Angelina Jolie is a huge star in dire need of a great acting career – will her new movie finally change that?

Despite being one of the most famous women in Hollywood history, the actor is still more known for her complex love life than film roles of note. But could a biopic about Maria Callas from a celebrated filmmaker turn her fortunes around, asks Geoffrey Macnab

It has been a long time since fans and critics have had a major Angelina Jolie acting performance to watch (Shutterstock)

Where in the world is Angelina Jolie? Twenty-five years after winning an Oscar for her wildly arresting performance as a young psychiatric patient in the drama Girl, Interrupted, the actor has pulled her own version of a vanishing act. It’s not as if she’s been hiding out in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. She does remain an enormous global celebrity, her every action scrutinised, her every utterance pored over.

This week she’s been in the news again because of her bitter legal battle with her ex-husband Brad Pitt. But it has been a long time since fans and critics have had a major Jolie acting performance to watch. Though it looks as if that may be about to change.

Jolie will soon be back on the big screen playing opera diva Maria Callas in a new biopic by the Chilean director Pablo Larraín. Maria, scripted by Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight and set at the end of its subject’s life, has been receiving strong advance buzz. Its producers believe that Jolie is exceptional.

Inevitably, the role is going to be judged both as a dramatic comeback for the star – who has almost exclusively appeared in animated and fantasy films, and few at that, in the last 15 years – and an opportunity for Jolie to play a woman whose life bore echoes of her own. Callas was known as “the divine one”, and she too led a turbulent existence in the full glare of the media.

Larraín has already enthused over Jolie’s “extraordinary preparation” for the role, which suggests she could quite easily join his most recent American leading ladies in securing Oscar nominations for their work with him. The filmmaker previously directed two films about powerful women at pivotal moments in their lives: Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, and Spencer, with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, just before she and the future King Charles announced their intention to divorce.

Maria is expected to premiere at a festival later this year. If it does, all of the world’s leading critics will be watching, if only to see whether she’ll give as good a performance as her work in Changeling, Clint Eastwood’s Depression-era thriller. Debuting at Cannes in 2008, the film saw Jolie play a single mother whose son vanishes in mysterious circumstances. It earned her some of the best reviews of her career, and – to date – her last Oscar nomination for acting.

It’d be about time for Jolie’s acting work to be recognised again in such a fashion. For too long, she has been the victim of her own celebrity persona. As The New York Times wrote back in 2008, her “off-screen role as Angelina Jolie is so much more vivid and all-consuming than the parts she now plays on screen”. As her fame has increased, the impact of her films has diminished. Modern audiences have primarily come to see her as a flamboyant presence in big-budget movies – such as her two films as the Disney villain Maleficent – or as an action hero, as in the critically and commercially disappointing Marvel film Eternals, and the little-seen 2021 wildfire thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead. It has been a long time since she has taken on a significant character role.

Over the last quarter of a century, Jolie’s films have earned $2.4bn (£1.9bn) in North America alone, thanks to hits like her two Lara Croft movies, or actioners such as Wanted, Salt and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. But how many of these star vehicles have truly retained their spots in cultural memory? And considering her outsized fame, she has few powerhouse character performances to her name. There is her work in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (2007), in which she played Mariane Pearl, the wife of the slain US journalist Daniel Pearl, as well as Changeling and Girl, Interrupted. She also rightly received a Golden Globe in 1999 for her star-making performance in the HBO film Gia, about the tragic supermodel Gia Carangi. But that may be it…

Oscar-winning: Jolie in 1999’s ‘Girl, Interrupted’ (Shutterstock)

Jolie herself has also expressed ambivalence about American filmmaking, which has likely contributed to her erratic track record. “Because I grew up around Hollywood, I was never very impressed with it,” she told the Wall Street Journal last year. “I never bought into it as significant or important.” Jolie is, of course, the daughter of Oscar winner Jon Voight and actor Marcheline Bertrand. For over 20 years, she has been more vocal and passionate in discussing her humanitarian work than her movie career.

Those interested in scurrilous gossip about the rich and famous have always found plenty of grist in Jolie’s story, though. There’s been drugs, sex and broken marriages. She famously wore a T-shirt with Jonny Lee Miller’s name written on it with blood when she married him in 1996. Mick Jagger was quoted as saying that Jolie “scared” him when he met her in the 1990s. Her break-ups with Billy Bob Thornton and Pitt have been exhaustively chronicled.

For many who have collaborated with her on films, this has all been noise. “I loved working with her,” producer Andrew Eaton tells me, of their time on A Mighty Heart. He remembers her being close to the real Mariane Pearl before production had even begun. “She seemed to us to be perfect for that part, partly because they were friends but also because she so immersed herself in that character. She is probably the most famous person I’ve ever worked with but also the most professional actor I’ve ever worked with.”

Eaton remembers the shoot being difficult, with Pune, India, standing in for Karachi. Jolie, however, never once complained about location difficulties or sudden changes to her filming schedule. “She was always so gracious and professional about it,” he says. “She was one of those people who could be doing a very, very serious scene and then the next minute making you laugh. I found her incredibly refreshing and kind. She didn’t seem to be ‘method’ at all. When you go on set as a producer, you can either be excluded from that inner circle or not. I really like people who can turn around to the camera when the director shouts ‘action’ and completely become that person and as soon as that scene is over, they can revert.” When Eaton’s wife and children came to visit him on set, Jolie always took time to talk to them. “Not all actors are like that, especially ones who are such big stars.”

Jolie is directed by Michael Winterbottom on the set of ‘A Mighty Heart’ (Shutterstock)

In the years since making the movie, Eaton has witnessed Jolie’s career from afar. “I don’t think she gets nearly as much credit as she should do,” he explains. “I find it terribly depressing what has happened in her relationship with Brad Pitt … They just seemed very much in love and to work together really well. To see all the fallout makes me really sad.” Pitt worked on the film as a producer.

While Jolie has become a rare presence on-camera, she has spent the last decade building a parallel career as a director, with four features to her name. A fifth, Without Blood, based on the novel by Alessandro Baricco and starring Salma Hayek, is shortly to be released. But if you feel you’ve missed Jolie’s directorial work – perhaps apart from her critically reviled romantic drama By the Sea, in which she and Pitt played a couple in turmoil – you’re not alone. None of her movies have been obvious or easy.

In the Land of Blood and Honey, from 2011, was set during the Bosnian war and told the story of a Muslim woman who had an affair with her Serbian captor. Unbroken, released to mixed reviews in 2014, was an epic wartime survival saga. In 2017, she made her boldest feature: First They Killed My Father, about the horrific experiences of a child soldier during the period of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Jolie became interested in the country’s history through her humanitarian work, and adopted her first son, Maddox, from an orphanage in Cambodia’s capital in 2002.

Jolie at an event in 2017 for ‘First They Killed Her Father’ with the producer Rithy Panh and her children Maddox and Shiloh (Getty)

First They Killed My Father’s producer Rithy Panh (whose new film Rendezvous Avec Pol Pot was this week chosen for the Cannes Film Festival) tells me that Jolie had long wanted to adapt the film’s source material – by her friend Ung Loung, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime – but chose to wait until Maddox grew up. “[She wanted them] to tell this terrible story of Cambodia together,” he remembers. He adds that many Cambodians have watched the film. “You can imagine the burden of the survivors to carry the memory of the dead and how to talk about these lost ones to their children,” he says. “First They Killed My Father has thus become a space for dialogue between these generations, in Cambodia and elsewhere, because this story is ultimately universal. [Jolie] made her film with a lot of respect and generosity. She paid attention to every detail. And for that, I [and] we owe her a lot of love and sincere friendship.”

The portrait of Jolie painted by Panh and Eaton is worlds away from how the gossip columns have tended to portray her – as the woman who “stole” Pitt from his then-wife Jennifer Aniston, or as a dark femme fatale with a chequered past. Whether her turn as Maria Callas will raise her profile as an actor again is so far unclear, but it would be a positive turn of events for Jolie to earn critical respect again. She’s always deserved far more of it than the trolls and detractors have been prepared to give.