Power couple Jolie, Pitt to split
LOS ANGELES: Actress Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from actor Brad Pitt, her attorney said yesterday, signaling the end of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and powerful couples.
“This decision was made for the health of the family. She will not be commenting, and asks that the family be given privacy at this time,” attorney Robert Offer said in the statement.
Jolie filed divorce papers in the Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, citing irreconcilable differences as grounds for the split, court records showed. She sought full custody of their six children, and Pitt asked for visitation rights. Jolie cited their separation date as September 15.
Entertainment website TMZ, citing a legal filing, said Jolie “was extremely upset” by Pitt’s parenting methods.
Other reports say Jolie learned through a private investigator, whom she hired, that Pitt was cheating on her with the French actress Marion Cotillard, on the set of their new film, Allied.
Jolie and Pitt, known collectively as “Brangelina”, were one of the entertainment world’s most visible couples, due to their good looks, successful films and activism. They married in 2014 after being together for 10 years.
Jolie, 41, who won a best-supporting actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted in 2000, was previously married to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton. Pitt, 52, one of Hollywood’s leading men, was married to actress Jennifer Aniston in 2003 when he and Jolie began filming Mr & Mrs Smith, the story of two professional killers assigned to kill each other.
There were reports of an affair, but Jolie told Vogue magazine they were only “very, very good friends” until Pitt and Aniston split in 2005.
Before their August 2014 wedding at their French estate, Jolie and Pitt had said they would not wed until same-sex couples were allowed to marry.
Jolie, the estranged daughter of actor Jon Voight, had a bohemian reputation early in her career but has taken on humanitarian causes and was named a special envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She frequently visited countries such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Tanzania, Iraq and Jordan to draw attention to the plight of refugees and the underprivileged.
Pitt joined Jolie on some trips and started a foundation to finance the reconstruction of homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooding. Together they started the Jolie-Pitt Foundation in 2006 to help charities worldwide. Their children include sons adopted from Cambodia and Vietnam and a daughter adopted from Ethiopia.
Jolie spoke out publicly about her elective surgeries in 2013 and 2015 to have her breasts, ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as a preventive measure due to a family history of cancer.
Jolie was nominated for an Academy Award for Changeling in 2008. She also starred in the Lara Croft action films The Good Shepherd and A Mighty Heart, and in The Tourist.
Pitt’s breakout role came in a supporting part in Thelma & Louise in 1991. Other films include Legends of the Fall, Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Inglourious Basterds, Moneyball, The Big Short and the Ocean’s 11 films.
Jolie and Pitt starred together the marital drama By the Sea, a 2015 movie that she wrote and directed. – Reuters