THE DAY HOLLY LEFT WOOD
World crisis? You mean the Brangelina split?
‘OMG!” screamed the internet as one. “Ha!” said Jennifer Aniston, lying between her handsome new husband and her brilliant career. Barack Obama could have addressed the UN for all the attention he would have garnered as the website TMZ breathlessly announced that Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
Of course, we probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the news that Hollywood’s most powerful couple are to divorce — not when said couple had three marriages between them by the time they got together (his to Jennifer Aniston, hers to Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller).
But Brex-Pitt — as the internet was calling the break-up of 52-yearold Pitt and 41-year-old Jolie within moments of the news being confirmed — has, like every other element of 2016, come as a complete shock. What? When? How?
Amid the hurly-burly of the past decade, there has always been one constant: Brad and Angelina. Brangelina. They gave us the celebrity portmanteau — they were the King and Queen of Celebrityville, AAA list, a super couple the likes of Kimye were barely fit to bow down to.
Their relationship was not without its controversies, of course — Pitt was rumoured to have left Aniston having met Jolie on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith, causing a glut of people to declare themselves either “TEAM ANISTON” or “TEAM JOLIE“. But the couple weathered the storm.
Together they had six children (three biological children and three adopted), their “rainbow family” as they described it.
They married two years ago and seemed to settle into a reasonably normal existence — or whatever a normal existence is when you are worth several hundreds of millions of dollars between you.
That was the odd thing about Brangelina. Despite their wealth and almost immeasurable beauty, they seemed kind of regular. They seemed to be doing what we’d all be doing with our loved ones if we, too, had wealth and almost immeasurable beauty.
To wit: the delicious rosé they produced at the R730-million estate in Provence they owned (and were married on). What self-respecting couple wouldn’t use their millions to make delicious booze?
They seemed untouchable precisely because they seemed so ordinary — be it hanging out in DIY shops, visiting refugee camps, or revealing a double mastectomy to try to beat the cancer gene that had cruelly killed Jolie’s mother (she later went on to have both her ovaries removed). They weren’t the Beckhams. They didn’t seem to be trying too hard. It all looked very natural.
And then the news that Jolie had filed for divorce, petitioning for custody of the children, with visitation rights for Pitt. According to reports, those differences were anything from his “bad parenting” to his “substance abuse” to his “affair with Marion Cotillard” — all of which have been denied.
Whatever the reason, there’ll be no happy ending for Brangelina.
Pitt released a mournful statement to People magazine. “I am very saddened by this but what matters most now is the wellbeing of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.”
His estranged wife has taken on the so-called “disso queen” of divorce lawyers, Laura Wasser, who represented Johnny Depp during his acrimonious break-up from Amber Heard.
And as Brangelina go their separate ways, becoming Brad and Angelina once more, the general public are left with the crushing realisation that, in the end, the couple were nothing like the rest of us after all. — © The Daily Telegraph, London