Voight, Daughter Jolie Go Public with Estrangement
Two weeks after Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from husband Billy Bob Thornton, her father revealed on Thursday in a televised interview that she has split with him as well.
In a tearful appearance on the syndicated TV show “Access Hollywood,” actor Jon Voight said his daughter has “carried a lot of pain” for years, adding he was “broken-hearted … because I’ve been trying to reach my daughter and get her help, and I have failed and I’m sorry.”
Jolie responded with a brief statement acknowledging her estrangement from her father but offering no apologies or explanations.
“I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father,” she said. “After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.”
The 27-year-old actress adopted a Cambodian-born baby boy just months before she filed for divorce July 17 from Thornton, 46, her husband of two years, citing irreconcilable differences.
Voight, 63, an Academy Award winner for his 1978 role as a Vietnam War veteran in the film “Coming Home,” said his own “greatest pain” was not being able to see his adopted grandson, named Maddox. “I’d love to help out with the baby,” he said.
Voight traced his strained relations with his daughter to his own separation from Jolie’s mother, former actress Marcheline Bertrand, and his departure from the family home when Jolie was less than a year old.
He said he and Jolie enjoyed a brief rapprochement when they worked together on the set of “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” but had since become estranged again.
Jolie and Thornton, who met while working on the 1999 air traffic control comedy “Pushing Tin,” separated in June, according to her divorce filing. The breakup of one of Hollywood’s most high-profile and eccentric marriages had been the subject of frenzied gossip and tabloid headlines for weeks.
Jolie, who studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in New York, gained widespread attention, critical raves and an Emmy nomination for her performance as the drug-addicted, AIDS-stricken model Gia Carangi in the 1998 HBO television movie “Gia.”
She went on to win an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role as a young, institutionalized sociopath in the 1999 drama “Girl, Interrupted” and box-office success as an action heroine Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider.”
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