'Angelina' Tell-All Paints Shocking Picture of Jolie's Troubled Childhood
7/30/2010 04:05:00 PM
kenmouse
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Angelina Jolie has lived a life of contradictions. Now a goodwill ambassador and one of the world's most celebrated actresses, she's blessed with six beautiful children (and one Brad Pitt), but she was once also a heroin addict from a shattered home who went on to steal other women's husbands. This -- and so much more -- according to the forthcoming bombshell tell-all about the actress, 'Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography,' by the master of such celebrity dirt-fests, Andrew Morton.Leaked excerpts from the book are fueling so much hype that publisher St. Martin's Press has moved up its release date from Aug. 3 to July 31, says USA Today.
Critics cite the lurid details of the 35-year-old star's childhood as the most compelling morsels Morton throws his readers.
An affair Jolie's famous father Jon Voight had with starlet Stacey Pickren when Jolie was only a few months old tore apart her family life and set her on a path of teenage rebellion, according to the book.
Her mother Marcheline Bertrand moved out of the posh Beverly Hills high-rise where baby Angelina lived with her dad and was taken care of by nannies. A bitter Bertrand rarely came to see her daughter during the first year of her life because Jolie reminded her too much of her philandering husband, Morton says.
"She separated herself from that child because she looked a lot like Jon," he writes.
The author traces Jolie's battle with heroin, cocaine and anorexia during her teens and early 20s, her bisexuality, the loss of her virginity at age 14 to a boy named Anton – whom her mother let move into their house – and her addictive romantic relationships with men and women.
He outlines her marriages to Jonny Lee Miller (whom, he says, she was cheating on with an old girlfriend and later with actor Timothy Hutton) and to Billy Bob Thornton (whom she clung to as she struggled to get clean). Just before she and Thornton tied the knot in Las Vegas in 2000, her mother checked her into the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA for three days.
"In her heightened state, struggling to stay off heroin and wrestling her addiction to Billy Bob, Angie went to pieces," Morton says.
The 46-year-old Pitt, described as a "bit of a stoner" and "Mr. Mom," is characterized by Morton as someone the 'Salt' actress had set her sights on long before she buried her claws into him on the set of 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.'
The actor "was one of the triumvirate of men - the other two were Johnny Depp and Willem Dafoe - whom Angie had watched and wondered about from afar," says Morton.
And Pitt was equally enthralled. "The corn-fed boy was toast," claims Morton. Jolie "came across as a strange exotic wanting to save the world's underclass and yet fill her life with children."
In spinning his version of Jolie's relationship with Pitt, the actress is cast as the calculating, bewitching villain who denies any role in the collapse of his marriage. Before the Aniston-Pitt union unraveled, Morton recounts a meeting between the two queens of Hollywood.
"As Angie shook her hand, Jennifer could have been excused for wondering whether she was extending her long slim fingers in friendship or sizing up her next victim, like a hangman judging the length of rope needed for the drop," he writes.
But Jolie is also hailed as a heroine for her work for the U.N. During her first trip to Sierra Leone in that role, Morton says, the star "insisted on paying her own way and on being treated like everyone else."
The book hits shelves on Saturday. Morton predicts that even Jolie, who has tried to divert attention away from it, will feel its impact.
"I think my biography will genuinely change the way people view her -- and the way she sees herself," he tells The Daily Mail.
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