year than some of us have seen in a lifetime—this strange and golden couple, collectively known in the press as “Brangelina,” has found time to do high-profile humanitarian work, Brad for victims of Hurricane Katrina and Angie for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. However well-meaning her volunteerism, Angelina Jolie has failed to address the extreme controversies that have shamed other UN efforts, specifically the Oil for Food scandal and allegations that women were raped by UN peacekeeping troops in Congo. And no interviewer, not even Anderson Cooper, who had Angelina all to himself for a couple of hours, has pressed her to speak out about such unpleasant things.
William Bradley Pitt was born December 18, 1963, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and raised in Springfield, Missouri, the son of Jane Etta, a high school counselor, and William Alvin Pitt, a truck company owner. Angelina Jolie Voight, as she was known at birth, followed Brad into the world nearly a dozen years later, on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Bertrand, who died from ovarian cancer in 2007, was French Canadian, Voight German and Slovak. Her parents split up a year after her birth, and Marcheline gave up acting to raise Angelina and her older brother. Angelina’s relationship with Dad has always been fraught. Now she won’t speak to him.
Brad’s background was the more conventional. He attended the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, but left two credits short of graduating to move to California, initially supporting himself by driving strippers in limousines, moving refrigerators, and dressing up as a giant chicken for the restaurant chain el Pollo Loco. He got noticed, big-time, in a supporting role as a hustler in 1991’s Thelma and Louise in which he took off his shirt, donned a cowboy hat, and worked his way into the fantasies of millions of women and more than a few men. Like his buddy and Oceans Eleven , Twelve and Thirteen co-star George Clooney, he’s twice been named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. In 2000, he married Friends TV star Jennifer Aniston, a marriage that, for years, seemed like the rare Hollywood keeper. That is, until he met Angelina Jolie.
Angie, as she’s called, was a self-described “drama queen” who, as a child in Palisades, New York, wore glasses and braces, and failed as an early model. She complained that she looked like a Muppet, all skinny and goofy. As a self-loathing teen, she started cutting herself. She lived with a boyfriend, and as Jolie boasted in too-much-information interviews, the pair was heavily involved in sado-masochistic sexual activity. She was so obsessed with death, she fantasized about becoming a funeral director, but instead attended acting classes and majored in film at New York University before dropping out to act.
In 1995, while filming the movie Hackers , she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. She said about him, “You’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives; sh*t happens.” How romantic. She wore black leather pants to her wedding and a white shirt with Miller’s name written across the back in her blood. No surprise the marriage was doomed.
After starring with Jenny Shimizu in Foxfire in 1996, the pair were said to have an openly lesbian relationship. Jolie told Elle magazine, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman.” Asked by Barbara Walters if she was bisexual, she said, “Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it’s okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!” Only much later, ensconced with Brad Pitt, Jolie had second thoughts. “I’ve never hidden my bisexuality, but since I’ve been with Brad, there’s no longer a place for that or S&M in my life.” Shimizu didn’t buy it. Lesbianism is “like a drug and she was hooked,” she told
William Bradley Pitt was born December 18, 1963, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and raised in Springfield, Missouri, the son of Jane Etta, a high school counselor, and William Alvin Pitt, a truck company owner. Angelina Jolie Voight, as she was known at birth, followed Brad into the world nearly a dozen years later, on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Bertrand, who died from ovarian cancer in 2007, was French Canadian, Voight German and Slovak. Her parents split up a year after her birth, and Marcheline gave up acting to raise Angelina and her older brother. Angelina’s relationship with Dad has always been fraught. Now she won’t speak to him.
Brad’s background was the more conventional. He attended the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, but left two credits short of graduating to move to California, initially supporting himself by driving strippers in limousines, moving refrigerators, and dressing up as a giant chicken for the restaurant chain el Pollo Loco. He got noticed, big-time, in a supporting role as a hustler in 1991’s Thelma and Louise in which he took off his shirt, donned a cowboy hat, and worked his way into the fantasies of millions of women and more than a few men. Like his buddy and Oceans Eleven , Twelve and Thirteen co-star George Clooney, he’s twice been named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. In 2000, he married Friends TV star Jennifer Aniston, a marriage that, for years, seemed like the rare Hollywood keeper. That is, until he met Angelina Jolie.
Angie, as she’s called, was a self-described “drama queen” who, as a child in Palisades, New York, wore glasses and braces, and failed as an early model. She complained that she looked like a Muppet, all skinny and goofy. As a self-loathing teen, she started cutting herself. She lived with a boyfriend, and as Jolie boasted in too-much-information interviews, the pair was heavily involved in sado-masochistic sexual activity. She was so obsessed with death, she fantasized about becoming a funeral director, but instead attended acting classes and majored in film at New York University before dropping out to act.
In 1995, while filming the movie Hackers , she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. She said about him, “You’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives; sh*t happens.” How romantic. She wore black leather pants to her wedding and a white shirt with Miller’s name written across the back in her blood. No surprise the marriage was doomed.
After starring with Jenny Shimizu in Foxfire in 1996, the pair were said to have an openly lesbian relationship. Jolie told Elle magazine, “When I was twenty, I fell in love with somebody who happened to be a woman.” Asked by Barbara Walters if she was bisexual, she said, “Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it’s okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!” Only much later, ensconced with Brad Pitt, Jolie had second thoughts. “I’ve never hidden my bisexuality, but since I’ve been with Brad, there’s no longer a place for that or S&M in my life.” Shimizu didn’t buy it. Lesbianism is “like a drug and she was hooked,” she told
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