Angelina Jolie, 46, has made quite an impression on the world in her own right but it turns out her parents’ experiences has also helped her to become who she is today. The actress is the daughter of Jon Voight, 82, and the late Marcheline Bertrand, who have both had experience in the entertainment industry and the activism world. Angelina has shared various quotes about how her mom and dad have affected her over the years and how they influenced her work as an actress, humanitarian, and mother to her own six kids.
Find out more about Jon and Marcheline below.
Jon Voight
Jon is best known for being an actor. He broke out on the scene with his role as would-be gigolo Joe Buck in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the role and it led him to many other successful films and television series throughout the 1970s. Some of them include 1972’s Deliverance, 1978’s Coming Home, for which he won an Academy Award for his role as a paraplegic Vietnam veteran, 1979’s The Champ.
He also went on to appear in popular features like 1985’s Runaway Train, 1993’s The Rainbow Warrior, 1995’s Heat, 1996’s Mission: Impossible, 1997’s The Rainmaker, and 1998’s Enemy of the State. He continued to lead a successful acting career throughout the 2000s with roles in 2001’s Ali and Pearl Harbor, and took on a regular role on the television series Ray Donovan from 2013 until 2020.
When it comes to his personal life, Jon married for the first time in 1962. It was to actress Lauri Peters, whom he met when they worked together on the Broadway production of The Sound of Music. They divorced in 1967 and he went on to marry Angelina’s mother Marcheline in 1971. They had Angelina’s brother James Haven in 1973 and then Angelina in 1975 before deciding to separate in 1976. They filed for divorce in 1978 and it was finalized by 1980.
Although Jon hasn’t remarried since divorcing Marcheline, he has dated various women over the years, including Linda Morand, Stacey Pickren, Rebecca De Mornay, Eileen Davidson, Barbra Streisand, Nastassja Kinski and Diana Ross.
Jon and Angelina made headlines when it was known they were estranged for a number of years throughout the 2000s due to friction between them. Jon expressed concern for her and her mental health in the media but Angelina hinted that his alleged infidelity during his marriage to her mother is what added struggles between them.
“When my father had an affair, it changed her life,” Angelina wrote in an article for the New York Times in 2020. “It set her dream of family life ablaze. But she still loved being a mother. Her dreams of being an actor faded as she found herself, at the age of 26, raising two children with a famous ex who would cast a long shadow on her life. After she died, I found a video of her acting in a short film. She was good. It was all possible for her.”
In 2010, after Marcheline’s death, Angelina’s then husband Brad Pitt reportedly encouraged her to reconcile with her father for their children. “He’s been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time,”she told Vanity Fair of her father in 2017. “I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around. He knows kind of the rule—don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.”
Marcheline Bertrand
Angelina Jolie’s mom Marcheline was known as an actress. She was born in Blue Island, Illinois, and she later studied acting with Lee Strasberg who founded The Actor’s Studio. She appeared in small roles in only a handful of features, including an episode of the 1971 television series Ironside, 1982’s Lookin’ to Get Out, and The Man Who Loved Women in 1983. She focused a lot on humanitarian work and founded the All Tribes Foundation with her partner John Trudell. The foundation worked to support the cultural and economic survival of Native peoples and by 2007, they issued over $800,000 in grants to reservation-based programs that work to strengthen tribal ways of life and safeguard a future for Native communities.
After being diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999, she and John also founded the Give Love Give Life organization to raise awareness of ovarian and other gynecological cancer through music. The organization held a few concerts for the cause and made quite a lasting impression even after Marcheline eventually passed away after battling both ovarian and breast cancer in 2007.
Jon was Marcheline’s only husband in her life. After they were legally separated, she started a relationship with documentary filmmaker Bill Day and it lasted for eleven years. She then went on to date activist and musician John, with whom she founded her charitable organizations.
Since Marcheline’s mother and sister also died from cancer, Angelina used the knowledge and experience as a way to be proactive with her own health. She decided to have an elective prophylactic double mastectomy after she underwent genetic screening and learned that she had a big risk of developing breast cancer due to the mutation of the BRCA1 gene.
Angelina wrote a touching essay about her mother and how she affected her life for the New York Times in May 2020 and it included a lot of bittersweet revelations about their relationship and about women in general. “When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me,” she wrote.
The actress continued, saying how she’s grown to relate to her mom. “With my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit,” Angeline wrote, referring to her own daughters Zahara, Shiloh, and Vivienne, in the essay. “She was a girl who danced all night on the Sunset Strip and loved rock ‘n’ roll. She was a woman who loved, even after loss, and never lost her grace and her smile.”