Angelina Jolie admits she started acting to help her late mother Marcheline Bertrand “pay the bills”.
Angelina Jolie is arguably one of the world’s most famous actresses but, she admits she never truly been comfortable in front of the camera, despite being the child of two performers.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she said: “There’s a lot that’s not in my nature to be an actor.”
“I’m very happy that I was able to be one – I’m very lucky and very fortunate – but I realized how much it was for my mother when she passed away because I felt very differently about it as soon as she was gone.”
“I think, when I started acting, it was a good means to an end. It was a job, and I wanted to help my mom with bills. It was a creative job, something where you get to explore different times in history, different people, different sides of yourself, learn different skills, so it’s a wonderful job to have as you grow and as you learn as a person. But you also are not those people.”
Angelina admits she struggled with the fame that came with her career, saying, You’re young and you don’t know exactly who you are, yet you also get a microphone in front of your face, and you’re 17, 18, and people are asking you your opinions, and you haven’t formed them yet.”
She briefly quit acting in the late 1900s to study at New York University, saying, “I was ready to kind of have a different life… I’d done what everybody said you should do – become an actor. This is what should make you happy, right…? I was miserable. I was completely unhappy.”
The she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the movie Girl, Interrupted but that success didn’t change her mind about acting. Jolie has since discovered her love for directing.
