Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (38 page)

A home life, too. While the duo lived out of a suitcase for much of the year, Angie added to her existing portfolio of properties in Los Angeles and New York, buying a $3.4 million eight-bedroom converted farmhouse in Buckinghamshire, north of London, which she was then renting. Her new home, which had previously been rented by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman during the making of
Eyes Wide Shut,
was convenient because London was much nearer than the U.S. to the places in Africa and the Far East she wanted to visit in her work for the UN. At Christmas 2002, for example, she spent time with a group of women clearing land mines in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and in April she flew to Sri Lanka to see for herself the plight of refugees made homeless by the long civil war. She saw England, too, as a sanctuary. “I call England home,” she observed. “Living in Europe makes me feel more connected to the rest of the world.”

In time she would look for another home in mainland Europe, pondering the pros and cons of Spain or Italy. She also bought a twenty-one-acre plot of land in the Cambodian jungle in Maddox’s name, the aim being for him to keep his connections with his home country. “He will have a very fortunate life and I want him to be responsible to his country, to know his language, his people, to do something to make it better for his people,” she commented. “If he, at eighteen, said I don’t want to go there I would have it out with him.”

The contrast between their rural idyll in Buckinghamshire and the site in the Cambodian jungle, complete with forty-eight unexploded land mines and the occasional visiting tiger, where Angie built three simple wooden bungalows could not have been greater. One of the first visitors was her onetime lover Jenny Shimizu. “There’s no special treatment there,” said the former Calvin Klein model. “One electric light for each house. We play cards and go to sleep.”

The endless traveling, ostensibly for filming, promotion, or her UN work, dovetailed with Angie’s roaming personality, her restlessness one of
the factors behind the breakups of her brief marriages. “I’m not very settled,” she admitted. “The positive side of that is I’m on fire all the time, to try anything. The negative side is there isn’t a lot of time for me to sit and watch a movie and hold hands. I tend to not be inside my relationships. I tend to be more focused on the world. It takes a certain kind of man to love those things.”

Inevitably, any new man—or woman—would have to pass the Maddox test. Her new mate would have to be an “amazing” father, “independent, compassionate and strong.” The real man of her imagination.

In London endless media speculation about her love life centered on Jonny Lee Miller, but the focus changed when she flew to Montreal in the spring of 2003 to work on
Taking Lives,
a thriller based on Michael Pye’s novel. Playing an FBI profiler hunting a ruthless serial killer, she was linked to each of her costars: Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, and Olivier Martinez. A classic example was when she and Maddox went to a Montreal Expos baseball game with various members of the cast and crew. She was photographed sitting or standing next to Hawke and Martinez, different tabloids plumping for one or the other as her new lover. While this unwarranted romantic juxtaposition irritated Australian singer Kylie Minogue, then the girlfriend of the French-born Martinez, it gave rangy blonde actress Uma Thurman, wife of Hawke and mother of his two children, rather more to think about. During the three-month shoot her five-year marriage steamed onto the rocks after Hawke was linked to Canadian model Jen Perzow. When the couple separated in September 2003, weeks after filming wrapped, Thurman’s brother Mipam publicly threatened his brother-in-law, telling
People
magazine: “I want to kill him. I can’t believe what he’s done to my sister.” His mood would have been even darker if he had known that Hawke had enjoyed a fling with Angie as well. Hawke’s public pronouncements about Angie were clue enough. “She’s ravishingly beautiful and never gets old and never gets boring. She is a really incredible woman, and I liked her,” he said, which could hardly have been music to his wife’s ears. “I knew about her affair with Ethan,” recalls Lauren Taines. “At that time she hadn’t seen anyone for quite a while.”

During the publicity for
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
that summer, however, she repeated that she was celibate like a mantra. “It’s really funny that I’m still seen as a sex symbol considering I haven’t
had sex in a really long time,” she said, amused at the idea that she was “dating everyone.” When she left the cold climes of Canada in fall 2003 for the desert heat of Morocco and Egypt for the filming of
Alexander,
Oliver Stone’s $160 million epic about the ancient warrior ruler, the burning question once again concerned Angie’s love life. She was linked with her costars, Val Kilmer and Colin Farrell, as well as with Oliver Stone.

Farrell was playing Alexander, and even though, at twenty-eight, he and Angie were the same age, she was cast as his ruthless mother, Olympias. While Stone could see in Angie the “strong and determined” quality he wanted for his queen, he was intrigued by what would happen at the first meeting between screen mother and son. When they sat down for dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan, Stone recalls: “It was funny. He was all over her, he was like the Irish boy—he wasn’t Alexander, he was just falling in love with her, couldn’t help himself.” He realized that he had made the right choice, as Farrell was behaving more like a baby, the infant to her mother. Both wild at heart, they discussed dating but decided they were too similar for a romance to develop. Angie said: “We’d go nuts.” Even so, photographs of them together suggested a closeness and an intimacy that went beyond the professional. After all, why not? They were both unattached Geminis, single parents—he had a son by model Kim Bordenave—who were stranded in the desert. They shared, too, a love of tattoos, once spending hours touring Cairo in search of a tattoo parlor. She ended up with an Arabic script tattoo on her right arm that means “Determination.” It covered up the energy waves tattoo she had done during her days with Billy Bob. “We knew there were going to be millions of rumors pouring out of this movie,” recalls Rosario Dawson, who played Roxane, Alexander’s chosen wife. “Nothing as good as what did happen, I have to say.”

During the ninety-four-day shoot there were practical jokes aplenty—on one occasion Val Kilmer sent an unsuspecting Angie a snake in a basket—and late-night drinking sessions led by “The Regent,” the cast’s nickname for Farrell. Toward the end of the shoot in Thailand, he fell down the hotel stairs in a drunken stupor, breaking his ankle and wrist. “Colin came very close; he gambled,” observed Stone indulgently.

As teasing as she was about her relationship with Farrell, Angie further intrigued her fans when she revealed that she had arrangements with a couple of men she knew well who met her in upmarket London hotels for
afternoons of sex. It meant that she could enjoy herself without the need to interfere with her own family life. “It’s an adult way of having adult relationships,” she told the
New York Post.
Angie declined to name names, but clearly she and her former husband were great friends, so he was an obvious candidate. One man not on the short list was Billy Bob: “We’re not friends. We don’t even talk anymore,” she said. As for her other lover, she admitted she had met him while married to Billy Bob and called him up out of the blue several years later when she came to live in London. Her mystery lover was in fact actor Ralph Fiennes, who had been penciled in to play the lead in
Beyond Borders
before withdrawing. “Yes, I knew about him,” confirms a family friend. “She saw him occasionally.”

Their clandestine meetings were held in smart London hotels, discreet and anonymous. At that time, Fiennes, eighth cousin to Prince Charles, was living with actress Francesca Annis, eighteen years his senior. They separated in 2006 after his reported affair with Romanian singer Cornelia Crisan. A year later, in February 2007, he was involved in another sex scandal when staff aboard a Qantas flight from Sydney, Australia, to Mumbai, India, caught the actor leaving the same airplane lavatory at the same time as flight attendant Lisa Robertson. After first denying allegations of a tryst, Robertson, thirty-eight, later confessed to having sex with the star of
The English Patient,
whom she had met only a couple of hours before. Fiennes, a UNICEF ambassador, was on his way to an AIDS awareness event. The charity kept him on; Qantas sacked Robertson.

Angie was able to switch back and forth from bad girl to the “other girl,” swatting away inquiries about her sex life one minute, the next standing demurely on a podium in her capacity as UN Goodwill Ambassador. As she told writer Nancy Jo Sales about her forays to Washington: “When I’m here there’s a side of me that I just get into focus. I get my notes, my pen. I get my head together. I do want to cover my tattoos, get into my suits, look clean, don’t dress too sexy, and just try and present the woman that I’m not sure I am but would like to aspire to be.” In June 2003, for example, she joined then secretary of state Colin Powell to launch World Refugee Day, and later stood with Senators Dianne Feinstein and Sam Brownback on Capitol Hill to publicly call on the U.S. Senate to support a bipartisan bill to reform the treatment of unaccompanied minors, including refugee children.

At that time, unaccompanied minors were held at detention facilities without lawyers or guardians to help them with complex immigration procedures, a fact that “really surprised” the Goodwill Ambassador. She told an audience of senators, officials, and media: “As Americans we defend our human rights, we defend our freedoms and we will help the innocent, especially the children, who need our support to protect their rights and their freedoms.” Despite her lack of a college degree, Angie’s profile and “heartfelt plea” on behalf of refugee children impressed legislators. At a private meeting with Senators Arlen Specter (a Yale Law School grad with “more political clout that some sovereign nations”) and Hillary Clinton (an alumna of Wellesley and Yale Law School, and a former First Lady), Angie (a graduate of Moreno High) convinced the two political heavyweights to cosponsor the bill, which came into effect in October 2004. “Jolie seems much more at home these days talking to Powell about the refugee problems in Africa than sitting at the Dorchester hotel and promoting yet another of her movies,” noted celebrity profiler Kevin Sessums.

The collision of her art and her passion came at the world premiere of
Beyond Borders
in New York in October 2003. Escorted by Jonny Lee Miller, Angie sat through the gala event, which raised $100,000 for UNHCR, in the presence of UN secretary general Kofi Annan and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers. A few days earlier Senators Edward Kennedy and William Frist had hosted a panel discussion in Washington on refugee-related issues, while in New York Kofi Annan gave the film a warm introduction.

Unfortunately, the movie itself was left behind in this caravan of self-congratulation, a refugee roaming the cineplexes looking for a home—and a half-decent review. The opening sequence, which showed an irate relief worker crashing a fancy fund-raiser to scold rich swells for enjoying themselves while their supposed beneficiaries were dying in Ethiopia, left Jack Mathews, of the New York
Daily News, “
squirming in his seat” given the fact that guests at the premiere itself had invitations to a posh post-screening party at the upscale Cipriani restaurant. “One might have trouble ignoring the irony,” he observed, going on to describe the film as “awful.” The title was a headline writer’s dream: “Beyond Belief,” “Beyond Dull,” “Beyond Boring,” “Beyond Redemption” . . . you get the idea. The high-minded movie made
just $2 million in America and failed to find a distributor in Britain, with the UN-approved script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen widely derided.

Angie seemed to have swapped acting for earnestness—“wooden,” a word never before heard about Angelina Jolie, an apt description of her performance. It was a movie she truly believed in and had worked hard behind the scenes to get to the screen. “Jolie’s personal interest in humanitarian causes has been well documented,” noted critic George Thomas. “Here, she shows precisely why you should never mix your work with your personal crusades.”

Still, Angie’s love-in with the United Nations continued. In the week of the movie premiere, Secretary General Kofi Annan personally presented her with the first Citizen of the World award given by the UN Correspondents Association for her efforts “to bring public attention to the plight of refugees across the globe, so that the world community will take action to help them.” Only twenty-eight, she was justifiably proud of her achievement. “It means that I’ve done good work for an organization that I care a great deal about and that I didn’t let them down. If I die tomorrow I can leave my son something that says I did something good with my life.”

There is something endearingly naïve and innocent about her response, rather like that of a schoolgirl being given a gold star. The same quality of wide-eyed concern, a childlike wonder at man’s inhumanity to man, runs like a thread through her book
Notes from My Travels,
published in October 2003, describing her visits to refugee camps in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador. In the 256-page paperback she paints a vivid and at times moving portrait of the lives of the refugees, particularly the children. “I wanted to take each and every one home with me,” she wrote during a visit to a transit center in Africa. As well-meaning and eye-opening as her book was, it was still, as academic Jaimie Lee-Barron pointed out, rooted firmly in a traditional genre of travel writing in which the impoverished Third World is defined and described through the prism of the wealthy West, in this case a multimillionaire movie star.

With visits to refugees in Jordan and Egypt in December, Angie showed that she was not content to rest on her laurels, her goodwill missions invariably accompanied by large personal donations. During her visit to the SOS Children’s Village in Amman, Jordan, she “adopted” a house of three girls and four boys, paying for their food, clothing, and education.