Angelina Jolie has revealed that she stopped singing because an ex-partner criticised her voice.
The Oscar-winning actress has made her return to the big screen in Maria, a new biopic from director Pablo Larraín (Spencer, Jackie) about the opera singer Maria Callas. Jolie sings in the film, but she recently explained to The Hollywood Reporter why that presented a slight problem.
“I don’t sing,” she said. “I had somebody in my life who was not kind to me about singing. It was a relationship I was in. And so I just assumed I couldn’t really sing. I’d been to theatre school, so it was weird that it even had an effect on me. I just kind of adapted to this person’s opinion. So it took me getting past a lot of things to start singing.”
As Jolie explained, the shooting process “grew and grew and grew until we were at La Scala. La Scala was the one everything was building toward. That was going to require the whole crew, the entire audience. It was so beyond my comfort zone that I was giddy. There was nothing else to do except to jump, to just fully jump.”
On the process of reclaiming her voice, she said: “It took many months of singing classes. Months of just getting the singing down and then the Italian classes and then the voice and doing all these things like her. You try to be precise.”
Jolie said that singing opera, which requires using “your full body as loud as you could possibly sing” is “scary,” because it’s “rarely asked of us in life to be all that we can be or feel all that we feel”.
Maria premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last week and Jolie was moved to tears after audience members afforded the movie an eight-minute standing ovation.
While reviews of the film have generally been mixed, Jolie’s performance has been described as “career-defining”, and many have tipped her for an Oscar nomination.
The film, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee and Pierfrancesco Favino.