WASHINGTON — The woman in question is always right in front of everyone's eyes, but still they persist in asking: Who is she?
It applies to both the suspected double agent Angelina Jolie plays in the spy thriller Salt and to the actress herself, one of the world's most famous women — though the world, insatiably, perpetually, wants to know more.
She has obliged the curiosity by defying easy identification.
The gothic, spooky ingénue turned seductive femme-fatale siren turned female action hero, she's also the mother of six, a daring U.N. goodwill ambassador who travels regularly to violent and impoverished nations, and companion to a man who makes the rest of his gender look like cartoon drawings.
Her screen characters have a lot to live up to.
In Salt, opening Friday, Jolie is once again in attack mode as a CIA operative suspected of being a mole for a Russian sleeper cell that is trying to restart the Cold War as something a little more hot. Is she wrongly accused? A traitor playing innocent?
The movie's sinister twists are what intrigued the actress.
"I loved that she wasn't completely good. There's something about that," Jolie says, smiling warmly.
"Not to say that's me. But there's certainly a side of me that isn't completely ..." She searches for the word.
"Sane," she chooses.
"Or completely 'even' all the time."Her eyebrows lift, just slightly, over intense eyes. She smiles again.
"We all have our dark sides," she says.
As someone whose identity has shifted dramatically over the years, it's obvious why Evelyn Salt would appeal to her. While the rest of the world questions Salt, doubts her, cheers for her or roots against her, only the woman herself knows her true motivation. Jolie is the same way.
"My evolution, and any extremes in my evolution, has been my personality, out of the nature of what's inside me," Jolie says.
"I'm very unaware of my public self. I don't read anything written about me. I don't look at magazines. I only watch the films and premieres if I have to. I still haven't seen some of my films.""If you become aware of a public self, you're in danger of becoming a very artificial person."In person, Jolie, 35, is delicate in a way that seems the antithesis of her furious screen alter egos.
At a suite in the Ritz-Carlton in Washington neighborhood Georgetown, not far from where she shot many of Salt's chase scenes through the capital, she has trouble sliding a steel coffee table closer to the hotel room couch for her water.
Try to do it for her, however, and you realize —damn, that table is heavy. She purses her lips in a playful smile that seems to ask: Who's delicate now?
The surprising adjective for this iconic screen vixen in real life is ... sweet. Her smile, when it really turns on, is big and goofy. Genuine.
It comes out when she spots a picture of a baby on a stranger's cellphone, reaching out for it:
"Is that your daughter? ... Oh. So cuuuuute."With 2-year-old twins at home, she looks at the picture again and asks, almost conspiratorially, how the baby's hat manages to stay on. When told it doesn't, she leans back on the couch, nodding knowingly.
Liev Schreiber, who co-stars in Salt as a CIA colleague, says parenthood is a surefire way to bond with the enigmatic actress.
"I get uncomfortable and nervous around beautiful women and famous people," jokes the actor, who has two sons with actress Naomi Watts.
"So Angelina presented kind of a problem for me. But we bonded very quickly over kids, since we both have children. We'd be shooting and then we'd stop, and she'd be like, 'Oh, you're doing timeouts, too?' ... 'Oh, that — it's just teething, don't worry' "When talk turns from parenthood to her, Jolie seems a little disappointed. A slight on-the-record formality creeps in, though it loosens whenever the line of questioning does. You might expect her to be guarded about her home life, but she's passionate and eager to talk about it — except when people are cruel.
Then she turns protective.
That's a major part of her identity — warm, but fierce — that she gets from her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died in 2007. Jolie says the performance in her last film, 2008's Changeling, as a mother searching for her missing boy, was inspired by her own mom.
"That was very cathartic for me. I wish she would have seen it," Jolie says.
"That was very much her: All of her strength was in the way she loved her children. She wasn't a very strong person, but touch her children and she would rise up."One works, one stays home
After the heavy emotion of Changeling, which earned her an Oscar nomination, Jolie took an extended break, caring for the kids while partner Brad Pitt worked on Inglourious Basterds.
Maternity leave ended, and she returned to the job with Salt — jumping from the tops of moving trucks, making homemade explosives and killing with her bare hands (even while shackled).
It's action escapism, not just for the audience but for the actress. She got to fight in a way normally reserved for guys named Bourne. In fact, the character of Evelyn Salt was originally named Edwin Salt, and Tom Cruise was the actor in mind.
"I grew up with all the guy movies," Jolie says, rattling off a list of her favorites actors: Brando, McQueen, Pacino,
"but I didn't have the reference of a woman. Now I have daughters, and a part of me wants them to have that when they grow up."A heavy rewrite later, and the story of Salt became even darker than it was when a man was supposed to play the role. Instead of a tale of redemption, it became one of vengeance.
"I was surprised a studio was ready to put that big summer movie money into something that had never worked before — a woman in an action movie that isn't fantasy," she says.
Not the Tomb Raider films?
"But that's fantasy," Jolie says.
"It's odd to think about. It's always some kind of mystical thing — or there's a pairing."
She famously met Pitt during one such pairing — 2005's married assassins action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Long before that, she teamed with Denzel Washington in the 1999 thriller The Bone Collector. It was one of her earliest big-screen roles, and directed by Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger), who reunited with Jolie on Salt.
The changes in her since that time, the Australian filmmaker says, have been extreme.
"She was relatively inexperienced," he says.
"She was also a complete unknown — a wallflower at my Sunday barbecue when she came to visit. Nobody was talking to this girl who was sitting in the corner. Ten years later? Everyone wants to talk to her."Director's take: She's fearless
Noyce describes her as fearless, then and now. The difference:
"When she was young, she didn't know any better."It's an assessment Jolie shares.
She seemed reckless and menacing in those early years.
"I grew up in front of everybody, really," Jolie says.
"The big years of exploration."In the past, some of her performances have been like auditions for reality.
"I got married a few times before I actually got married," says Jolie, who was previously wed to Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.
"You do all these odd firsts before you actually do them in life. ... I was a mother in films many times before I was a mother."Her relationship with Pitt, of course, also was formed on a film set. Jolie says he has been a big part in shaping her identity, too.
"He's definitely made me a better person. I've learned so much from him, as you do when you come together with another person. You both make each other better. You both learn about the best of each other, and recognize the things where you're failing, or where you need to step up. When it's a great partnership, you really are patient with each other," she says.
"He's been a huge influence on me. In all ways, from my parenting to my art, to ... everything."Jolie acknowledges that you also can tell a lot about whom she used to be from her movies and early TV shows.
Her wilder youth also came out in screen choices, such as Girl, Interupted (1999), which earned her an Oscar, and Gia (1998), a true story about the tragic, drug-addled death of a supermodel, which got her a second Golden Globe. (The first was for George Wallace, a year earlier.)
After winning, she dived into the Beverly Hilton swimming pool in her gown. TV crews and photographers gathered. A gorgeous new wild child was born. Later, with Thornton, she was vampish and dangerous. The couple claimed to wear little vials of each other's blood.
"There was a certain madness I was going through," Jolie says.
"I learned a lot about myself."Does she wish she could change those days, or erase them from the public record?
"People tend to sum up times in your life and simplify," she says, shrugging.
"I would say there's a way of being bold when you're young that seems very brave. ... What's perceived as tough is a very funny thing. I think to be a parent is one of the scariest, boldest things to do, as opposed to, um, getting a tattoo. ... Much more than jumping into a pool when you're 20."That crazy girl from long ago isn't gone, just different.
"I see it almost as the flip side. I think I'm finally living completely free and brave. I'm bolder now," she says.
"I was a lot less when I was younger."Source.
