Angelina Jolie is ever present in the media, and no one can deny her power as a positive role model, especially for young and growing girls, whether Ms. Jolie is traveling the world and doing all she can to stand up for human rights or promoting female reproductive health by example. Recently, Ms. Jolie talked about her highly publicized life, revealing that there are still things the world doesn’t know about Angelina, including her brief stint as a high fashion model.
Modeling Left Angelina Jolie Feeling Humiliated
When she was 14 years old, Angelina was compelled to pursue fashion modeling by her mother, and Ms. Jolie reveals that the entire experience was upsetting, forever coloring her perception of the entire modeling industry. The memory stayed with Angelina throughout her life, and when she took on the starring role in Gia in 1997, Ms. Jolie felt uniquely qualified to relate to the tragic story of Gia Carangi, who passed away from A.I.D.S. at the young age of 26.
“I tried modeling when I was 14 and failed miserably,” Ms. Jolie said, according to Vogue. “Like Gia, I was a bit of a dirty punk, but it was interesting to clean up and start feeling like a girl. I was told I had all these problems I needed to fix. I was told to lose weight, and I was thin already. They actually put me in a room in a bathing suit and measured every part of me. I felt terrible.”
It turns out that not all of Ms. Jolie’s childhood memories were negative experiences. Angelina also recollects her first adolescent crushes with the two most prominent heartthrobs bringing a smile to Jolie’s lips. While the wife of Brad Pitt admits to heavily crushing on both Star Trek‘s Spock and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, it was the Leonard Nimoy character that most enraptured Angelina in those early years. Ms. Jolie recalls that Spock was so repressed that she was often frustrated, watching Nimoy’s performances on Star Trek.
The By The Sea Director Emphasizes The Importance Of Family
It’s common knowledge that Angelina Jolie comes from Hollywood royalty, but it may not be commonly known that Ms. Jolie’s godmother is 71-year-old Jacqueline Bisset. The actress, best known for The Deep (1977) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), says that, while she has never been very close to Angelina, she does feel pride and admiration for Ms. Jolie.
“What I find difficult is she’s become so famous. So many people are pulling on her time. I’m a little bit shy and I don’t want to be someone who tries to take advantage of her.”
Of Ms. Jolie’s immediate family, which includes husband, Brad Pitt, and children, Maddox, 14; Pax, 11; Zahara, 10; Shiloh, 9; and 7-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne, Angelina is very close, making certain to schedule time for them into her hectic schedule.
While By the Sea, which was also written and directed by Ms. Jolie, was never intended to be representative of her real-life marriage to Brad, Angelina does think it’s a good example of the common marriage in modern society. Angelina says that the extremes of joy, tragedy, and humor seen in By the Sea are certainly found in every marriage, reports Design & Trend.
Something that has made Ms. Jolie an even greater role model for women has been her decisions to undergo procedures that would lessen her chances of contracting cancer commonly related to the female reproductive system. Following Angelina’s 2013 double mastectomy and her 2015 oophorectomy, the New York Times commented in an op-ed piece that Jolie’s openness about the procedures directly resulted in an increase in B.R.C.A. (BReast CAncer susceptibility gene) testing. Dubbed “The Angelina Effect,” testing requests doubled, following each of Ms. Jolie’s highly publicized procedures.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt can be seen in By the Sea, when the film hits theaters on November 13.
[Featured image courtesy of Andrew Toth/Getty Images]