Angelina Jolie's latest humanitarian mission has been a trip with British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to the Congo to try and end rape in warzones. However, many still find it hard to take her seriously. But why, asks Katy Brand, in this week's Paper Tiger column.
8:00AM GMT 29 Mar 2013
Angelina Jolie seems to be very confusing to some people. On the one hand she is the quintessential Tinsel Town creation - mother to a Mia Farrow style adopted ‘rainbow family’, partner to Brad Pitt, daughter to bona fide movie star Jon Voight. She has two showbiz marriages behind her, and apparently another to look forward to, if indeed it hasn’t happened already. She has played the media like a Stradivarius her entire working life, indulging in extraordinary behaviours such as wearing a vial of her former spouse’s blood around her neck, offering up the most photogenic heroin addiction it is reasonable to expect, entwining herself in a somewhat provocative manner around her own brother, and talking at length about her bi-sexuality. Oh yes, and she’s an Oscar-winning actress.
Angelina, the Hollywood actress, with lover Brad Pitt
But these days, she has all but entirely reinvented herself as a global humanitarian campaigner, visiting some of the world’s most hostile and crisis-hit environments to raise awareness, whilst also giving significant amounts of her own money to charity. She has even bought a vast swathe of the Cambodian rainforest in order to protect it from unscrupulous developers. Of course, this is not an option available to most of us, but I’m not sure why that means it should be met with cynicism – just because the charitable giving you or I might make is more modest, it doesn’t negate the fact that others use their considerable resources for good.
Nobody is so rude about Bill and Melinda Gates attempting to eradicate malaria from West Africa (a task they seem to be succeeding at), but perhaps this is because they are not quite so physically blessed as Jolie. We are still suspicious of beauty, associating pulchritude with manipulation and deceit in a most Shakespearean manner.
For many still find it hard to take her seriously in her most laudable endeavours, with raised eyebrows and curled lips accompanying every foreign aid trip she makes. Why is this? Because she’s beautiful? Because her life is so privileged we can see nothing but insincerity in her altruism? Because Sting has basically ruined it for all celebrities by preaching his message of environmentalism between flights in private jets to his many luxury homes? This doesn’t seem fair.
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