In the late 90s, when she was a kind of weird Hollywood “It” girl, I suspect few people could have anticipated the turn Angelina Jolie’s career would take ten years later, when she had a 4-year span of some of the most interesting and outstanding work in the industry. It was also work that came in the midst of heavy scrutiny, with her life becoming more public than ever, and a large portion of a public that wanted her to fail.
She responded to this attention by delivering massively powerful performances, first in A Mighty Heart and then in Changeling, the latter of which earned her first Lead Actress Oscar nomination. There’s not much use speculating about the dramatic deepening of her on screen emotion, but one can’t help but suspect her experience as a mother informed, at the very least, her devastating work in Changeling, where she plays the mother of a kidnapped child.
But she also complemented these dramatic roles with a couple of action roles, first with Wanted, which was stylistic and reliant upon her unique skills as a badass femme fatale, and Salt, further capitalizing on her physical strength, one of few actresses granted the opportunity to play a superhero-like character.
As a public figure she’s become an important voice for political and health-related issues, more signals that her odd youthful days of wearing vials of blood are behind her, and the new, more mature Jolie is probably the preferable one in every way.
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Published: Jan 27, 2014 11:56 am