What now for the children they collected like trophies?
FOR more than a decade they trailed around the world accumulating children like other people collect souvenirs. Often the arrival of a new child would coincide with filming commitments in some of the most remote outposts on the planet.
Indeed the more benighted the destination, the higher the chance Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s clan would be embracing a new family member.
In this charmed, globe-trotting existence their offspring – both adopted and biological – became almost like trophies, a kaleidoscope of colours and races to embellish their parents’ image as Hollywood deities.
Through carefully choreographed PR stunts, gushing details of the children’s progress – from their embrace of different cultures to their future plans – would be offered up alongside the plots of Pitt or Miss Jolie’s latest blockbuster.
But in taking their adopted children away from poverty, they actually drew them into a film-star fantasy lifestyle where all the natural rhythms of childhood are absent.
The children were home schooled, speak a multitude of languages – from Arabic to sign language – and when their parents travelled they were dragged along too.
No experience, however distressing, was out of bounds. When Miss Jolie, in her role as a United Nations special envoy, met refugees in Lebanon, she took ten-yearold Shiloh with her.
When she met the Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, she took 12-year old Pax. And eldest son Maddox was co-opted into doing research on the killing fields of Cambodia for a film about the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge.
THeRe is no doubt that Miss Jolie and Pitt’s split will have the most profound effect on their children. Indeed, some will conclude it is a rum business to adopt several youngsters from all over the world, and then divorce so they are deprived of a stable nuclear family.
In all, the pair have six children aged eight to 15. The collection began in 2002 when Miss Jolie was 27. While filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia she visited an orphanage in Battambang.
She and her then husband, the actor Billy Bob Thornton, applied to adopt seven-month-old Maddox. The process was halted the following month when the US government banned adoptions from Cambodia amid allegations of child trafficking.
Although the go-between acting for Miss Jolie was later convicted of visa fraud and money laundering, the actress’s adoption of Maddox was deemed lawful. Once the process was finalised, she took custody of him alone in Namibia – where she was filming Beyond Borders – with Miss Jolie and Thornton separating three months later.
In 2005, she adopted daughter Zahara from an orphanage in Addis Ababa, ethiopia. By then she was dating Pitt, and the actor travelled with her to collect the girl. The following year, she and Pitt adopted both children together. The family swelled further the following year when she gave birth to their first natural child, Shiloh, in Namibia.
In 2007, Miss Jolie was back in south-east Asia, where she adopted a son, three-year-old Pax, from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City. She had to adopt him as a single parent to get round Vietnam’s regulations, which prevent unmarried couples adopting. A year later, the family was complete when she gave birth to twins Knox and Vivienne.
‘All the kids are learning different languages,’ Miss Jolie told Radio 4’s Women’s Hour in June. ‘Shiloh is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language, Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Maddox has taken to German and Russian, Zahara is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.’
Undoubtedly it is an extraordinary and highly eccentric family. The problem, of course, is that Hollywood is littered with the damaged children of celebrities whose colourful lives are often the undoing of their offspring.
‘I want to really focus on my children,’ Miss Jolie promised last year, ‘doing the best I can to guide and protect them before they are out of the house. These are the most important years.’
Which makes it all the more troubling that they must now watch as their parents separate in the glaring spotlight of the world’s gaze.