She knew about needles and tattoos and heroin and she had an innate wild sexuality. That is what the camera captured. It filmed her courage and her chutzpah.
—PLAYING GOD DIRECTOR ANDY WILSON
After more than two years of focusing on her acting career, Angelina had no social life to speak of and no boyfriend since Anton had been sent packing. Her life was a relentless round of acting classes, occasional auditions, and rejection after rejection. The couple of small roles she had snagged in low-budget films after Cyborg 2 were not going to make a Hollywood director or producer sit up and take notice. By the fall of 1994 she was depressed and frustrated; the name Angelina Jolie was just not opening any doors.
Seeing her despair, her mother, who was now her manager, broke the cardinal rule of Angie’s professional life, her refusal to piggyback on her father’s name. Without breathing a word to Angie, her mother called her agent, Hollywood veteran Richard Bauman of Bauman-Hiller, and told him that he could start to tell casting agents that Angie was indeed Jon Voight’s daughter. As the name Voight was rather better known than Jolie, very soon doors started creaking open. To this day Angie doesn’t know that it was her father’s name that helped her get her first big break.
In any event, she needed more than her father’s name to win her first mainstream role; dumb luck played a starring role, too. When fifteen-year-old actress Katherine Heigl, who had earned plaudits from French actor Gérard Depardieu for her role in his latest film, My Father the Hero, decided to drop out of a teen cyber-thriller, Hackers, Angie was invited to audition. Even though Angie impressed director Iain Softley, she was up against formidable competition, including Hilary Swank, Heather Graham, and Liv Tyler, for the role of computer whiz kid Kate “Acid Burn” Libby.
Given Angie’s antipathy toward modern technology, it was rather ironic that the English director eventually chose her. Unlike her computer geek brother, she prided herself on using only a pencil. “I hate computers,” she would say during interviews to promote the film. She was not the only one. Her costar Jonny Lee Miller also had a love-hate relationship with the world of technology. “I’m not someone who needs to talk to someone in Russia at four A.M. on the Internet or store lots of information,” he later explained. It was but the first connection on the road to romance.
At first glance, Jonny Lee Miller neatly fitted the template of the rather fey young men who had drifted through her life. Good-looking, quietly charming yet diffident to the point of shyness, Miller, known as “Jonny Leave Me Alone” by his friend actor Robert Carlyle, seemed the antithesis of a strong, macho male. For Angie, an alpha female, he fitted the mold established by her friendship with the openly gay Chris Landon, her sobbing live-in lover, the “nerdy” Brian Evans, and of course her brother, the favored son endlessly waiting for his father to give his career a kick-start rather than relying on his own chops as his sister was doing.
Yet, as she was soon to discover, Miller was much wilder than his meek and mild persona suggested. For once the intensely competitive Miss Jolie found herself uncomfortably lagging behind. Like Angie, Miller was from a theatrical family—his grandfather Bernard Lee played “M” in the first twelve James Bond films—and Miller had appeared onstage and on TV since he was nine. A member of the National Youth Music Theatre, during the summer vacations he and his best friend, actor Jude Law, regularly performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. Before joining the cast of Hackers, he had held his own playing opposite the redoubtable Helen Mirren, the hardboiled detective in the TV drama Prime Suspect.
Initially, his pleasantly hypnotic English accent proved Angie’s undoing. “Englishmen appear to be so reserved, but underneath they’re expressive, perverse, and wild,” she says. She soon discovered that Miller, a serious runner, skydiver, and martial-arts fan, was as fascinated by tattoos as his new girlfriend. Two years older than Angie, he had a rat and a snake on his arm, courtesy of his “crazy” youth. Together they would explore the world of the needle much more intensely.
In the early days, though, the tomboy in her tried, and usually failed, to best her costar on Rollerblades, the couple bonding as they prepped for their roles as cool computer hackers. When they reported for work in September 1994, they spent several hours a days padded up and learning to Rollerblade in Battery Park in New York City and another four hours a day under the tutelage of a computer expert learning how to type and understand the intricacies of cyberspace. “Racing Jonny on Rollerblades was a big part of our relationship,” Angie recalls. “We had read a lot about computers and met computer hackers. With a lot of lines, I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
For his part, as much as Miller professed to be a Luddite, he spent hours playing computer games, one of his favorites the adventures of a buxom action heroine, Lara Croft. Angie, on the other hand, to the bemusement of other cast members, found a scene in which she had to rummage through garbage in an alleyway endlessly amusing. “I thought of you when I was doing it,” she told a fellow conspirator in the real-life garbage run on Steven Paul’s house.
Perhaps appropriately, given the juvenile nature of the movie, her love affair with Jonny evolved in the schoolyard, much of the filming taking place in November and December 1994 at Stuyvesant High School in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan. “I always fall in love while I’m working on a film. It’s such an intense thing,” she recalls. At the end of a passionate and at times exhilarating experience came the inevitable feeling of deflation and depression as the bonds forged in the intensity of the moment were casually cut. In spite of their closeness, when filming ended, Angie, once again sad and despondent, asked Miller to forget about her and move on. She returned to Los Angeles, but they nonetheless kept in touch, developing a long-distance relationship.
Angie had work to do. In many ways her role as the edgy but brilliant tomboy “Acid Burn” anticipated her next character, a charismatic drifter named Legs Sadovsky in Foxfire, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel set in the 1950s. It’s the story of a group of high school girls who are inspired to confront a sexually abusive teacher when a mysterious female James Dean–like character appears out of nowhere to urge them to take on authority and explore their true natures, including their dawning sexuality. The opening shot establishes the mythic mood, the leather-clad Legs dramatically arriving at the school gate in the middle of a thunderstorm. “I saw Legs as being androgynous but sexual in a very animal sort of way; free, fascinating, intriguing and touchy,” Angie told writer Gary Dretzka.
Before filming began in Portland, Oregon, in March 1995, she was reminded that for all the exploration of character, the search for essence, she was involved in a game for overgrown children. She remembers being in her father’s bedroom excitedly showing him the butterfly knife she was going to carry and the leather pants she was going to wear for the Foxfire shoot. He then showed her the hair extensions, bracelets, and rings he would be using in the Los Angeles–based crime drama Heat. “It was just like two kids playing dress up,” she recalls. For all her issues with her father, there remained a residual bedrock of understanding. “Now it’s great because we can talk on a level few people can talk to their parents on,” she told Empire magazine. “Not only can we talk about our work, but our work is about our emotion, our lives, the games we play, what goes through our heads.” The good news, too, was that he was back working, doing what he did best. As much as she railed against him, he was her dad and she cared about him. Watching a man she admired, albeit grudgingly, spiral out of control had been a painful experience.
For Angie there was no boundary between a role and real life. As she noted, she absorbed the character, becoming that person and living through the role. On set, she was Legs Sadovsky even when the cameras stopped rolling. She was not the only one. Fellow actress Hedy Burress was as granola offscreen as on, enjoying hiking and communing with nature; Sarah Rosenberg was the token grunge; while Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu was a contradictory presence: A crop-haired motorbike dyke, she gave off a butch vibe but was actually sweet, demure, and easily dominated. Both on-screen and off, Angie was an intimidating presence, her dark, brooding charisma terrifying and attracting.
Actress Michelle Brookhurst, who played the class bitch, Cindy, vividly describes having to shout, “Who the fuck are you?” in a potentially violent face-off with Angie’s Legs. The problem was that Michelle, then sixteen, was wary of Angie. It didn’t help her self-possession that, in Method acting style, Angie would yell and scream and continuously clear her throat in preparation for the scene.
“Even at nineteen, Angie was the most formidable person I have ever met,” recalls Michelle, now a stylist. “Everyone was slightly terrified of her, not because she was mean or unkind. She was not like that at all. It was like meeting a serial killer or a member of the Mafia. There was something dark there that scared me. She had that unsettling presence. Watching her was like watching a snake uncurling. She is inaccessible, like a force of nature, as if she was from a different planet.”
The screen “scent” left by Angie was sniffed out by film critic Robert Butler. He noted perceptively: “If Foxfire is remembered for anything it will be as one of the earliest screen appearances of Angelina Jolie, who has a face the camera loves and seems a likely candidate for fully fledged stardom.”
Certainly, Angie was by far the most experienced actor in the group of teenage girls sequestered in a luxury hotel in Portland’s Pioneer Square with an acting coach. Shimizu struggled with her role as a troubled drug addict and needed particular attention. For first-time director Annette Haywood-Carter, this was a baptism of fire. During filming virtually all members of the camera crew were fired, and the girls were endlessly indulged—filming halted for hours, for example, so that Hedy Burress could enjoy her “moment” alone on an empty bridge that served as a metaphor for personal growth. Editorially there was indecision about whether this was a liberating revenge fantasy or a rite-of-passage movie, as Maddy, a conventional young woman played by Burress, has her sexuality awakened by Angie’s Legs. Every night the girls were handed new pages of dialogue to learn, reflecting the indecision at the top. In the end, Haywood-Carter filmed two endings, one with Legs and Maddy kissing, the other with Maddy holding back.
While the kiss ended up on the cutting-room floor, another quasi-erotic sequence did make it to the big screen. In a long scene shot in an empty house, Legs tattoos the breast of each of her teenage disciples. “I loved doing it; it was sensual and fun,” she later told James Lipton. “It was a very lovely time between women.”
While there was sexual hesitancy on film, among the actors and crew there was no such inhibition, the eight-week shoot turning into one long and decadent sorority party. On one occasion all the girls went to a strip club, a bespectacled blonde lap dancing for Angie and her “wasted” crew. For the first few weeks Jenny’s girlfriend visited from New York, bringing small presents. Angie bided her time. Although she was still developing her long-distance relationship with Jonny Lee Miller, she admitted that she fell in love with Shimizu the moment she saw her audition for the movie.
At first Angie thought the dark-haired model was a rival for her role of Legs, but she relaxed when she realized Shimizu was up for Goldie, the troubled addict. “I noticed her sweater and the way her pants fitted and I thought: ‘My God!’ I was getting incredibly strong sexual feelings,” she told the London Sunday Mirror. For the first two weeks the girls just lay on a hotel bed chatting. Eventually Jenny, then twenty-four, made the first move and undressed her costar. “She was very sexual and very comfortable and very domineering. I could tell she wasn’t a normal teenager,” Jenny later told Sky TV, acknowledging Angie’s precocious behavior. “I’ve never kissed anyone with a bigger mouth than Angelina Jolie. I always thought I had huge lips, but when I met her it was like two big water beds.” Much of their passion lay in resisting temptation before wildly embracing each other, Jenny describing this masochist element of their love affair as being acted out in their minds rather than in bed. “It’s not like we dressed in leather and hung each other up in chains or anything like that,” she said.
When Miller, who was under the impression that he was Angie’s boyfriend, visited the set, Angie took the English actor and Shimizu out for dinner and explained that she cared for them both and that she and her costar were sleeping together. “She was honest—that’s how she’s been her whole life,” Jenny recalled. After this heart-to-heart, the three went back to the local strip club. “I don’t really do threesomes,” Jenny explained later. “It was a good friendship for all of us to have. There wasn’t much conversation with Jonny. I think he was very threatened by me. Who wouldn’t be?”
In the peripatetic world of acting, Angie returned to Los Angeles after filming ended in April, while Miller bleached his hair and flew to Scotland to appear in Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s movie based on Irvine Welsh’s tawdry tale of drugs and low life among a motley crew of Edinburgh youths.
Around this time another man came into her life who would have a profound influence on her career. Her brother James’s graduation from USC took place during the filming of Foxfire, and she had wanted a clause in the contract to allow her leave to attend the ceremony. For some reason it was omitted. Angie was furious, and went to the graduation anyway—a fraught family event that saw the permanent estrangement of her mother and her mother’s sister, Debbie, over the trivial matter of the allocation of tickets. As a result of this contractual mix-up, Angie decided to move to a bigger agency, William Morris. As she was low on the agency totem pole—at the time, Billy Bob Thornton was riding high with Sling Blade, Quentin Tarantino had a hit with Pulp Fiction, and Sean Penn and Bruce Willis were hot—she was relegated to an agent’s assistant, Geyer Kosinski.
Inside the William Morris offices, Kosinski, an exuberant if rather arrogant party animal, enthusiastically championed her cause, even when others questioned his judgment. She was seen as a wild card, a starlet who had done little of note—apart from attract the wrong sort of publicity. “He believed in her absolutely,” recalls a WMA colleague. “He told everyone that she was going to be a great movie star.” In time his home would become a shrine to Angie, every room dominated by pictures of his client. While she thought it was “creepy,” he soon had her in his thrall. Tough, thick-skinned, and driven, Kosinski was the classic hard-boiled agent who went everywhere with several cell phones—even on a date.
Although Angie liked his focus, her mother was not so impressed. As Angie’s manager, Marcheline had effectively guided her career to date, keeping an eye on contracts and accounts while helping with scripts. Now all that changed, with Kosinski driving the editorial side of her career and Marcheline taking over the finances—for a reduced percentage of Angie’s fees. While this arrangement could charitably be described as creative tension, there was little affection between mother and agent over the coming months and years. At some point Marche was delighted when she discovered a $15,000 payment discrepancy, and thereafter she watched Angie’s accounts like a hawk. For his part, Kosinski frequently undermined Marche’s attempts to develop film and TV projects for herself and her children.
Over time Angie and Geyer developed a dysfunctional father/daughter relationship. While Angie felt she had the final say over her career, Kosinski was the one who pulled the strings. Eventually their relationship evolved into the Hollywood equivalent of a royal court, Marche and Kosinski intriguing against each other. Ultimately, though, it was Kosinski who came to control Queen Angie. A family friend who watched this dance observed: “Angie is a typical Gemini and split the responsibilities. Marche didn’t trust Kosinski, and while Angie loved her mother, she pitted them against each other. It was checks and balances. There was no love lost there.”
Nor was there any love lost between Jonny Lee Miller and Jenny Shimizu. As much as he might have considered himself Angie’s boyfriend, it was clear that her relationship with Jenny was no passing fancy. The two women continued to see each other in Hollywood, their ideal night spent cruising strip clubs with Angelina in hot pants and a matching skintight vest. “I even took her to dominatrix joints, and she loved them,” Jenny told writer Georgina Dickinson. “The naughtier the better. Then we’d go back to wherever we were staying, desperate to rip each other’s clothes off and act out the moves we had seen. They were amazing nights.”
Even though she was younger and less sexually experienced than Jenny, it was Angie who was the dominant in their relationship, reflecting her long-held desire to “be one of the boys.” “If a strap-on was involved, she would wear it,” joked another friend from this sexually experimental period in her life. “She would be the one to tell you to suck her cock.”
While her friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, was heterosexual and in a relationship, when Angie first met her she invited her and her boyfriend for a threesome. The girl declined, but nonetheless her friendship with Angie flourished, and she came to know Angie well over the next few years. Marche was thrilled about this friendship, observing that she was the first girlfriend Angie had ever had that she was not sleeping with. As this platonic girlfriend recalls: “I’d never met a true bisexual before Angie and wasn’t sure if they even really existed. To quote my little sister: ‘Bisexuals are just greedy.’ But I feel Angie is a true bisexual. She lusted after women, just as she did with men. It definitely was not an act. She is mega-sexual. When it comes to men, she is interested in those in the spotlight. When it comes to women, they are her true love. She is attracted to women she is friends with.”
Psychologist Iris Martin sees more in Angie’s behavior than adolescent experimentation, tracing it back to her early months left alone in her crib, her life an unconscious search for a mother. “Most women have women friends and they are like your sisters. You don’t want to fuck them. If you are starved of intimacy, if you have been abandoned, you feel like nothing inside. If you have an attraction to a woman, it is going to end up sexual. The slightest reaction to intimacy is completely overblown, as it taps into her well of neediness.”
Psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George also focuses on Angie’s scattered childhood, her disassociation from herself. “Bisexuality is part of being lost; it is a way of expressing yourself. If you don’t understand yourself and what you need, you are going to experiment.”
There was, too, a darker motive behind Angie’s sexual experimentation and willing embrace of bisexuality—revenge. On one occasion she and Jenny Shimizu went to a photo booth near the beach at Santa Monica and made out for the camera, Angie licking and French-kissing her lover. When she next saw her father, she asked him if he wanted to see some pictures, pulling out the lewd set of her and Jenny. She knew full well that Stacey Pickren had left him for another woman, and teasing and humiliating him was her payback for the fact that he had left her mother. “I think a lot of her dabbling with other women was to take a stab at her father,” observes Lauren Taines.
Whatever the motivation behind her on-and-off relationship with Jenny, she was reunited with Jonny Lee Miller that September to publicize Hackers. Their first experience of a mainstream release was not entirely enjoyable. The reviews were lukewarm to hostile and, in spite of all her efforts, in the round of media interviews, the chief interest in Angie was about her famous father. The focus was as much on why she no longer used her last name as on her role in the movie. “I don’t want to be hired because of my name,” was her patient refrain. “I’m not ashamed of my background. I’m very proud of my father and the work he’s done. But I don’t want anyone to be expecting me to be him.” Little did she know the unwitting part her father had played in her snagging her first decent role.
There was no chance of anyone’s expecting her to be like Jon Voight for her next movie, Mojave Moon. Publicity for Hackers over, in October 1995 she headed out to the desert in Palmdale, California, where she was soon sensuously licking an ice-cold beer bottle in a roadside diner in a blatant attempt to lure middle-aged Danny Aiello into giving her a ride. The comedy thriller perfectly showcased her sexual presence; critic Rod Dreher described her as “so sinuously sexy she makes contemporaries Liv Tyler and Drew Barrymore look like church ladies.”
Throughout the shoot, she was nursing a secret sadness: Her grandmother Barbara Voight was in the final stages of bone cancer, and on December 3, just days after filming wrapped, the eighty-five-year-old matriarch passed away in Palm Beach, Florida. During her illness, Barbara, an indomitable crackerjack of a woman whose personality reminded friends of Angelina’s, had displayed her customary cheery disregard for age and infirmity, her son Jon deliberately choosing film roles that would give him the chance to take her to parts of the world she had never seen. It was for this filial purpose that he took the part of agent Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, which starred Tom Cruise. His mother had always wanted to see Prague, where the blockbuster was filmed. “She loved it,” Voight recalls, describing how he pushed his mother around the castle district in her wheelchair. “In the last year of her life we had that wonderful experience.” A fighter to the end and filled with a life force, his mother soon began asking: “Where are we going next?”
As it happened, two big screen projects presented themselves. In Rosewood Voight was offered the role of a white storekeeper who saves black neighbors during a vicious race attack, and in Anaconda he was due to travel to the Amazon to be eaten by a giant snake. His mother had no hesitation. “I’ve never been to the Amazon,” she said. She passed away before she could make that trip, but not before her illness had encouraged her youngest son, Chip, to give up his addiction to gambling and go back to songwriting.
It was Jon who took on the responsibility of speaking for the family at her funeral. He wrote a lot of notes the day before—he is always careful to prepare his speeches—but after a restless night was struggling to find the right tone with which to speak about his beloved mother. In the morning, when he told Angie about the trouble he was having, he remembers that she spoke to him like a director to an actor. “You’ll do great, Dad. Just speak from your heart; you’ve got it all.” Her encouragement helped him capture his mother’s irrepressible spirit in his tribute. “There’s something about Angie that knows how to handle things,” he observes.
For a girl intrigued by funerals, even Angie was taken aback by her grandmother’s bizarre final requests. At the open-casket visitation before the funeral, Marcheline was one of the first mourners to go forward and pay her final respects to her mother-in-law. When she returned to the pew, she was ashen-faced. “Angie, I want you to be really prepared when you go up there,” she told her. Angie asked what was wrong with her grandmother. Marche would not explain, saying, “You will have to see for yourself.” When Angie went to say goodbye, the matriarch of the Voight family was laid out according to her last wishes: dressed in a red bikini with a set of golf clubs by her side. She died as she lived—one of life’s great enjoyers who could raise a smile, or a rictus grin, even in the face of death.
From being one of the congregation, Angie was once again just a face in the crowd when she watched her boyfriend enjoy his moment of triumph a few weeks later. She flew to Glasgow, Scotland, in February 1996 to join Jonny and the rest of the cast at the premiere of Trainspotting. Described as “Jonny Lee Miller’s girlfriend,” she was such an unknown at the after-party that she was not even mentioned in media reports of the list of attending celebrities.
This was her boyfriend’s chance to bask in the limelight as critics heaped praise on a film that, despite the gruesome scenes of drug abuse and violence, was described as “a true original movie which everyone should see.” Danny Boyle’s film went on to win an Oscar nomination as well as British and European awards. The scene in which Jonny’s character, Sick Boy, meditated on the cultural significance of Sean Connery was singled out as matching any sequence dreamed up by cult hero Quentin Tarantino. This was Scotland’s answer to Pulp Fiction.
Six weeks later, on March 28, 1996, Jonny and Angie were married in an intimate, almost apologetically small civil ceremony in Los Angeles. Only her mother and Jonny’s best friend, Jude Law, were witnesses. Absent were her brother and her father, who had previously met Jonny on the set of Hackers but was still filming Mission: Impossible. Also missing was Jonny’s family—parents Alan and Anne and his journalist sister, Joanna. They had called him in Los Angeles in some agitation when they had read about their future daughter-in-law’s very public discussion of her lesbian lover as well as her drug issues. They wanted to know what their son was getting himself into. Little did he know.
“SICK BOY” WEDS FORMER ADDICT was the dismissive headline in the London Daily Mirror, Angie confessing: “I have done just about every drug possible, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and, my favorite, heroin. Although I have been through a lot of dark days, Jonny has helped me see the light.”
Though it wasn’t her first walk on the conservative side, it seemed an impetuously conventional decision to marry at all. After all, Angie was still seeing Jenny, still attracted to other women and exploring her sexuality. In marriage she was, once again, the sidekick and not the star. As a child, she had lived in the shadow of the favored son, James, who was always seen as the one most likely to succeed. At school and as she took her first steps on Hollywood’s greasy ladder, she had parried questions about her famous father, constantly measuring herself against his luminous and intriguing life’s work. Now she had hitched her wagon to a man whose career seemed about to take off. Trainspotting was his breakout movie, a chance for stardom that his colleagues, notably Ewan McGregor, seized with both hands.
Enough about them, Angie’s fragile ego protested, what about me? It was only days after she had said “I do” that she was having second and third thoughts. As a family friend notes: “She was wild, impetuous, and adventurous. At that time in her life she didn’t see marriage as lasting forever; she saw it as an adventure.” In other ways, marriage was a sanctuary, a haven of independence from her mother. With no Bill Day on the scene, Marcheline’s total attention was on her daughter. They spoke every day on the phone, her mother learning all Angie’s secrets. It was as claustrophobic as it was affirming. Her husband, though he didn’t know it, was a buffer of sorts, a lightning rod and a useful way to get out of things Marcheline wanted but Angie didn’t. Soon, though, it was clear to Angie that what she wanted to get out of was the marriage.
On what was effectively their honeymoon—a European junket in May to promote Hackers—she realized that all the media questions concerned her father and her husband. No one seemed interested in her. It became so irritating that she said on Spanish TV that she was not even related to Jon Voight. “It was weird to immediately be married and then you kind of lose your identity,” she told The New York Times with a wide-eyed wonder that was as naïve as it was instructive. “You’re suddenly somebody’s wife and you are like: ‘Oh, I’m half a couple now. I’ve lost me.’ ”
A morning TV show where the happy couple were showered with rice and given a toaster as a wedding present was a turning point. “I need to get myself back,” she thought. Whoever that was—she herself admitted that she spent so much time living the lives of her movie characters that she didn’t have “much of a personal life” of her own.
What was intriguing was that in a matter of weeks, her private and very intimate civil ceremony was the most talked-about wedding of the year. She told journalists that she had had a large cross tattooed on her stomach the day before the wedding as a tribute to her beloved. It covered a little dragon with a blue tongue that she had had done in Amsterdam during a riotous trip that involved games on a water bed. “No longer appropriate,” she explained.
She revealed, too, that their union hadn’t been a big white wedding but “a small black wedding.” As intimate as it was, she made sure the world knew all about it, telling the media that the groom wore black leather, while she wore black rubber trousers and a white shirt with his name written on the back in blood carefully extracted from her body with a clean surgical needle. “It’s your husband; you’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special,” she explained, her own love of ritual overlaying the existing marriage rites. Not so much the blushing bride as the bloody bride, especially as the groom had a long name. Fourteen letters, to be precise. A lot of blood, but more ink spilled all over the celebrity magazines as the media became increasingly intrigued by this bizarre and highly photogenic actress. Sexy and dark; it was an explosive media combination.
While Angie ruminated on what she had gotten herself into, it was Jonny’s mother, Anne, who inadvertently put a spoke in their romantic wheel. She worked in the production department at the BBC in London and had been contacted by her friend Johanna Ray, a casting agent and the ex-wife of tough-guy actor Aldo Ray, about the latest movie she was casting, Playing God. The surreal tale of drugs, gangsters, and a good doctor gone bad was the breakout movie for X-Files star David Duchovny. The actor had such an influence over the $24 million production that he even chose the director, former circus impresario Andy Wilson, because he liked his work on the British cop series Cracker.
Even before the filming of Playing God, scheduled for August 1996, began, the production was a mess. There were almighty arguments about the script, originally by Mark Haskell Smith but rewritten by Larry Gross, and deemed by Andy Wilson to be “unfilmable.” Not only was the script unfinished, but the editorial team was having hell’s own job finding a leading lady. After talking with Anne Miller, Johanna Ray watched Hackers and liked what she saw of Angelina Jolie. When she discussed her name with the Playing God producers, however, they were against even calling her in for an audition.
They originally wanted the gangster’s moll, Claire, to be a big name and a blonde, penciling in Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, and Species star Natasha Henstridge for the part. By contrast, Andy Wilson, directing his first Hollywood feature, saw the bloody thriller as a “weird, slightly surreal” homage to maverick director Nicolas Roeg, who made the iconic movies Performance, Walkabout, and Don’t Look Now. He felt the lover of the ruthless crook played by Timothy Hutton should be dark-haired, with an enigmatic European quality. Dutch actress Famke Janssen, star of GoldenEye; Jennifer Tilly, from Bound; and actors from Twin Peaks all auditioned, but no one was deemed suitable. As Andy Wilson explained, “Casting is 90 percent of the filmmaking. It is being an alchemist, working out if the actors fit together. A director is like a sorcerer. Anyone can make a film. It’s all in the prep; that’s where you exhaust yourself.”
Unfortunately, these sorcerers could not find a female apprentice who would have the right chemistry with David Duchovny, who played a blacklisted doctor with a drug problem, and the devilish hoodlum, Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton. Angie Jolie was literally the last actor to come in for casting. Such was the frantic nature of their search that Wilson used a handheld camera to film Angie in his office as Duchovny watched from the side. “She came in and hardly looked at any of us,” recalls Wilson. “She read for a scene around a bonfire in the desert and she was electrifying. She had a great understanding of what she was doing.” Both he and David Duchovny knew this was the girl for them, but the producers had other ideas, continuing to insist on a blonde “name” to help carry the movie. After increasingly acrimonious discussions, the director and his leading man finally won out, and Angie found herself being fitted for costumes—clothes by designers like Dolce and Gabbana, Richard Tyler, and Mark Wong Nark—mere days before preproduction began. It was quite a transformation from her personal wardrobe of leather pants and tank tops. “Angelina had to look like an expensive sports car—sleek and streamlined,” said costume designer Mary Zophres.
During filming, coproducer Melanie Greene said graciously of the female lead: “She has the wisdom of an old soul . . . the grace and style of an older woman. You want to peel away the layers when you meet her.”
The casting of Angelina was such a coup for her ambitious young agent, Geyer Kosinski, that even though he had broken bones in a boating accident in late May, he rose Lazarus-like from his sickbed to call Variety, the Hollywood trade journal, and personally confirm their story that Angie was the female lead for Playing God. In doing so he ensured that he, not Marcheline, was linked with the up-and-coming young actress.
At long last David Duchovny had got the girl. Or rather, he thought he had got the girl. His rival Timothy Hutton had other ideas. It greatly amused the director and other members of the cast and crew to see Hutton and Duchovny, two legendary Hollywood swordsmen, vying for the attention of a woman fifteen years younger than either of them. That Hutton was reportedly dating Uma Thurman, and Duchovny, who years later entered a rehab center to confront his sex addiction, was seeing actress Téa Leoni did not seem to matter as the duo dueled for the affections of the “newly married but still dating” Mrs. Miller.
As for the director, he was thrilled with the offscreen shenanigans. “Angie was only twenty-one but as sexy as all hell. She enjoyed the company of all the guys,” recalls Andy Wilson. “During the preproduction and filming she was splitting up with Jonny, and for some reason it gave her great energy, which was fabulous for the movie. Then Tim and Angie started their affair on set. Tim was besotted with her, besotted. Actually, David was rather jealous.”
There were many consolations for the dejected star. When filming began in August, virtually every day carloads and sometimes coachloads of young girls, all X-Files fans, would appear at the location, some even throwing their panties at Duchovny. As Hutton and Angie made merry, Duchovny, according to Andy Wilson, began an affair with a crew member.
Although Hutton pursued and won the girl in real life, Duchovny, in Wilson’s view, enjoyed one of two of the “sexiest sex scenes never seen by a cinema audience.” Filmed by Anthony Richmond, whose bedroom scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Roeg’s Don’t Look Nowis widely credited as the most erotic sex scene in cinema history, Duchovny made love to a naked Angie as music from Massive Attack played in the background.
In the end, Disney and Touchstone, who were funding the movie, axed the scene, arguing that it was too erotic and romantic and detracted from the gangster plotline. By contrast, an equally sexy scene shot between Hutton and Angie in the back of his Jaguar as fellow gangster Gary Dourdan looked on was deemed by the producers to be too much of a celebration of the criminal classes. For the public, who will never see the uncut version, Wilson attests that the scenes were “fucking horny.”
As for Angie’s husband, cuckolded after four months of marriage, Jonny Lee Miller spent his days mooning about the Hollywood home of Roger Taylor, from the rock band Queen, which the actor was renting for the duration of his now-estranged wife’s shoot. During what Andy Wilson described as Miller’s “cry fest,” he would pour his heart out to English actor Andy Tiernan, who played one of Hutton’s heavies and, like Miller, had cut his teeth on the TV crime drama Prime Suspect. Kept apart from his wife, Miller would ask Tiernan how Angie was coping on set, using his friend as a shoulder to cry on. As Andy Wilson saw it, Angie and Miller “were just too young to marry.” He recalled: “I had to treat all actors equally, so I tried not to get too involved in what was going on.”
Eventually Jonny did the decent thing—and went off with another woman. Or two other women, to be precise, if only on the screen. He flew to Montreal, where, thanks to the recommendation of Keith Carradine, he had been cast in Afterglow, a four-handed romantic comedy directed by Alan Rudolph. He played a buttoned-up young executive who does not want to have children with his sexy wife, Lara Flynn Boyle. When she has an affair with a local handyman, he enjoys a fling with the handyman’s wife, played by Julie Christie, in her heyday one of the world’s most desirable women. Doubtless the irony of the situation was not lost on Miller.
While her husband might not have wanted to hear it, Mrs. Miller was coping remarkably well on set, coolly and calmly embracing an unusual filming process. With the director deeming the script “garbage,” Angie and her fellow actors would spend much of each day improvising their dialogue before the cameras rolled. It was a test of character and ability, and, according to Wilson, she “pitched in like a rock-and-roll star.”
As Angie became more and more comfortable with improvisation, Wilson could sense that “an extraordinary actress” was emerging from the creative chrysalis. “When you film people, you don’t film technique or talent, you film the eyes,” he says. “What is going on in there will be captured by the camera. With Angie there was an enormous amount going on. She knew about needles and tattoos and heroin and she had an innate wild sexuality. That is what the camera captured. It filmed her courage and her chutzpah. As with all great actors, you never focus on technique, you film their spirit.”
Taking a page from her mother’s book, she was the only member of the cast who bought the director a gift when filming ended. “It was perfectly chosen and very touching,” he says. Indeed, at the end of every film Angie was punctilious about buying presents for cast and crew. She was aware that the big-name actors who earned the most were invariably given the most handsome and lavish gifts, so she ensured that no one was left out.
Work was now flowing for Angie, who flew from Los Angeles to central Texas to immerse herself in True Women, a sweeping historical saga spanning five decades, from the Texas Revolution through the Civil War. For once she kept her clothes on, which was just as well, as the TV movie, filmed on location in October and November, attracted the attention of a former and a future First Lady and a future president. The then governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura, as well as Lady Bird Johnson, were among the spectators watching the reenactment of the stormy scenes surrounding the Reconstruction Convention of 1868. They looked on as Angie’s character, Georgie Lawshe Woods, a spoiled and self-centered Southern belle who goes through a humbling epiphany when she discovers that she is part Cherokee Indian, delivered a retort to the body of male politicians who rejected the idea of female suffrage.
It was a powerful moment in a vivid, if overly earnest, historical drama that attempted to capture the hardships and triumphs of three women in one extended family whose lives were evoked by their descendant Janice Woods Windle in her best-selling 1994 novel. As director Karen Arthur, who corralled a largely female cast, observed: “Growing up in our country we never find out about the women, the normal women. These women are heroes to everybody whose lives touch theirs, but they were unsung.”
To prepare for their roles, the three leads, Angelina, Annabeth Gish, and Dana Delany, visited many of the real locations, met with their characters’ descendants, and communed with their spirits in Texas graveyards. During filming the author was on hand every day to answer questions about their characters. Dana Delany, who was the first of the trio to sign up for the movie, said of her character, frontierswoman Sarah Ashby McClure: “I thought of Sarah doing everything that John Wayne does, but she did it pregnant.” It was a test of a different kind for Angie, whose performance easily measured up against those of her more experienced costars. When the movie was screened the following May, Angie was praised for making her character the most interesting, if least noble, of the three.
Angie was still immersed in the feisty character of Georgie Lawshe Woods when, during the filming of True Women, she went for an audition that very nearly proved her undoing. It was for another period piece, a TV biopic about the controversial governor of Alabama George Wallace. She was reading for the part of Cornelia, his outrageous and sexy second wife, in front of veteran director John Frankenheimer, helmsman of The Manchurian Candidate, The Train, Birdman of Alcatraz, and many other films. Wearing bright red lipstick and a black dress, she nervously did her reading. Then Frankenheimer, in an attempt to calm her nerves and break the ice, casually mentioned, “So Jon’s your father. How’s he doing and what’s he up to these days?”
For Angie, not to mention the willful Georgie, this was a familiar and maddening refrain. As she later told Back Stage magazine: “My heart just sank and I thought: ‘He didn’t pay attention to anything I just did.’ ” She found herself suggesting that Frankenheimer call her father himself if he was so interested in his health, and stalked out of the audition.
Within minutes Geyer Kosinski was on the telephone, berating her for storming out and for “dressing like a geisha girl.” As far as Angie was concerned, the elderly director had been rude and hadn’t paid attention to what she was saying. “He didn’t even care about me as an individual,” she complained.
Kosinski convinced her to wipe the lipstick off, calm down, and return to the audition for a second try. It was a triumph, and she landed the part that would change her life. Very soon everyone would be talking about her, rather than about the men in her life.