We’ve all got one relative or another that drives us up the wall. Even movie stars aren’t exempt from teeth-gnashingly annoying family drama. Angelia Jolie is no exception. She and her Oscar-winning father, Jon Voight have had an on-again-off-again relationship since the Girl Interrupted star was a child.
Their family ties are all that bind them together, and even those don’t seem strong enough to keep Jon Voight in his daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives.
Did Angelina Jolie have a good childhood?
Jolie has been very candid about her relationship with her father. Voight married her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, in 1971. Together the pair had two children, James Haven in 1973, and Angelina in 1975.
By the time Jolie was 5, Voight had destroyed his marriage. Rumors abound about what caused the sudden fallout, but Voight eventually came clean, admitting that it was he who tore the family apart. “I had an affair and there was a divorce,” Voight has said. “There was a lot of hurt and anger.”
After the divorce, Voight was estranged from his family. Jolie has said that her childhood was spent with her mother and brother and that her father, “was around occasionally for holidays and birthdays.” Her father’s part in her life, according to Jolie, was performative at best. “There are pictures of me with him because his bits of time with me tended to be in front of the press.”
Jolie has been incredibly candid about her struggles as a teenager. The Changeling actress described her teenage self as a punk outsider, gunning for the position of funeral director, and struggling with drug abuse. She moved out by 16 and has admitted to trying, “just about every drug possible” during her teens and early 20s. She’s openly spoken about how reckless she was, and claims that “for many reasons I shouldn’t be here.”
She credits her survival to her mother, who rolled with the punches and did what she could to keep her daughter under the same roof. “When I was 14, I was either going to be reckless on the streets with my boyfriend or he was going to be with me in my bedroom with my mom in the next room because I was going to have a boyfriend.”
Voights recollection of Jolie’s childhood is self-centered, to say the least. When Jolie was going through a divorce with Billy Bob Thornton, Voight commented that she “began showing signs of mental illness as an infant,” and pleaded with her friends and handlers to her some help for her “mental problems.”
The George Wallace actor claims that he has tried to help her behind the scenes “in every way.” He pointed to her time on the set of Girl Interrupted as a key moment of his attempted intervention, but rather than the sunny welcome he apparently expected, she rebuked him, emphasizing that he couldn’t understand her.
Despite the bad blood, the two came together for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, but their reunion was short-lived. Voight blasted Jolie for publicly snubbing him at the release party, where he says her manager intercepted him and told him, “She doesn’t want to see you.” The manager recalls the interaction differently, and claims that he intervened after Voight “aggressively, physically grabbed her.”
Jolie kept her oldest son, Maddox, adopted in 2002, away from Voight for years. He described not meeting his grandson as, “the greatest pain” and said he would love to help out with the baby but that his children’s “inability to let go of years of programmed anger from their mother,” kept them apart. Gotta love that lack of accountability.
Jolie was having none of his platitudes in 2002 and not only removed his surname of Voight in favor of her middle name, Jolie but also clapped back saying,
“I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father. I will only say that, like every child, Jamie and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad. After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.”
The two reconciled for the second time in 2010 when Jolie allowed Voight to meet her 6 children. Brad Pitt – who was allegedly the driving factor behind the reunion – requested the meeting after the death of her mother. Jolie remained firm in not fully integrating her dad into her life, saying, “I think sometimes you have to distance yourself from the relationships you feel are unhealthy for you. But we have spoken and we are going to try to get to know each other.” However, she has decided that their relationship is less father-daughter and more like friends.
Things seemed to be looking up after Jolie’s 2017 divorce from Pitt. The custody battle was bitter, but through her children, she found a new way to bridge the gap between she and her dad. Voight has spoken very highly of Jolie as a mother, “she’s on it with these kids. She gives them love every second of their day.” But one can’t help but wonder how much time Voight spent with his own children, based on the cadence.
“Angie’s very good at encouraging the kids to be what they want to be, do what they want to do,” he told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview. What seems like the baseline for parenting to most people is, “interesting, [and] its fun,” to Voight.
The family remained close for several years, with Voight rising to the occasion and helping Jolie out with the kids when she needed it. She told Vanity Fair that he knew well enough not to force attention on them and to “just be the cool grandpa who’s creative.”
Unfortunately, their relationship dissolved again in 2023. The two have very different politics. Voight is a well-known conservative, whereas Jolie is an outspoken liberal. Jolie has been a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 2001, and has spent months overseas in more than 30 war-torn countries. In 2012, she was promoted to Special Envoy, with the authority to represent the U.N. High Commissioner at a diplomatic level – though she left the position in 2022.
Voight has been a vocal opponent of the Democratic party and liberals in general since at least the Obama era. In recent years, the actor jumped on the Trump train and endorsed the stolen election claims. He’s an avid Trump supporter, and has claimed the former president was “the answer to all our prayers.” That political disconnect ruptured the family yet again when Voight publicly chided Jolie for her Instagram post in support of Palestine.
Voight posted a video on Instagram, bashing his nearly 50-year-old daughter, “ I am very disappointed that my daughter, like so many, has no understanding of God’s honor, God’s truths.” It’s a deeply unhinged rant (perfectly positioned in front of an American flag) and more frustrating considering Jolie’s humanitarian work over the last 20 years.
Jolie has yet to comment on her father’s classic old white man moment. Voight is pushing 86 years old, so he might not have much time to find another reconciliation in the future.