Angelina Jolie: Tres Jolie

There have been more recent fears, some perhaps more founded than others. She was scared doing her role as a passionate club crawler who falls for Ryan Phillippe in Playing by Heart. She thought there was nothing particularly funny or bright about her. Hey, maybe she's scared in advance about playing a hostile, troubled woman on Winona Ryder's mental ward in Girl Interrupted. She's certainly harboring elaborate insecurities over her present effort in The Bone Collector---about not doing her job, not figuring her character out in time, not knowing how to deal with the fact that it doesn't "feel like an actor's movie."

"I had a thing with a writer"she's using code again; by "thing" Angelina here means disagreement"that grew out of the fact that I wrote a scene and he wrote a scene and we couldn't come to grips as to which scene was gonna get used. I was in my cop character and I'd been wearing guns for the past year, so I said, 'OK, come on, let's just take it outside and whoever wins can do their scene.' You get to a point in this business where everyone just kind of skirts around each other and everyone talks to everybody else instead of who they should be talking to, and nobody's able to be straight with the other person, so nothing happens and nobody commits to anything solid. Well, that just kept happening, so I got frustrated. And I said, 'Let's take it outside.' It sounded like a damn good idea at the time."

If Angelina had some insecurities on a little ensemble picture like Playing by Heart, and on a straightforward cop drama like The Bone Collector, how did she survive the free-for-all of Pushing Tin? The level of comedic sophistication in this story of dueling hotshot traffic controllers is said to be in the stratosphere. And the other people dealing with the blips and quips along with her were the always smart John Cusack, Oscar-winning Arkansas hyphenate Billy Bob Thornton, serious Australian sensation Cate Blanchett and director Mike Newell, the guy who single-handedly put Hugh Grant on everybody's radar screen and then gave us Donnie Brasco. You know Pushing Tin is not going to be just a holding pattern.

"Actually, I was quite happy," Angelina says of that endeavor. "See, Pushing Tin came along just as I was coming out of my dark period. I was really very happy on that set. It was free, it was fun, I had fun with the character, not to mention great people around me. But getting back to the fear thing--that's what I live for. That's why asking me about fear is such a strange question. It's important to be terrified trying things I've never done. So that's the fun of it, but that's the scary part, too."

And the feeling part. Above all, the feeling part. Even if you haven't been slapped by her, you're bound to get the sense that Angelina likes/needs to feel. At the moment, she's staring a stigmata hole into her palm, while the couple with the mango-colored martinis and the $300 haircuts can't keep their eyes off her. If they looked closer, they'd find a young woman tough in the way you have to be to reckon with taxes, and vulnerable in the way you have to be to get your garden to grow. Those two ways of being share borders, like that illusory drawing which can be seen as either two candlesticks or the silhouette of a lady, depending. Hard to say what decides which reality dominates at any given moment in the actress's life, but this much seems certain: she knows full well that when you spend your life pretending to be other people, your own behavior becomes an odd affair.

"In real life I find myself not so much acting, but certainly being dramatic," she says. "Especially if I find myself in a situation where it's really emotional, or I have to be real. Like I had to tell a girlfriend her dog died and somehow in doing it, I was studying her reaction instead of being there for her. Or if I have somebody that I'm helping and they're sick, I'll say 'Come over and I'll take care of you,' but somehow I'm selfish because I'll end up watching them, you know? Not good.

"Acting is a weird reality, to be sure," she continues. "My first wedding was on-screen. I've had more onscreen relationships with men than I've had in my entire life. And now, not so uncoincidentally, I have this weird thing with intimacy. When I did Wallace with Gary Sinise, there was a part where he was sick and we shot it at this hospital--and that became my image of a hospital. It felt real to me, even though it was far from it. But now, in real life, if I visit someone in a hospital, it's this initial feeling like it's fake--it's not real and they're not really sick. The clincher--a while ago I got sick enough to be hospitalized, and I wound up in the same hospital where we shot Wallace.

"Yeah," she says, and her voice goes lower, "you could say my sense of reality is more than a little warped."

The actor Jon Voight and the actress Marcheline Bertrand made a point of giving their children middle names in the event that later in life son James Haven (born in 1973) or daughter Angelina Jolie (born in 1975) found the surname Voight too much of an obstacle to overcome. A divorce when the children were just toddlers may have proven a bigger handicap for their daughter than any name could have been, but, as Angelina likes to say today, "Why sodomize dragonflies?" At age seven, Jon Voight's little girl made her acting debut in Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, a film cowritten and coproduced by her father. By the time she was 14, she was a two-year veteran of the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. Throughout Angelina's teenage years, the acting bug flared up and went dormant by turns; the bug she couldn't quite shake was the effect of her parents' divorce. It made for a stormy relationship with her father. "We had a heavy relationship because we were so much alike," she says.

"With every divorced family there are things. They're gonna be your parent, but you're easy for them to accept as a friend. And you have issues, and they need to be forgiven for things and you do--and you need to come back together and really go through ... and with me and him, it was always just who we were. I had a therapist in school--I thought it was extra credit to take drug group and private therapy so I took it. And my therapist just really, really wanted to blame everything, all my problems, on my father. She thought it was impossible for me to be adjusted because my parents were divorced. I thought I was managing, but she just wanted to get to it, know what I mean? I came in one day and told her I'd had this dream that I stabbed my father with a fork, and she was just thrilled. She was, like, happy I killed my parent. 'Now we're getting somewhere.' That was the end of my therapy. Today if I need to work things out I just drive a car around for a couple hours."

By the time she hit the legal age of 18, Angelina had already decided once and for all on becoming a real, live actress. Cyborg 2 featured her in her first costarring role as a hybrid Data/Xena character. The cast of that film included Jack Palance, 'nuff said. She began to hit her stride as "Acid Burn" in the Gen-Net ensemble thriller Hackers (1995). Then she really came into her own as Legs Sadovsky in the screen adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's novel Foxfire (1996), the story of an all-girl high school gang fighting for their rights to be an all-girl high school gang...fighting for their rights. The next year Angelina won a Golden Globe award for her performance as the second wife of the wheelchair-bound governor of Alabama in the TNT biopic George Wallace. Besides being good, her performance could have single-handedly revitalized the Freudians. Father Jon, recall, won an Oscar for his gutsy portrayal of an embittered Vietnam vet--paralyzed from the waist down--in Coming Home.

Angelina had the distinction of being cast as David Duchovny's leading lady in Playing God, though it didn't do her or him any good. She was sorely underused in the part--which, to hear Angelina tell it, was probably a good thing: "I had sex scenes that were cut, but left in the trailer--how's that for a level of reality that rivals eating your foot to stay alive? It's like, we have sex in our movie, but we really don't, but go see the movie."

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