Angelina Jolie

The weight of an erased last name

In 1982, a seven-year-old girl appeared for a few seconds in Lookin' to Get Out alongside her father. Her name was Angelina Jolie Voight, but her father's last name would soon disappear from her legal documents. Her real entry into the industry happened far from the spotlight of the big galas. She shot music videos for Meat Loaf and Lenny Kravitz while looking for a foothold in B-movie productions that nobody remembers.

And the opening came in 1995 with Hackers.

That cyberpunk-styled film put her on the radar of casting directors. But the industry didn't know what to do with an actress who projected such uncomfortable intensity. In 1998, she starred in Gia for HBO. Playing a model consumed by heroin earned her her first Golden Globe. It was the first sign that Jolie was not looking for likable characters.

She won the Oscar for Girl, Interrupted in 2000. Her role as a charismatic sociopath overshadowed the lead and catapulted her to a level of fame that was hard to manage. The press focused on her personal eccentricities, but she responded by accepting the role of Lara Croft in 2001. That decision changed her bank account and her standing in the industry forever.

The Camera as a Political Tool

In 2011, she decided that acting was no longer enough for her creative ambitions. She premiered In the Land of Blood and Honey, a film shot in Bosnian and Serbian about the Balkan wars. Critics were divided over its harshness. But she didn't care about the box office results, because she was looking for her own voice behind the camera.

She wrote and directed First They Killed My Father in 2017 for Netflix. The story centered on the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime. She used a cast made up entirely of local actors and shot in the native language. It was her most personal project to date.

Yet directing did not pull her away from the major studios entirely. In 2014, she starred in Maleficent, and the film grossed more than 750 million dollars worldwide. She balanced these massive productions with much smaller, riskier projects. Jolie understood early on that Disney's money allowed her to finance her own stories.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2021 she joined the Marvel Universe with Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao. She played Thena in a production that cost 200 million dollars. The shoot was demanding and required months of physical training in London. The film received mixed reviews but met the studio's financial goals.

A Return to Pure Drama

In 2024, she presented Maria at the Venice Film Festival. She spent seven months preparing to play opera singer Maria Callas under the direction of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. She had to learn to sing opera and move like a diva in the twilight of her life. The specialized press noted that this role restored the actress of real presence she had first become known for in the nineties.

That same year, she finished post-production on Without Blood as a director. It is an adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's novel, shot at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Salma Hayek stars in this story of revenge and memory set in a postwar landscape. The production relied mostly on an Italian crew.

Jolie keeps her main residence in Los Angeles, though she spends much of her time overseeing projects in Europe and Asia. Her production company, Jolie Pas, currently manages several literary adaptation rights for television. The distribution deal for Maria with Netflix in 2024 ensured the film reached more than 190 countries simultaneously.