There’s the Angelina Jolie who’s now a single mother—managing the day-to-day chaos of six kids, and the trauma of her split from Brad Pitt—and there’s the Angelina Jolie whose latest movie, a groundbreaking Netflix original about Cambodia’s genocide, is also a thank-you to the nation that transformed her.
At her new L.A. mansion, Jolie reveals the tension between the two Angelinas and the reason her life will never be normal.
Like most things involving Angelina Jolie, stepping foot into her house is an experience so heightened one wonders if it’s for real or the product of careful orchestration. The large gates to her recently purchased Los Feliz house—an 11,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts mansion once owned by the epic filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille—slowly swing open, revealing rolling lawns, lush trees at the perimeter. No one’s there, and all is quiet except for the delicate sound of fountains, arched in a row over a swimming pool.
A number of doors to the house are open, as if posing some riddle from a fairy tale—which one to enter? Inside, the vibe is airy and calm: all open windows and cross-breezes, creamy-white unlit candles, soft creamy-white furnishings. Finally she emerges from the other side of the house and glides across the room in a creamy-white, floor-length caftan. Her hair is down, her feet bare, only a touch of makeup, her skin luminous. She smiles widely—a beneficent, ethereal wood nymph.
