LOS ANGELES: As a tattooed wild child wearing her husband’s blood in a locket and luring Brad Pitt away from Hollywood rival Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie was dream fodder for the tabloid press.
But her transformation into a humanitarian campaigner and now poster girl for the fight against breast cancer with her revelation that she had undergone a double mastectomy, when faced with a high cancer risk, has elevated her to heroine status in the media.
Her deeply personal account of the decision to undergo the operation, published in the New York Times, won her wide praise for her courage and Pitt’s support of her move has put the couple in a new light in and beyond Hollywood. Jolie said she made the difficult choice in order to “tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”
“This week they have shown that they are real people and a real couple with a solid relationship,” said Wendy Mitchell, editor at trade magazine Screen International, speaking at the world’s largest film festival in Cannes. “They have both grown up and even though the tabloid press will still chase them, there is a new respect there for them.”
Jolie, 37, has managed to put her wild reputation behind her, staying out of the public spotlight with Pitt and their six children and only taking to the stage to promote films and causes in which she is involved.
The actor, whose past roles have included the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider films, still makes big studio entertainment such as next year’s Maleficent, a twist on Sleeping Beauty in which she stars as the wicked sorceress who puts a curse on the princess.
She has also combined her humanitarian campaigning with film-making, marking her directorial debut with 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, a love story between a Muslim woman and a Serbian man with the Bosnian war as a backdrop.
Industry insiders at the Cannes film festival this week, the year’s biggest movie industry gathering, were stunned by Jolie’s mastectomy announcement but said the way she released the news, in her words in the Times, was a sign of her maturity.
“She’s somebody who has transformed herself in so many ways from the very beginning when she was dismissed as more or less some kind of kooky bimbo,” said Jay Weissberg, a movie critic at industry publication Variety.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 17th, 2013.
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