Angelina Jolie
Britney Spears
Kate Winslet
Jessica Alba
Lindsay Lohan
Home
When Jolie came into the Four Seasons, she looked around quickly, then crossed the floor like a pilgrim, with her head down, like someone used to being noticed, or bothered, like someone who does not feel safe. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.” She went through the lobby the way a shark goes through the ocean, quickly and smoothly. You detect her presence not by her face, which she can obscure or render ordinary in that way of celebrities, but by how people around her react—the flurry in the water. She carries herself with strange dignity, as if she were an emissary of a secret order, a messenger from a lost kingdom. You see it in every picture. Shot after shot. She’s a princess, an aristocrat. I mean, the woman knows how to be photographed, where to look, where the light comes from. (Us says they’re just like us, but Us is wrong about them, or wrong about us.) She’s not quite flawless in person—she’s more real, human. It’s the same product, only it’s been taken out of bunting and plastic and set in this ordinary place, as opposed to the dreamworld cooked up by set designers and admen.
We sat near a wall of windows in the back of the hotel restaurant. As we talked, people circled around her as debris orbits a planet. This is called gravity. She wore a silky maternity dress under a blue blazer, the sort worn by stand-up comics, and Frankenstein. After a while, she took off the jacket, and there were her arms with their hieroglyphic tattoos, each telling another story, another legend from her already legendary life: wild teen years, marriage to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.
“How pregnant are you?,” I asked.
“I don’t want to say,” she said, smiling sadly. “A few months. I only know, if I do say, people will start stressing on our due date.”
When Pitt or Jolie shoots a film (they never work at the same time; there is always a parent around), the entire family goes along, bringing familiar things from home—though there is no home—in an attempt to re-create the world as it existed in the last place, and in this way they give their children a semblance of normalcy, routine.
For the Jolie-Pitts, there are no particulars: no particular cities, no particular towns. Only backdrops, locations. Texas. Before that, Prague. Before that, somewhere else, each made to stand for HOME in all capitals, which, of course, is a fantasy—a memory from someone else’s past, backstory from a character Jolie has played. This illustrates a bigger point: she is a Method actor in reverse; whereas a Method actor brings the things of her life into her roles, Jolie brings her characters’ stories into her real life. Which is why, though Jolie is an outstanding actress, she’s a more outstanding celebrity. It’s not that she becomes the character—it’s that the character becomes her. Disturbed youth (Girl, Interrupted), wild child (Gia), humanitarian (Beyond Borders), married (sort of) to Brad Pitt (Mr. & Mrs. Smith).
