Angelina Jolie has spoken about how she fell into acting to help her late mother, Marcheline Bertrand, pay household bills. Really? That pungent odour tells me that my truckload of celebrity horse manure has arrived.
There’s plenty to like about Jolie – she may have her ludicrous moments, but she’s talented, gorgeous, seems to put real effort into her humanitarian work, and, frankly, I can’t work up vitriol for someone who’s had to face a preventative double mastectomy and hysterectomy.
However, I’m not sure I’m buying into this saintly “I only acted to help Mum pay the bills” spiel. In fairness to Jolie, she went into more detail (the creativity of the job, her youthful vulnerability), but still, with performers as parents (Jolie’s father is Jon Voight), she’s unlikely to have tumbled into acting by chance.
And, at 16, when she started acting seriously, even in Los Angeles, there must have been simpler ways to earn pin money. (Hollywood stardom or a newspaper round? The eternal quandary.)
Just a thought, but when Jolie was younger, maybe she was rather drawn to celebrity. And when I say “drawn”, I mean that she was as much of a fame-hungry brat as the next Hollywood teenager. And so what if she was? She won’t have been the first and she won’t be the last.
If Jolie got into acting for all the wrong reasons, it doesn’t mean that she was stupid, evil or barred from changing her mind later – just that she was young. At this stage, it seems a bit unnecessary to sanitise her past, with bizarre claims about primarily wanting to help pay household bills. As Jolie probably realises herself, there have been many who have yearned to be rich and famous – and just as many who have pretended that they didn’t.
