Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt divorce: Their poignant last joint interview

The couple were quick to dismiss any suggestion the troubled marriage they portrayed in Beyond the Sea filtered into their own lives

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in 2011 (getty)

The demise of the marriage of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt has come as a shock to many fans who heralded them as an example of a rare, long-lasting, Hollywood couple who collaborated together on screen, appeared very much in love and openly gushed about each other in interviews.

News of their divorce was announced on Tuesday. In separate statements, Jolie said she will “always do what’s in the best interest of taking care of her family” while Pitt said he was “saddened” by the divorce and that the most important thing to him at the moment is the well-being of the couple’s six children.

Last year, the couple who met on screen starring in Mr and Mrs Smith, reunited on camera to film Beyond the Sea - the story of a couple experiencing problems in their marriage which was written, directed and produced by Jolie.

During the press trail to promote the film, the pair repeatedly dismissed questions around whether it was risky or dangerous to play two people in a turbulent marriage given their relationship off-screen.

They also presented a united front in a rare joint interview with the Today show in November, their last joint interview before announcing their separation. In it, the couple joked that Beyond the Sea was Mr and Mrs Smith after ten years of marriage.

Jolie also affirmed she was counting on the audience to realise that in the case of the film art does not reflect their harmonious, “very stable” reality.

“I’m counting on the audience to know that if it was close to us at all we could never make this film. It’s because we’re actually very, very stable and these aren’t our issues," she said.

Holding hands throughout, the couple candidly discussed Jolie’s health issues which saw her undergo a double mastectomy and had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed after discovering she had the BRCA1 gene mutation giving her an 87 per cent chance of developing breast cancer and 50 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer, both of which killed her mother Marcheline Bertrand in 2007.

Pitt spoke of his admiration for his wife throughout her health ordeal while Jolie credited her husband’s support and said despite her operations and the early onset of menopause after her operation, he never made her feel less of a woman or insecure about the changes to her body.