Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (32 page)

Once back in London, Angie did not exactly morph into the ladylike Lara Croft. During preparation she encouraged her boxing trainer and stunt double, Eunice Huthart, then the women’s world kickboxing champion, to get her first tattoo, and ignored her curfew in order to go see a group of Elvis impersonators at an off-the-beaten-track nightclub. For a girl who loved Madonna, Michael Jackson, and punk, Angie’s willing embrace of one of Billy Bob’s rock-and-roll icons had a touch of the Laura Dern school of romance about it. Just as Lara Croft would have turned up her finely bred nose at Angie’s night out at the Jazzmines club in unfashionable Bromley in darkest Kent, so her screen character would have been unable to stomach her eating habits.

Angie frequently ignored the advice of her nutritionist and ordered her driver to stop at a McDonald’s so she could get her fix of hamburger and fries. At the London premiere of
Gone in Sixty Seconds,
she turned up in leather trousers and a T-shirt, clutching a small bunch of flowers and wishing for all the world that she was somewhere else. No sooner had she made her way down the red carpet than she sneaked out of the auditorium in Leicester Square and went for a hamburger. “I was hungry and don’t like to see myself on the screen all the time,” she explained.

In the computer game, the voluptuous Lara Croft was a 36DD cup
size, whereas at that time Angie was a mere 36C. The race was on to increase her ability to fill a bra. Teenage boys, who made up the bulk of the expected audience, notice these things. It ended as a compromise. Angie appeared on-screen as a 36D.

Even the Queen took second place to her cravings. In July Angie stalked out of the Cartier International Day polo match, held in the presence of Her Majesty and attended by British high society and international celebrities on the grounds of Windsor Great Park. She put down her glass of champagne, reportedly dismissed the likes of fellow actors Minnie Driver and Billy Zane as “pompous assholes,” and ordered her driver to find her the nearest McDonald’s. “I love Big Macs,” she later explained. Her early departure from one of the highlights of the social calendar excited much irritated comment, model and polo player Jodie Kidd saying tartly: “Well, that’s just typical. She’s American, after all.”

With principal photography beginning at the end of July, she had now to leave her trailer-park persona behind and start living to the manor born, in a baronial castle specially constructed on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios in north London. The start of filming also coincided with a personal celebration for the leading lady, who learned that she had finally been cast by director Oliver Stone in his latest movie,
Beyond Borders,
a high-minded romance set in refugee camps based on the work of Doctors Without Borders, an organization that won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. When she was first sent Caspian Tredwell-Owen’s script during the filming of
Original Sin,
she had cried as she read the story of a well-to-do American socialite, Sarah Jordan, who falls for a dedicated doctor striving to save lives in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. During their passionate affair she comes to see the world through the eyes of hard-pressed international relief workers.

In spite of her enthusiasm “to take the journey,” Oliver Stone had other actresses in mind. When his first choice, Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, became pregnant, he turned to single mom Meg Ryan. Then Ryan dropped out, saying she didn’t want to be away from her eight-year-old son for so long. This left the role free for Angie.

As with all his actors, Stone encouraged Angie, whom he describes as a “natural-born actress,” to do her own research into her role. “He was one of the first people to tell me to start reading international papers and to educate myself,” she recalls. While she was in London, he was visiting UN-run
refugee camps in northern Kenya and the turbulent southern Sudan in order to learn firsthand about the dire conditions. “I want to make it as real as it can be,” he said.

While preparing to dip her toe into the world of international relief, Angie first had to throw herself into the grueling twenty-week shoot for
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
She appeared in virtually every scene and performed her own stunts, which left her with torn ligaments and a battered, bleeding, and bruised body. “She was totally fearless. I had to decide how much jeopardy I wanted to put her in,” commented director Simon West. On one occasion she was swinging on a moving log fifty feet off a concrete floor and asked to take off her safety harness—a request West denied. “If she fell, she would be dead. I didn’t need that,” he said, displaying the classic auteur’s altruism.

One of the more telling—and quieter—moments in the action movie, which went on to shoot in Iceland, Cambodia, and Venice, was Jon Voight’s turn as Lara’s father, the late Lord Richard Croft. The interchange formed the emotional backstory to the movie, the whole adventure helping Lara find a sense of peace following the loss of her father. Angie personally approved the choice of her father to play the role, a far cry from her previous attitude toward being associated with him professionally. It was a sign of her confidence that she now overshadowed him as an actor, as well as a tentative personal reconciliation. The weeklong shoot with her father, scheduled for early October, had to be delayed when Angie flew to Los Angeles to be by Billy Bob’s bedside after he was admitted to the hospital suffering a viral infection. At first it was thought that he had a heart complaint, an illness that runs in the Thornton family, his brother Jimmy Don having died of a heart attack at the age of just thirty. Such was the concern that President Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, personally called Billy Bob’s mother, Virginia, to check on his condition. It helped that it was an election year; Billy Bob had recently appeared at a fund-raiser for Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore, then vice president.

When she returned to film the scenes with her father, Angie perceptively observed that their interaction was “a kind of goodbye in a strange way.” As she said: “It was a hello and goodbye.” Perhaps more accurately, it marked the ending of a period of her life. The movie has them professing sentiments about love and respect and lost time that appear to be both narrative-driven
and reality-based. “I wanted to say a lot of those things to my dad,” admitted Angie. “And he wanted to say them to me. And I wanted to hear them.”

It seemed that father and daughter could connect through acting better than in real life, using words written by others but interpreted by them. Father and daughter did write a further scene, but it was never made. Angie finally got to hear what she had always wanted her dad to say. “I miss you and love you always and forever,” Lord Richard tells Lara. In the movie he dies when she is still a child, just as in real life he left when she was still in the cradle. “The time was stolen from us, and it’s not fair. I’ve missed you,” she tells her father in a sequence in which he reappears in a tropical tent when the hands of time have been shifted backward. For his part, Lord Richard apologizes for leaving Lara. It was a profound moment. What daughter, however proud and haughty, would not melt in the face of her father’s protestations of sorrow at the time stolen from them? “I am with you always, just as I’ve always been,” says Lord Richard to his daughter in a final sequence before she bids farewell to his spirit. On camera Lara was duly dewy-eyed; offscreen Angelina was in tears.

“Jon and I could not stop crying,” she later told TV reporter Ann Curry. “We’d have to stop takes. We’d walk on the other sides. We didn’t talk in between takes. We met in that tent and we’d walk away and meet in the tent until the scene was completely over. Then we kind of hugged each other.” On reflection Angie found it profoundly sad that the closest moment she ever had with her father was played out in public. It was also one of the rare times that she publicly acknowledged any positive influence he’d had on her life, telling the
Los Angeles Times:
“All my life my dad was always there for me, but I was very independent as well, and he’d always send me letters, books and information. And in the end we did the same thing with our lives—acting. So our scenes ended up becoming very personal.”

For his part Jon Voight was thrilled that at last his professional dream had come true. He described the shoot as a “joyous” time, father and daughter laughing and loving together. “It seemed like the beginning—there was a little hope coming through at that moment in time,” he later recalled.

He said hello, she said goodbye. “We seemed to understand each other and it was fun, but afterwards he returned quickly to old habits of being judgmental,” she told writer Andrew Duncan. During the shoot Voight was worried about her stunts—“She’s done things that I would never do
and I wish she wouldn’t”—and encouraged her to take up his health regime of yoga and vitamin supplements.

As working with her father had been a completion of sorts, it was the other man in her life she needed most, Angie convincing her husband to overcome his fear of flying—and genuine antiques—to join her in London. With a great effort of will—“It was a sign of how much he loved her,” noted a friend of Thornton’s—he endured the eleven-hour flight to Britain. Just so that the world got the point, she told the
Daily Mail,
“I need him in my bed. I told him I was going to lose my mind if he didn’t get over here.”

Such was the automatic association among Angie, Billy Bob, and sex that when they paid $3.8 million for the home of his friend Slash, from Guns N’ Roses, it was immediately assumed that their huge basement had been converted into a sex dungeon. In fact, the onetime speakeasy was a music recording studio, perfect for Billy Bob to pursue his major artistic passion in life.

The real irony about their eleven-thousand-square-foot “love nest” was that their new neighbor was comedian Steve Martin, who Billy Bob had once feared would lure his fiancée Laura Dern away from him. Just three months on, Martin was no longer relevant to the script.

ELEVEN

Before, he was the sun, the moon, the stars and sky to Angie. Now he was no longer in her universe. Maddox was the new center of her life.

—I
NGRID
E
ARLE, FRIEND OF
B
ILLY
B
OB
T
HORNTON
’
S

In late November 2000 the
Lara Croft
caravan left Pinewood Studios and moved to Cambodia for a two-week shoot during what is termed the “cool season,” when temperatures drop to the high nineties. It was a visit—and a view into a previously unknown world—that changed Angie forever. Like many of her life-altering moments, it was a fluke. Originally filming was due to take place on the Great Wall of China or a faux fifteen-foot stand-in in Scotland. Cost and politics ended that plan; it was cheaper to set the exotic scene in Angkor Wat, a complex of sacred ancient temples surrounded by dense jungle, located 220 kilometers (135 miles) northwest of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.

One of the archaeological wonders of the world, the Temple of Angkor Wat is a massive ring of sculpted sandstone structures, the blurred carved faces depicting legends of the once great Khmer civilization. Given Angie’s love of symbol and ritual, the location must have been soul-stirring. It was a special privilege, too, Angie the first Hollywood star permitted on the grounds of this holy place since 1964, when Peter O’Toole filmed
Lord Jim.

First, though, she and her film crew had to get there, trucking equipment from neighboring Thailand along a road only recently held by Khmer Rouge rebels and still pitted with potholes and land mines. Accompanied by the Royal Cambodian Army, the convoy of thirty trucks was forced to stop frequently so that soldiers could repair bridges and check for bombs.

Once Angie had reached the temple unscathed, the real work began.
She had to leap from twenty-foot walls, paddle a wooden canoe, and fight off the bad guys. At the end of a long day’s shooting, she couldn’t even bitch to her husband about her strained ankle, the bump on her head, and her pulled muscles. “The phone is a nightmare,” Angie admitted. “When I finally get through to Billy, and you try to say something romantic you both end up saying, ‘What? You said what? Oh forget it.’ Trying to be sexy on a cell phone in Angkor Wat just isn’t working.”

At least she could still talk
about
him, her love life the lure for the intrepid journalists who hacked through the jungle to visit the set. “I’m obsessed with Billy. I always want more. I can’t have enough of him,” Angie told one unnerved reporter, sitting on the steps of her trailer, naked beneath a sheet she had quickly wrapped around herself after taking a shower. So close and yet so far away. Cut off from her man, yet feeling for the first time in her life supremely fit and healthy, immersed in a holy place complete with chanting Buddhist monks, and with the ever-present frisson of danger in this lush land, Angie felt a spiritual kinship to an exotic place and people, impoverished but still smiling. For Angie, who usually found connecting and feeling so difficult, this experience—albeit surrounded as she was by film folk and sleeping in an air-conditioned trailer with hot and cold running water—touched something inside her. She experienced what she later described as “an epiphany.” Or, put another way, the mutable, impulsive Angie was about to shed yet another skin. “This has changed my life, being here in this country,” she said when the Cambodia chapter wrapped. “The world is a lot bigger than I thought it was. There is a lot I have to learn.” When she left, she was so touched by the people and the country that she cried for three days. She couldn’t explain why, but the tears just kept flowing. “I didn’t know what that country had gone through. I didn’t learn about it in history. And they were so warm and so beautiful and so pure and honest. And the country, I just loved the country.”

Back in London she continued her long-distance marriage, given every Friday off in order to share a few snatched hours with her husband in Los Angeles. “I spend twelve hours on a plane, fall into bed with Billy for ten hours, then it’s straight back to the airport,” Angie said. He had his own ferocious schedule, in December crisscrossing the States to bang the drum for
All the Pretty Horses,
his $45 million adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s stark, neo-Western novel, which was due for release on Christmas Day.