actor, I think. So that’s what I had to do.”
After Angelina emerged from her obsession with death, her father helped her build on the skills that she had picked up at the Strasberg Institute years before. He gave her weekly acting lessons at the home he rented in the San Fernando Valley where they read or acted out a different play every Sunday.
Voight later described being “moved to tears” when she read from the Arthur Miller play that had given him his first big break three decades earlier. “It was in stages, different stages. There was a point where we read A View from the Bridge , which I did as well as anything I’ve ever done in my life. There’s a scene where this Italian boy comes in and meets this young girl Catherine, and they fall in love. I’ve played with many Catherines. One Sunday Angie read it, and the first time she read Catherine, it was a performance. She was studying acting and sixteen, and it was, I’m telling you, as good as anybody had ever played the part. The accent, the emotion was there, and absolutely perfect. I was overwhelmed. It was very touching to me. That was the first time I knew.
“The next week, I had a friend of mine, Tom Bower, a wonderful actor, come over and we read it again. And same thing, a great performance. Tom’s going, ‘This is great!’ Tom was running the Met Theater in Los Angeles. So she went down with Tom and auditioned for Saturday workshops, which were monitored by Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Amy Madigan, who are [now] like godfather and godmothers to her. And one day, Tom came back from class and said, ‘Jon, she’s really special.’”
Bertrand encouraged her daughter to re-enroll at the Strasberg Institute to hone her talent. For her first production there, the comedy Room Service , she made an unusual choice of roles. “I thought, which character do I want to audition for?” Angelina explains. “The big, fat, forty-year-old German man, that’s the part for me.” She put her own take on the character, however, turning the part of an overbearing hotel manager into “Frau Wagner,” a German dominatrix.
Voight later recalled the surprise of seeing his daughter in the production. “I was a little shocked seeing her walk around as Frau Wagner. But the shock came from the realization that, ‘Oh my God, she’s just like me.’ She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.”
Meanwhile, her brother Jamie had enrolled at University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television (renamed the School of Cinematic Arts in 2006) and was living with his father at his house in the Valley. During this period, he made five short films, all starring his sister and all financed by his father, who at the time was still very close to his son. One of them even earned a George Lucas Award, whose winners were personally selected by the Star Wars director, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and generous benefactors.
Around this time, Angelina decided to drop the name Voight and started billing herself by her middle name, Jolie. As she later explained, “I love my father, but I’m not him.” Despite this, and despite Bertrand’s subsequent claim that at most auditions nobody knew her daughter’s bloodlines, many of her early casting directors have acknowledged that she was introduced to them as the daughter of Jon Voight, a fact that couldn’t help but open doors in Hollywood.
Still, it was slow going at first. Her first break, if it can be called that, came when director Michael Schroeder offered the seventeen-year-old Angelina a screen test and then a lead role in his science fiction film Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow. This was the sequel to Albert Pyun’s 1989 hit, Cyborg , which launched Jean-Claude Van Damme to fame. Neither Pyun nor Van Damme signed on to the sequel, however, which perhaps destined it to failure from the start.
The script for Cyborg 2 had the world divided between two
After Angelina emerged from her obsession with death, her father helped her build on the skills that she had picked up at the Strasberg Institute years before. He gave her weekly acting lessons at the home he rented in the San Fernando Valley where they read or acted out a different play every Sunday.
Voight later described being “moved to tears” when she read from the Arthur Miller play that had given him his first big break three decades earlier. “It was in stages, different stages. There was a point where we read A View from the Bridge , which I did as well as anything I’ve ever done in my life. There’s a scene where this Italian boy comes in and meets this young girl Catherine, and they fall in love. I’ve played with many Catherines. One Sunday Angie read it, and the first time she read Catherine, it was a performance. She was studying acting and sixteen, and it was, I’m telling you, as good as anybody had ever played the part. The accent, the emotion was there, and absolutely perfect. I was overwhelmed. It was very touching to me. That was the first time I knew.
“The next week, I had a friend of mine, Tom Bower, a wonderful actor, come over and we read it again. And same thing, a great performance. Tom’s going, ‘This is great!’ Tom was running the Met Theater in Los Angeles. So she went down with Tom and auditioned for Saturday workshops, which were monitored by Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Amy Madigan, who are [now] like godfather and godmothers to her. And one day, Tom came back from class and said, ‘Jon, she’s really special.’”
Bertrand encouraged her daughter to re-enroll at the Strasberg Institute to hone her talent. For her first production there, the comedy Room Service , she made an unusual choice of roles. “I thought, which character do I want to audition for?” Angelina explains. “The big, fat, forty-year-old German man, that’s the part for me.” She put her own take on the character, however, turning the part of an overbearing hotel manager into “Frau Wagner,” a German dominatrix.
Voight later recalled the surprise of seeing his daughter in the production. “I was a little shocked seeing her walk around as Frau Wagner. But the shock came from the realization that, ‘Oh my God, she’s just like me.’ She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.”
Meanwhile, her brother Jamie had enrolled at University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television (renamed the School of Cinematic Arts in 2006) and was living with his father at his house in the Valley. During this period, he made five short films, all starring his sister and all financed by his father, who at the time was still very close to his son. One of them even earned a George Lucas Award, whose winners were personally selected by the Star Wars director, one of the school’s most prominent alumni and generous benefactors.
Around this time, Angelina decided to drop the name Voight and started billing herself by her middle name, Jolie. As she later explained, “I love my father, but I’m not him.” Despite this, and despite Bertrand’s subsequent claim that at most auditions nobody knew her daughter’s bloodlines, many of her early casting directors have acknowledged that she was introduced to them as the daughter of Jon Voight, a fact that couldn’t help but open doors in Hollywood.
Still, it was slow going at first. Her first break, if it can be called that, came when director Michael Schroeder offered the seventeen-year-old Angelina a screen test and then a lead role in his science fiction film Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow. This was the sequel to Albert Pyun’s 1989 hit, Cyborg , which launched Jean-Claude Van Damme to fame. Neither Pyun nor Van Damme signed on to the sequel, however, which perhaps destined it to failure from the start.
The script for Cyborg 2 had the world divided between two
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