ANGELINA WHO?
Brad Pitt’s new lady friend isn’t just ‘the sexiest thing’ he’s ever seen, but an award-winning professor of architecture whose last lover was a billionaire. As her ex-husband tells the Mail: Brad is one lucky guy!
THEY are calling it the ‘Amal Effect’ because, following George Clooney’s marriage to human rights barrister Amal Alamuddin, it seems that what a bachelor film star of a certain age needs most is a consort with a supernova combination of beauty, brains, and serious professional achievement.
The latest star to embrace the phenomenon is Brad Pitt — probably the most eligible bachelor in Hollywood since his split from Angelina Jolie and, incidentally, a long-time pal of Clooney’s.
In Professor Neri Oxman he has found a dazzling supernova of his own, and reportedly thinks she is ‘the sexiest thing he ever laid eyes on’. (Take that, Angelina!)
Professor Oxman, a 42-year-old divorcee who was born in Israel, is an award-winning architect with a PhD (in design computation) from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She was a 2014 honoree in Carnegie’s Pride of America, which celebrates brilliant U.S. immigrants, and was invited to give her own TED talk — a highly sought-after opportunity for world-leading experts to share their views with a global audience online.
In her current role, Professor Oxman leads the Mediated Matter research group (focusing on ‘nature-inspired design and design-inspired nature’), and teaches graduate students at MIT School of Architecture and Planning Media Lab.
Dubbed the ‘rock star’ professor, she seems to have more brains than all of Pitt’s previous wives and girlfriends put together. In fact, she even makes his ex, Angelina, who has combined acting and directing stardom with humanitarian work, look, well, a little ordinary.
Professor Oxman and Pitt, 54, are said to have formed an instant connection after meeting last autumn when he consulted her about an exclusive item of furniture she’d designed — a ‘3D printed’ [under computer control] chaise longue.
The actor is now ‘completely smitten’ with her, according to reports. A source told the New York Post’s gossip column: ‘Brad and Neri instantly hit it off because they share the same passion for architecture, design and art. Brad is very interested in spending more time with Neri; she is fascinating.’
oTHEr reports claim they have an ‘intense chemistry’ and have been spending quiet nights in at her home in Boston, ordering takeaway dinners.
The magazine Us Weekly says he’s been given a key to her apartment, and has been seen coming and going.
A source insists: ‘Brad has been spotted going into her apartment building on multiple occasions late at night, and emerging the next morning after she leaves to teach.’
He’s said to have joined her in February at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where she was speaking (Pitt’s representative disputes the claim).
‘Brad is besotted with Neri. He is mesmerised by her intellect, her cool philosophy on life and their shared love of arts and design,’ one observer says.
Sources close to Pitt confirm that the pair have met multiple times but dispute claims that the actor has keys to Professor Oxman’s apartment or that they were in South Africa together. They deny a romance while conceding ‘one may yet blossom’ — a revelation that is unlikely to dampen the excited gossip and speculation.
What Professor Oxman makes of it all is harder to ascertain.
At her 4th floor office at MIT this week, her assistant Alexandra said Professor Oxman was ‘travelling’, adding: ‘If she decides to release a statement I will let you know.’
A doorman at her apartment building, which is a ten-minute walk away, said: ‘As soon as I heard Neri was seeing Brad Pitt I asked my manager what to do if he came in.
‘I was told to treat him exactly like any other guest and ask him for ID, and if he refused to show ID, Neri would have to come down and get him.’
The first indication that the pair knew each other came late last year when Pitt was photographed visiting Professor Oxman’s workplace.
One of her students posted it on the social media site Instagram in November.
One can understand how the connection was made: Pitt has called architecture his ‘passion’ and is a keen sculptor.
He is said to have had dinner at Professor Oxman’s apartment after the meeting, and then stayed in town for a week.
Neri Oxman’s father robert, also a professor of architecture, has confirmed the pair have met: ‘They had two meetings that were both professional meetings, mainly at the [MIT] Media Lab, and I think there may be some possibility the project will progress if MIT comes up with some proposal.’
He added: ‘As far as we know, the relationship is mainly a professional one due to his interest in having her work on a specific theoretical project, which he was doing, to my understanding, with Netflix.’
Note the use of the word ‘mainly’. Her father says he hasn’t actually talked to his daughter about claims of a romance.
Pitt, of course, became one of the world’s most desired singletons when his marriage to Jolie ended in 2016.
Some months later, Pitt announced he had quit alcohol in a bid to ‘evolve’. Jolie and their six children moved into a £18 million house in the Los Feliz area of LA, previously owned by legendary filmmaker Cecil B DeMille.
After an aggressive start, with claims and counter-claims, numerous lawyers and ‘crisis control’ Prs, the pair’s divorce has been quietly progressing and is said to be almost settled.
So the path is clear, then, for a romance, and in the opinion of Professor Oxman’s former husband, it is Brad Pitt who can count himself lucky.
Indeed, Osvaldo Golijov, a Grammy award-winning Argentine composer, told the Mail this week that Neri is, in his opinion, far more beautiful than Pitt’s estranged wife Jolie.
‘Neri is multi-layered, like a flower. Unique and beautiful on the inside and out,’ he said.
He added: ‘Neri is very brilliant, very beautiful, tremendously beautiful. People have said she looks like Angelina Jolie. Well, I think she looks even better than Angelina. There is a resemblance but I think Neri has a different kind of glow.’
Many have commented on the striking physical similarity between Angelina and Neri. The latter can hold her own — and more — with the actress, and most supermodels, too.
hEr divorce from Golijov was painless and amicable, and neither party bothered with lawyers (unlike Brad and Angelina).
‘We have remained friends — there is still love there,’ said Mr Golijov.
So what more is known about this intriguing woman who appears to have entranced a man who has previously broken the hearts of such beauties as Gwyneth Paltrow (they dated for three years) and Jennifer Aniston (he left her for Jolie after five years of marriage)?
Born in 1976, Neri Oxman is the daughter of rivka and robert
Oxman, professors at a leading university, the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology). Her father has written widely on public housing, and her mother is an expert on digital architecture, which uses computers to design and create structures.
The family lives in Caesarea, one of Israel’s loveliest areas. It is the home of numerous millionaires, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Neri Oxman spent her 18 months of mandatory military service in the Israeli Air Force.
She then spent two years at medical school at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before leaving to study architecture, starting her degree in Israel but finishing in London. She did her PhD in the U.S., moving there permanently in 2005.
younger sister, Keren, who lives in New york, is an artist who did her MA at the Royal College of Art in London.
In 2011, as she was rising to academic prominence, Professor Oxman was asked in an interview if she received particular attention for being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field. She described it as a ‘blessing [that] is also a curse in many cases’, because ‘the attention comes with a great deal of criticism and with the need to display a lot of responsibility.
‘It always requires me to work harder and present my ideas in the most professional way possible’.
In 2009, she met composer Golijov at a dinner party and they married in a flower-filled garden near Professor Oxman’s office.
His three children by a previous marriage, then aged 16 to 21, were among the guests. Golijov, 57, recalled: ‘The children loved her from the start, especially the youngest. I believe they are still in touch with her.
‘Neri and I wanted to start our own family but it didn’t happen. It was one of those things and it didn’t break up the marriage.
‘We just grew apart. Neri is 15 years younger than me and after three years it was clear that we were going in different directions.
‘I think we were drawn together by creativity. We are both creative and spiritual. Our Judaism was another thing, and the values we both shared.
‘We had a lot in common and understood each other so well. Our marriage lasted three years and it was really quite a beautiful time. I think, in the end, we sat down and decided it wasn’t working. We wanted other things.
‘There were no big fights or smashing of plates. Neri is feisty in a positive way, passionate about things she loves and a lot of fun. When we started to grow apart, she grew inward, not angry.’
The couple filed a joint separation agreement in May 2014.
Neri moved out of their two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in a converted 19th-century Methodist church in a suburb of Boston.
She also transferred $650,000 to her ex, which he says he had earned in music royalties from numerous compositions. He said: ‘The apartment was mine when we met and the only other thing was the money in her bank account. They were my royalties and she transferred those back to me.
‘It was a separation between honest humans. She was doing well, as an artist and a professor, and we walked out of our marriage with the things we went into it with. She left some sculptures — they were gifts she had given me and I still have them.’
The last he heard, she was dating Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedgefunder. ‘If it is now Brad Pitt, he is a lucky man,’ Golijov said.
cERTAINLy, Pitt will be relieved to move on from the tumult of the past two years. When he and Jolie split it was alleged that a ‘drunk’ Pitt had clashed with adopted son Maddox during a confrontation aboard a private jet while it was refuelling. Both the FBI and social services investigated before closing their files with no charges filed.
The LA County Department of Children and Family Services recommended Jolie got physical custody of the children, Maddox, 16, Pax, 14, Zahara, 13, Shiloh, 11 and twins Knox and Vivienne, nine, in the weeks that followed. Pitt was allowed supervised visits.
The actor was said to have seen his children just once over the Christmas period in 2016, even though by then he had been cleared of allegations of any abuse by the FBI and child services.
However, Angelina is said to have been stunned by the hostile public reaction to the divorce, which the public seemed largely to blame her for.
To the surprise of many, Pitt came to the rescue. In an excruciating interview with GQ magazine last year, he said that he was to blame, and talked about his sobriety.
A formal divorce agreement is now in view.
For her part, Jolie is said to have found love with an estate agent, but the two stars are reportedly keeping their new romances lowkey until they are ready to end their marriage officially.
It is thought that Jolie will retain primary custody of their children, with Pitt getting visiting rights. And with a romance with Professor Oxman to buoy him, perhaps the next chapter in his life will be a happy, and more peaceful, one.