Angelina Jolie has had a lot of success during her career as an actress, but before she became the Hollywood star she is today, the 48-year-old had a tough time growing up.
Angelina Jolie’s career spans four decades and in that time she has won many awards for her work, but in her childhood and early teens, Angelina faced more upset than many. From her dad leaving when she was a baby to the Hollywood actress experimenting with drugs and having bad mental health in her teens, the Mr. and Mrs. Smith star didn’t have an easy time of it.
Angelina Jolie’s fraught relationship with her dad
Angelina has been open about her relationship with her dad, Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, who left her and her mom when she was just a year old after he had an affair.
Their relationship has had its ups and downs, with Jon saying after her divorce from her second husband Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 that his daughter had “serious mental problems” which Angelina later told The Guardian was “unforgivable.”
“The most difficult thing, in him doing that, is that it could have affected my relationship with my child. They could have decided: ‘He’s right, she’s crazy, let’s remove that child from her custody.’ And that’s unforgivable.”
The celebrity has only used her dad’s surname once in her work during her first film in 1982, and though it’s unsurprising that she dropped his surname, favoring her middle name ‘Jolie’ instead. She said that it was also so that she didn’t get “hired for a name.”
The pair worked together on movie Tomb Raider after the incident, but Angelina later said that things didn’t stay positive for long. “We seemed to understand each other and it was fun, but afterwards he returned quickly to old habits of being judgmental,” she said.
“He gave me a letter in the car and said ‘this is my truth, this is unchanging’. I was unaware of what he’d written and said, ‘That’s wonderful, I love you, see you later.’ Then I opened the letter. He’d written I was a bad person. I was upset and thought of 100 replies, and then decided I don’t value this person’s opinion so it’s OK.”
she continued that she no longer sees her and her dad as “father and daughter.”
She told ELLE in 2014 that her turbulent relationship with her dad made her believe she’d never be a parent. “I never thought I’d have children, I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home — you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.”
Taking ‘every drug possible’
During her teen years, the actress, who starred in Disney’s Maleficent, said that she took “every drug” and has said she is lucky to still be alive and that “for many reasons I shouldn’t be here.”
“I went through heavier, darker times and I survived them,” she explained in a 60 Minutes interview, “I didn’t die young, so I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things … for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.”
If you’ve been affected by this story you can contact American Addiction Centers on (877) 686-7688 or Talk To Frank on 0300 123 6600 in the UK.
After filming one of her films, she fell into a deep depression
While filming HBO’s Gia in 1998, a TV film about supermodel Gia Carangi, the star said that she became depressed and decided that she wanted to end her life and had “found a way to do it guilt-free” by hiring a hitman.
“Gia has enough similarities to me that I figured this would either be a purge of all my demons or it was really going to mess with me,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
Luckily, the actress’ life took a turn and the person she hired had too much heart to go through with her request. “With suicide comes all the guilt of people around you thinking they could have done something. With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility …
“And after a month other things changed in my life and I was surviving again,” she said.
If you are affected by any issues raised in the article or would like someone to speak to, please call the Samaritans for free on 116 123. You can also email them at [email protected] or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch in the UK. In the US, please visit Samaritans USA for more information.
You can also contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text 741741 to get in touch with the Crisis Text Line. Americans can now call or text 988 to reach out and speak to a counsellor.
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