A Proverbial Adventurer

Stashed inside Angelina Jolie’s big black leather purse is a small, well-worn hardback, “The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time,” a book of quotes that Jolie apparently can’t leave home without.

“I love quotes,” she says, opening the book and beginning to flip through it. Inside, she’s marked her favorites with Xs and is eager to share them. “These quotes aren’t necessarily for me, but for the characters I’m playing. Here’s a good one: ‘The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.’ Oscar Wilde.”

Considering that Jolie has played women who cheat on their husbands, forge romances with other women, use heroin and plot escapes from mental wards, you have to ask which character this applies to.

“All of my characters are me,” Jolie replies. “I have to be careful about the characters I play because they’re going to be me. Hey, here’s another one: ‘If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself in shallow water.’ Bulgarian proverb.”

This is intriguing, coming from a young actress who until recently was best known for her performance as Gia Carangi in the HBO movie “Gia.” Based on the real-life story of a fashion model whose career spiraled out of control when she became addicted to heroin, “Gia” garnered Jolie this year’s Golden Globe for best actress in a miniseries or TV movie.

Add to the list of Jolie’s complicated characters the painfully honest, momentarily unfaithful wife of an air traffic controller in this spring’s “Pushing Tin,” the loquacious, sad-around-the-edges club girl in last year’s “Playing by Heart” and the pouty mobster moll with a heart of gold in the David Duchovny vehicle “Playing God.”

Currently, audiences can see Jolie opposite Denzel Washington in the thriller “The Bone Collector,” which opened Friday. In it, she plays a cop who investigates grisly murder scenes, gathers forensic evidence--and avoids stray body parts--to assist Washington’s character in finding a serial killer.

In an irony not lost on Jolie, her follow-up to playing one of New York’s finest in “Bone Collector” was to take on the role of a charismatic, unpredictable sociopath. “You know sociopaths usually become serial murderers,” she says of Lisa, her character in “Girl, Interrupted,” which is set for release Dec. 21.

The film is based on a memoir by Susanna Kaysen about the nearly two years she spent as a teenager in an upscale mental institution in the late 1960s. Jolie’s Lisa runs in direct counterpoint to Winona Ryder’s watchful Susanna. As played by Jolie, Lisa is the maverick of the all-female ward, fighting for justice in her small world and defying the system by devising diversions from the strict routines, as well as devising escape plans. At times tender, Lisa is also sharp, cutting through the chatter to get at some sort of truth.

“Here’s a quote for Lisa,” Jolie announces. “ ‘Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

So if, as she says, Jolie does indeed embody her characters--and they her--this would make her a complicated and gifted 24-year-old. Yet there’s also an unobstructed quality about her that makes you believe her when she says offhandedly, “I’ve never created a character who I wouldn’t want to sit down next to and have a cup of coffee [with].”

“For a person who has a reputation for being quite complex, she’s a very simple young woman in terms of the way she works with people,” says Phillip Noyce, who directed Jolie in “Bone Collector.” “Her approach is very straightforward.”

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Noyce is referring to Jolie’s reputation, based on magazine profiles revealing a penchant for collecting knives and tattoos. “You read some of the interviews with her,” he says, “and she doesn’t seem to be saying what she thinks people want to hear. She’s not censoring herself in anticipation of what she thinks will play. She’s just being honest and willing to talk about things.”

This openness, adds Noyce, fueled her work on “Bone Collector.” “She’s very courageous as an actress. She never says, ‘My character wouldn’t do that,’ which is often something that actors tell you when they’re afraid of going there. Angelina will go anywhere, or at least she’ll try going anywhere that the director suggests. In addition, she has no pretension about herself, no airs.”

“Angie’s always exploring,” agrees James Mangold, who adapted and directed “Girl, Interrupted.” “She’s always digging into finding a reality for herself.”

Mangold remembers when Jolie entered his office to audition for the role of Lisa. He describes that afternoon as one of the “greatest moments” of his life. “It was clear to me that day that I was watching someone who was not acting. There was someone speaking through her, it was a part of herself. . . . I not only knew I had Lisa, but that I also had confidence in the movie I had written.”

Jolie is the daughter of Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, and her mother is actress Marcheline Bertrand. Bertrand raised Jolie and her older brother, James Haven Voight, after she and Voight split when Jolie was a toddler. (Jolie is her middle name; she dropped Voight when she became interested in acting.) Jolie’s first on-screen appearance was in “Lookin’ to Get Out,” a 1982 film her dad co-wrote and co-produced when Jolie was 5.

In her adolescence, Jolie began studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in L.A. She also modeled for a few years and appeared in music videos for the Rolling Stones and for Lenny Kravitz.

Gradually, she started landing speaking parts. She co-starred in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” miniseries “True Women” and had a notable role in the feature film “Foxfire” as a ringleader of rebellious teenage girls. But Jolie first captured attention in 1995’s “Hackers,” in which she played a tomboy, nicknamed Acid Burn, who fights cyber-crime.

Before Jolie won the Golden Globe for “Gia,” she had already taken home another for best supporting actress in 1998 for her portrayal of Cornelia Wallace in TNT’s “George Wallace.”

Much has been made of her presence, or as Noyce puts it, her “on-screen charisma,” as well as her beauty. She says people have questioned whether her lips, which are ample and plush, are even hers. “I’ve had people come straight up to me and say, ‘OK, is that your mouth?’ I love it that people ask me, but you look at Jon in ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and it’s so obvious.”

Of her parents, Jolie says, “My mom never told me not to do things. . . . I was taught to express myself. If anything, through my dad I learned that fame doesn’t make you better or perfect, that you can still have highs and lows, that people will be nice to you and mean to you.”

Jolie says she would like to act with her father. She envisions a comedy like the camp 1985 screwball comedy “Clue,” based on the board game.

“I would love to do a comedy with her,” Voight says. “She has a wonderful sense of fun, and it would be great for the two of us to play these really dopey characters, partially because we’re both taken so seriously right now.”

Voight couldn’t be prouder of his daughter’s career ascent, comparing her screen presence to those of Bette Davis or Jane Fonda. He praises how poised Jolie is, how she always seems to know exactly what to do, even off camera.

“When my mom passed away after a long bout of cancer, I took the responsibility of speaking for the family at her funeral,” Voight recalls. “I wrote a whole bunch of notes the night before, going over and over them. In the morning, after sleeping on and off, I told Angelina the trouble I was having. She looked at me and said, ‘You’ll do great, Dad. Just speak from your heart. You’ve got it all.’ She said it like a director, not just as a person making conversation. I did as she told me; she empowered me in some way. There’s something about her that knows how to handle things.”

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Jolie also admits, notwithstanding her career’s steady progression, that she almost got into a car accident when she first saw the poster for “Bone Collector,” with her face next to Washington’s, and realized it hadn’t been a dream.

“I begged for the part of Amelia,” she says of her role as the intuitive New York City beat cop. “I just wanted it so badly. I loved who she was. She was very street, and there were a lot of questions about my accent, about how I’d dress.”

The process of being cast, Jolie says, was agonizing. “Denzel had to meet me. He had watched my films, and I was so nervous. I was filming ‘Playing by Heart,’ and I had this pink hairdo that was all spiked up. So I tried to cover it with a scarf, and halfway through the dinner I accidentally pulled it off and didn’t realize it, and they were all staring at my head, this pink thing. Here I was trying to be like a lady, a cop and an adult. But he approved me and I thought that said a lot.”

Jolie also fought for the role of Lisa in “Girl, Interrupted,” having read the book, portions of which she had emphatically underlined. Later, she realized that all the passages she’d marked were about Lisa. What appealed to Jolie was Lisa’s inability to keep quiet or play it safe.

“I’m Lisa,” Jolie says. “I identify with her. She was completely honest, trying to break through to people. She got involved and she would invest in other people. She was looking for someone to talk to, to drop the [expletive] and be real.”

At one point in the film, Lisa challenges Ryder’s Susanna, yelling, “Why doesn’t anyone ever push my buttons?!?”

“I’ve experienced that,” says Jolie. “As an actor, sometimes you know the people around you want you to tell you to [expletive] off because you’re having a bad day and maybe you were rude and you didn’t know it. You wish people would say to you, ‘You’re being really rude.’ And you can say, ‘Thank you, you’re right, I’m sorry.’ But people won’t say it.”

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Jolie, who lives in New York City, says she’s not in a relationship. She was 20 when she married Jonny Lee Miller, with whom she co-starred in “Hackers.” They were separated in 1997, and their amicable divorce was finalized this year. (Although she won’t name names, the actress was recently linked with actor Timothy Hutton, who played her gangster boyfriend in “Playing God.”)

For now, however, Jolie is ablaze to talk about her next film, “Gone in 60 Seconds,” a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action movie set for release in June 2000. Jolie plays what she calls a “sexy car girl” who’s also Nicolas Cage’s love interest in the film about a ring of car thieves.

“There were so many women on ‘Girl, Interrupted’ that when I got this script and saw it was going to be 20 men and me, and so many cars, I was like, ‘Thank God! Testosterone! All right!’ ”

The film, which is a remake of a 1974 cult film renowned for its 40-minute car chase sequence, inspired Jolie to don white dreadlocks, leather pants and a T-shirt that read “Cock Pit” for the part.

“Actually, that was too much,” she says regretfully. “I ended up wearing T-shirts that said ‘Self-Serve’ and ‘Super Premium.’ ”

She regrets that her newfound Hollywood celebrity--and the way her wild past has been depicted--may intimidate people who work with her or who meet her on the sidewalk. “I want people to know that I’m so scared of people not coming up to me and saying, ‘Hi.’ In this business, they turn you into something that you’re not. I’m not looking to shock anybody or hurt anybody. I may have tattoos and seem dark, it’s just simply . . .” Jolie trails off as she rolls up the sleeve of her black sweatshirt to reveal a tattoo she got with her mother.

Sure enough, it’s a quote, this time attributed to Tennessee Williams, “A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.”

“I think it’s meant for anybody, even you,” she says. “Everybody has something that cages them. This a prayer for everybody to just be themselves.”

Anne Bergman is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.