What was Angelinas Jolie's childhood like?

Answer 1

Angie lived with her mum and brother in the Palisades, New York, and living there she was a happy child, despite being a product of a broken family. She collected snakes and lizards - her favourite lizard being named Vladimir, and her favourite snake Harry Dean Stanton - and, oddly, like many females of her age, she had a major crush on Mr Spock. She would wear glittery clothing, including sparkly underwear, and flounce around, already performing, keen to make people laugh, to make them like her. She was a member of the Kissy Girls, who hunted boys down and kiss them till they screamed - until the school was forced to call the parents and the gang broke up.
Marcheline would take the kids to the movies often, and Angie claims this is where she got the notion to be an actress - not from her uncle, Chip Taylor, not from her godmother Jacqueline Bisset, and definitely NOT from her father, though at age 7 she did appear in Lookin' To Get Out starring alongside him.
When Angie was 11, her mother moved the family back to Los Angeles. They had already moved often, making the young Angelina feel constantly uprooted "I always dreamed", she says "of having an attic of things that I could go back up and look at".
Angie's teenage life didn't go as smoothly as her childhood and her wild experiences during this stage contributed much to her success as an actress today. Children teased her mercilessly for wearing braces and glasses and being so painfully skinny. Unlike the other parents, Marcheline was not rich - so Angelina had to seek her clothes at thrift stores like Aardvark. Her confidence received a further battering when her attempts at modelling proved fruitless. She never got picked - too short, too thin, too fat, too scarred. Perhaps it was the many moves, maybe it was to do with her father, a lonely, detached figure who did not want to live with his family (Angelina always feared she would be like that herself). Maybe it was the relative poverty, or the taunting, or the way she felt that, with her big eyes, big lips, big everything, she looked like a muppet. Angelina had come to hate herself, to feel absolutely worthless. She felt unworthy, didn't like to be touched (she still has this problem sometimes). So, like too many young girls, she started to cut herself. At 14, she dropped out of acting classes and began an existence of fast-living and active self-loathing. She wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out slam-dancing with her live-in punk boyfriend. They experimented heavily in S&M, Angelina once even asked him to draw a blade along her jawline, the scar still faintly there, serving as a witness to the troubles she had as a teenager.
At 16, things went slowly back to normal. Her relationship ended, she moved to an apartment opposite her mother and went back to acting classes. Now committed to acting, her first role was, unsurprisingly, as a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, noticed how he would watch people, talk to them, become like them. She stopped fighting with him so much too, realising that they were both "drama queens". For his part, Voight noticed her talent, being moved to tears by her reading of the part of Catherine in A View From The Bridge.
With the braces and glasses gone, she became a model too, working in Los Angeles, New York and London. Her confidence rose, though it would often plummet back down. She tells a story of how once she was so down she actually tried to hire a man to kill her. Being a compassionate sort of assassin, he told her to think about it for a month. Obviously, she didn't call him back.

Answer 2

Her parents Jon & Marcheline divorced when Angie was a baby. She was raised by a single-mom and visited her father every other weekend or so (he lived in another state). That's what is known of her childhood- her teenage years are another story