics and moviegoers as the first Internet-era blockbuster. They hired British director Iain Softley; he had won praise for his film Backbeat, which captured the Beatles’ early years while avoiding the clichés that so often plague such efforts. The producers felt his brand of distinctive originality was just what Hackers needed.
The script, set in New York, depicted a subculture of edgy high school hackers and their inadvertent involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. It follows a Seattle youth, Dade Murphy, who, as an eleven-year-old tech prodigy, was convicted of crashing more than a thousand computer systems in one day and causing a massive drop in the Dow Jones Average. Upon his conviction he was banned from owning or operating computers until his eighteenth birthday. When he turns eighteen, Dade takes up hacking again, at first simply causing mischief, such as tapping into a local TV station and changing the program it was broadcasting to an episode of The Outer Limits. After he enrolls in a new high school, he meets a beautiful girl named Kate Libby, whose own hacking skills rival his. Most of the film centers on a hacking duel between Dade and Kate, which eventually turns into a complicated tale about international corporate espionage and potential worldwide environmental disaster. The role of Kate was pivotal, and Softley was aware that the success of the film required just the right actress, especially because it was a film likely to appeal to a young male demographic. The director cast his net far and wide, auditioning, among others, Hilary Swank, Liv Tyler, and Heather Graham. None of them seemed to fit the bill. Then he was told that the daughter of Jon Voight had arrived to audition.
When she walked in, he later recalled, Angelina had long hair and was wearing glasses, perhaps believing that a computer hacker should look like a nerd. What she didn’t know was that Kate Libby’s alias was “Acid Burn” and that the character was a punk-rock cyber-rebel, the embodiment of teenage defiance. “I explained that she would have tattoos and piercings, and we would have to cut her hair,” he remembers. “Angelina said straight away that she would have her head shaved. That was what she was like—she threw herself into it completely.”
She got the part. It was her “compelling quality” that the director recognized immediately. “That thing that makes you interested in them for who they are, apart from their acting,” he says. “Johnny Depp has it, and Angelina has it, too. When you have a distinctive presence like hers, it will always be a very potent ingredient. People like Angelina tend to select themselves. She just had this inner self-confidence in a very understated way. She was focused, daring, bold, and brave.”
Similarly, Softley chose for the role of Dade an unknown named Jonny Lee Miller, whose previous experience had been confined to bit roles in British detective shows and soap operas, including a stint in the gritty cockney soap, Eastenders. Miller, however, came from a long family tradition of British actors. His grandfather, Bernard Lee, was best known for playing the role of M in the early James Bond movies.
Although Angelina eventually got together with Miller, it was not love at first sight. She confided to a makeup artist named Kelly that she assumed the soft-spoken Miller was gay when she found out that he had been part of a musical-theater company in London; she assumed that virtually all males in musical theater were “into other men.”
Yet Angelina has implied to the press that their romance actually blossomed on set. “We met while filming Hackers, and I always fall in love while I’m working on a film,” she told the British newspaper Daily Express. “It’s such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It’s like discovering you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deep. Then you slip back out of it like a snakeskin, and you are cold and alone.”
“To tell the truth,” the makeup artist Kelly now says, “they were not a couple when we were shooting Hackers, and Angelina seemed to assume he was gay all the way through. They spent a lot of time together, so who knew what went on in their trailer, but I’m fairly sure that they didn’t hook up until much later on.” Indeed, Miller confided that he “chased Angelina all over North America until she succumbed. It took a while—a good few thousand miles.”
After Hackers wrapped, Angelina took a part in an independent film, a gritty, low-budget crime drama called Without Evidence. The plot was based on the true story of the 1989 murder of the head of Oregon’s prison system, Michael Francke, who was alleged to have been the victim of a political conspiracy. Angelina played a low-life drug addict in a little- seen performance that nonethe
less offered an early glimpse of her true acting talent. Although the film never got a distribution deal, those who saw it were astonished by her performance. Variety later described her acting as “heartbreakingly touching.”
Playing the part of a young drug addict, however, may not have been much of a stretch for Angelina during that period. According to those who knew the nineteen-year-old, she was strung out much of the time. “Ace,” a drug dealer in Venice Beach, California, claims to have been Angelina’s regular supplier whenever she was in town. “She’d call me up, and we’d meet on the Santa Monica pier, and I’d give her whatever she needed,” he says. “I forget exactly what she bought, but she was into all kinds of shit in those days. Sometimes she’d call me, and she’d be incoherent. I didn’t sell smack—too risky—so I don’t know if she ever shot up.”
Angelina later claimed that heroin was in fact one of her drugs of choice, though she never publicly revealed many of the details of her drug addiction. Last year, the British newspaper The Sun published images of Angelina from a video taken in a drug den sometime in the 1990s, in which a woman beside her is doing heroin. Jolie, looking disheveled and smoking a cigarette, announces to the camera, “I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything. I hate heroin because I’ve been fascinated with it. I’m not immune, but I won’t do it now, at all.” Tabloids also reported that a man was shopping around another video, at a price of $70,000, which purported to show Angelina sniffing lines of heroin from a plate and sucking up smoke through a tube as the drug cooks on tinfoil.