JOLIE BREATHING LIFE INTO LARA CROFT
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com Source: www.canoe.ca

[ June 10th 2001 ]

Paramount Pictures $100m Tomb Raider motion picture is less that a week away from it's public U.S premiere, and virtually every online media carrier has tackled carriages to the electric Hype Express Railway by producing their take on this summers most anticipated computer game come silver screen conversion.

Toronto Sun's Bruce Kirkland advances this piece from todays issue:

By her own account, Angelina Jolie is a little crazy or a whole lot eccentric. You choose. Just don't judge her, because she may be too fragile for close scrutiny. Yet attitudes toward her are a growing issue because the Hollywood star machine is poised to catapult this strange, exotic creature into superstardom with the Friday release of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Jolie plays the buxom, brawling, video game vixen and uber-heroine come to life. "I feel that if there is any kind of energy for me, it's because people know that I am extremely human," Jolie tells The Sun in a revealing private interview that careens from absurd to sublime. In an earlier group interview, she is more organized, more articulate, but less colourful and emotional.

"They have been with me through a lot of different things," Jolie continues in the Sun interview, "and somehow we're all friends, yet they know I'm a little nuts, you know."

For Jolie, Tomb Raider is her first big part in a blockbuster movie. She barely counts her support role in Gone In 60 Seconds, which was gone that quickly at the box office. "This is the first time that I happened to do something that was mainstream. Some people don't allow themselves to do something that is mainstream, even though they would love to try and have some fun with it, because they want to be credible and take themselves seriously. "So, yeah, we hope that it (Tomb Raider) does entertain a lot of people and that people like it. That is just as important as being really complicated and really deep. Certainly, in my life, I have drowned in being deep and complicated and dark. It's very hard sometimes to step up in life and be proud and be confident and be healthy and be strong and be adventurous and be light and to laugh. It's hard for me. It's hard to be free. " The crazy stuff in Jolie's young life has been well documented because she does not censor herself. She is the 26-year-old daughter of an American original, Jon Voight, and French actress Marcheline Bertrand. Jolie is the fifth wife of another Hollywood eccentric, actor-filmmaker Billy Bob Thornton, 45. He is her second husband after Jonny Lee Miller. They have now been married for 13 months.

The "doubters," as Thornton called them in a Cannes interview last month in which he described Jolie as his one-and-only soulmate, had given them 13 days max. But the two lovebirds told US magazine last June that the only way that the union could end was through spontaneous combustion during their incendiary sexcapades. "Better than ever," Jolie says of the marriage now. "We're talking about a poodle! What I mean by that is that we're having fun with our life. We're coming back here in July (she's now shooting a movie in Vancouver, he's shooting one in Louisiana) to be mostly with his children and we want to have a real life and a real family. They're important. It's what grounds you. It's a real life you have together and memories you build and share." Both Thornton and Jolie are covered with tattoos, including each other's names and a symbol that has a spiritual significance known only to them. Jolie has a dozen designs on her body, some of which need to be covered up for movies such as Tomb Raider in which she exposes some flesh. Around their necks, they each wear a silver amulet containing four drops of the other's blood.

[Jolie set the gossip columnists' tongues wagging over her self] declared her love the night she won the best supporting actress Oscar for playing a sexy whack-job woman in Girl, Interrupted. Looking back, accusations of incest -- as well as heroin use -- were stupid and unsubstantiated, but Jolie has a way of generating a buzz. "I know myself as such a nut," Jolie says of herself. "I'm just honest and I like that I don't have to worry about what I say and I don't have to pretend that I'm someone else. I don't have the time or energy for it and I don't want to live that way. But, yeah, sometimes things are taken the wrong way. "But there is also a hell of a lot that people don't know about me, you know. People know maybe one-tenth of my life and because it's a certain kind of life (as a celebrity) they assume that's everything. But I have my secrets!" One of those secrets is certainly not her breast size. In one of the amusing side issues in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Jolie says she padded her breasts to conform to the expectations of hardcore gamers who idolize Lara. "I'm a 36C, she's a 36D," Jolie says of her character on screen. "In the game, she's a double-D, so we took her down but we did give her some proper padding."

Jolie finds the fascination with Lara Croft's breasts funny. "Because, personally, I wouldn't want those breasts!" In the Sun interview, Jolie tries to elaborate. Sometimes, her tongue cannot wrap itself around the ideas swirling in her head and conversation becomes gibberish. Here is an example, sparked when I return to the breast issue: "I think a lot of it has to do with ... (pause) ... because of how much ... (pause) ... I think people don't realize it is almost like ... (pause) ... it is not as much ... (pause) ... but because she was also a physical character ..." Jolie seems unfazed that she left her sentences dangling and made no sense. She simply continues with a warm smile on her lips and her liquid azure eyes sparkling with hope that this time the sentence will emerge full-blown. It does.

"There are certainly women in movies with big breasts. There are a lot of actresses with breasts and characters with nothing but cleavage. I know she has big breasts in the movie. She has big breasts in the game. We didn't want to make them as big as the game but we didn't want to take away from her the things that are trademarks of her."