I am fortunate to have met a few properly famous people in this job. You get used to it. Sometimes they are shorter than you would have guessed. Sometimes taller. The occasional one is a bit awkward. Most are perfectly nice. I am over it.
Angelina Jolie is different. I have met her before. Back in 2010 she made a good job of defending The Tourist, that dull comedy-thriller with Johnny Depp, at a round-table interview in Paris that included me. If I remember correctly I avoided passing out or bursting into tears. Let us see if that continues in a less crowded setting.
“Hi!” she exhales sweetly.
“HELLO!” I say too loudly. Why am I suddenly Brian Blessed? She lets me shake her hand as if we are both the same species. Must calm down. I’ll talk to Pablo Larraín, the director of Maria, for a while. Let’s pretend we’re all in the game of life together.
“Hello, Pedro. I met you last year in Venice,” I say, showing off a little. “I was in Venice again this year. There could hardly be a better environment to unveil Maria, which was terrific, and...”
Hang on. Did I just get his name wrong? I did. It’s too late to correct. This is just great. Why don’t I throw a glass of water over them both while I’m at it?
Jolie, daughter of the actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, has been a public presence for about a quarter of a century. It is an unusual career. She has been in a lot of well-known films. She has been in a lot of hits. Two Lara Croft flicks. Clint Eastwood’s twisty Changeling. Just fabulous in Disney’s Maleficent. Yet there is a sense, despite an early Oscar win for James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted, that she hasn’t quite got the material she deserved.
Like Elizabeth Taylor before her – a more volatile, shouty presence – Jolie hasn’t let that hinder her passage to era-defining renown. Marriages to Jonny Lee Miller, Billy Bob Thornton and, most notoriously, Brad Pitt have generated headlines. Her tireless work for humanitarian causes draws praise. Now within sight of 50, she remains the greatest movie star we have.
And finally she has the role she needed. Larraín follows up Jackie, his take on Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer, an off-centre study of Princess Diana, with another spooky meditation on the loneliness that comes with extreme fame. In Maria, which did indeed premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, Jolie inhabits the polished carapace of Maria Callas as the opera singer lives out her last days in an autumnal Paris. It is a bewitching piece of work – for me, the best in the trilogy – that shows an immense life ending in small steps.
I babble something to Jolie about the two women living very different lives at similar ages. (Callas died at just 53.) Whereas the singer had only poignantly loyal servants to speak with, Jolie is surrounded by people. She is always directing films or speaking at foundations.
“I’m not as surrounded as people think I am,” she says. “It’s usually just me alone with my kids. And now they’re getting older so, often, they’re out. And I’m Mom. I’m at home. I actually have quite a private life in a very small circle. But, yes, you are right in that. What is significantly different is that one of us had the ability to have a family. I think her life would have been very different if she had that. That is certainly what anchors me.”
Jolie has six children, three of whom she had biologically and three of whom she adopted. There have been traumas along the way. Wranglings following her divorce from Pitt, in 2019 – the pair have finally agreed a legal settlement, it was announced this week – are still making work for m’learned friends. In 2013 she had a preventative double mastectomy after a genetic test revealed she had a high probability of contracting breast cancer. All this while remaining prominently in the public eye. This is an aspect of Callas’s life that the actor surely can connect with. She understands the pressure of losing some of yourself to the great mass of strangers.
“Yes, we’re both very public women,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I felt for her more – in that I wanted to know Maria. I was maybe more sensitive about people making assumptions about her maybe because of that. You think you know her. I think probably, without me realising it, there were parts of me that just wanted it to be okay that she was this woman alone in her robe with her glasses – being a human being. I wanted there to be value to that Maria, to that person.”
Yes, the public person. It is hard to prise the Jolie of movies and magazine covers and red carpets away from the person sitting in front of me. Part of me wants to say she comes across like a normal person. Someone you’d meet down the Spar. She seems awfully nice. She does a good job of speaking to this gibbering journalist as if he weren’t behaving like someone who’d just survived a near fatal bang to the head. I imagine, like the late Queen Elizabeth, she had to master that art decades ago. But one is always aware of the aura of celebrity hanging about her coiled form.
What I’m calling Larraín’s lonely-lady trilogy is very much about that pressure. Both Natalie Portman’s Jackie and Kristen Stewart’s Spencer are victims of incessant gaze. They have both been in situations that required them to live up to arbitrary standards set by press and public. Does Jolie recognise that in herself?
“I don’t know. I’ve never lived as a famous person. I just don’t accept that,” she says. “Maybe it’s because my father was famous. So I never believed that it was a real thing. I don’t believe that certain people are different or special. I think they’re quite average. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy into any of it being real.”
This is a big job. In another era Callas’s voice would be simply dubbed unaltered into the actor’s mouth. But that is never wholly convincing. Larraín instead created a blend of the two voices that allowed Jolie to imbue the performances with her own timbre.
“Of course, you don’t want to make a movie about Maria Callas without Maria Callas’s voice,” Larraín explains. “That would be ridiculous. So sometimes it’s 5 per cent. Sometimes it’s 60 per cent. Depending on the scene and the moment. But that’s the only way to do it. There’s no trick here. There’s no illusion.”
All of that puts added pressure on an actor in an already taxing role. It is the sort of thing that could have gone badly wrong. I wonder if she took much persuading.
“I’ve always wanted to work with Pablo,” she says. “I took a few days when I realised it was Maria Callas. Because that’s a big one, of course. But, also, maybe if somebody else had asked me I wouldn’t have said yes. You know you can’t take on something like this if you’re not in the right hands. It could be done so badly. So I felt nervous. But I knew I was in the right hands.”
I wonder if it gets harder or easier to take chances as the years pass. Nicole Kidman, for instance, seems to have become increasingly fearless as she passes through middle age. Just look at her work in Babygirl and The Northman. Some feel a sense of release after a certain point. What is there left to lose?
“It probably gets easier,” Jolie says. “But I think it gets harder to find those pieces. Something happened. There aren’t enough of these projects floating around. I’m so grateful I was invited into this project with all these amazing artists working on this film.”
Jolie has, in recent years, increasingly taken hold of the creative reins. She has directed five features, most engaging with violent conflict, Without Blood, Unbroken and First They Killed My Father among them. You see this a lot with actors these days. As the studios lean more towards cookie-cutter franchises, the performers fashion work that meets their own creative ambitions.
“There’s a lot of focus these days on ‘content’ and amount versus the time and space to take risks,” she says. “It isn’t obvious that this could do well or be popular. It’s an unusual one. But it’s asking questions. It’s trying something. And that’s what you want. That’s why you do it. It’s down to the audience. It’s what the audience wants. If the audience consumes certain types of things, they’ll make more of them. And if the audience doesn’t, it shifts.”
We again get a contrast with Callas. The film finds the singer desperate to make some sort of comeback, but, unlike Jolie, she can’t gain control of her professional life. She is so taken over by pills that when a film-maker – perhaps imagined – visits her, she names him for the sedative Mandrax. Her muddied wanderings about Paris are punctuated by flashbacks to an extraordinary life. She is misused by occupying Nazis in Greece. We get her famous breakthrough in Venice. We watch her mysteriously fall under the spell of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (who, of course, ended up with the subject of the first film in the lonely-lady cycle).
There are clues there about why Callas gained a celebrity that came the way of no other opera diva in the postwar era. One can’t imagine a similar film about Joan Sutherland or Christa Ludwig. Can we identify the distinguishing quality?
“I am one of her fans. But that question might be better for those who’ve always loved her and her sound,” Jolie says. “I think she was a great performer. I think there was a lot of emotion to her work. She wasn’t just cold and technically good. She had a real depth of emotion. There was a truth to her performances. She was very committed and good at what she did.”
Her personal history was also part of it, though. Right?
“I think she lived an interesting life,” Jolie says. “You never know what it is that captivates people. I don’t know if I can understand it, but she was an interesting person. Just a truly interesting human being.”
It must be hard being Angelina Jolie, but she makes an effort to connect – so much so that, by the close, I can just about believe I am with a regular human being who eats toast and watches telly. Maybe it is possible to survive that degree of fame.
“I’m a public person, which I take seriously, and I share my work with people,” she says. “We share stories together. We share empathy. We share adventures. We share a laugh. We share whatever it may be. Right? Because I’m a storyteller. But I never adjusted my life that way. I travel. I have children. I read. I write. I live.”
Maria is in cinemas from Friday, January 10th
