Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt split — what broke up the glamour couple?

It’s over for the modern day Burton and Taylor, and while Jennifer Aniston may be feeling smug, most of us are a bit sad.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were Hollywood’s glamour pairing.

So farewell, then, Brangelina. Reports from Los Angeles are that the most famous marriage in the world, that of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, is over. Jolie has filed for divorce, allegedly unable to tolerate her husband’s approach to child-rearing.

“She was extremely upset with his methods,” according to the celebrity website TMZ, “and is seeking sole physical custody of their six children.”

Gosh. It’s only two years since photographs of their wedding raised $5 million for charity. The world boggled at an Atelier Versace couture wedding dress covered in hand-embroidered versions of their children’s doodles and the mysterious legend “buttock fattock”, coined by one of their children and evidently considered sufficiently meaningful to be on the dress.

Having publicly fallen for each other on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith in 2004, they amassed during their relationship a brood of six children, biological and adopted. Brangelina was the Burton/Taylor of our time, two people fired up by an evident passion that reportedly broke up Pitt’s marriage to America’s sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston, and made her the most famously wronged woman in the world. Although Jolie and Pitt later claimed that nothing happened until after the marriage had broken down, it was the divorce that spawned a million T-shirts: were you Team Jen or Team Jolie?

It was ten years until they actually married and when they did, at their chateau in the south of France, it was at the behest of their children. “We didn’t realise,” said Pitt, “how much it meant to them.”

Hollywood’s golden couple spent their honeymoon making a film about a couple whose marriage is falling apart. “Brad and I have our issues,” said Jolie. “We have fights and problems like any other couple ... but the problems in the movie aren’t our specific problems.”

The film, By the Sea, bombed. Only two months after they married they were pictured on a Sydney hotel balcony having what appeared to be a furious argument. They were absent from the red carpet for a year and rumours of trouble in the marriage began to surface, always carefully quashed. While Jolie became ever more radiant and in control of her own destiny, Pitt developed a fondness for grungy facial hair. There were reports that she was fed up with his drinking and smoking.

The end of ‘Brangelina’

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Jolie was, in truth, leaving the Hollywood circus to become a global charity campaigner. While Pitt was in Vegas making Oceans movies with his mate George Clooney, or more recently with Marion Cotillard on Allied — a shoot on which rumours are predictably swirling about on-set chemistry — Jolie was striding through foyers with heads of state, giving measured, articulate speeches about sexual violence in conflict zones.

She wasn’t the token celebrity any more, lending her fame to highlight causes. Gone was the tattooed actress with a reputation for wildness, who famously once wore a phial of her then husband Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck. In its place was a Jackie Kennedy/Amal Clooney hybrid, giving hard-hitting speeches while wearing demure dresses.

The game-changing moment arguably came in May 2013, when she wrote an article for The New York Times. She had, she wrote, a faulty gene that gave her a significantly increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer, the latter having killed her mother at the age of 56. “I am writing about it now,” she said, “because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test if you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”

Here was an A-list actress, globally famous for her beauty, whose pneumatic body was pretty much the whole point of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, announcing on the world’s front pages that both of her breasts had been removed. Two years later, in 2015, she wrote of her decision to have further surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes. At the age of 40 she was, she said, menopausal. The message was clear: a double mastectomy did not make you less of a woman and being menopausal did not make you any less beautiful.

“When such a beautiful woman and icon talks about this openly, it just changes everything,” said one breast surgeon. “My hat is off to her,” said another. “She is doing a lot of good for women worldwide by raising awareness of the options women have.”

The poise and dignity with which Jolie confronted her diagnosis was remarkable. In an age when celebrities bleat endlessly about invasions of their privacy, she stood up straight and invaded her own, out of a simple desire to help others. And while countless celebrities talk loudly of their charitable endeavours and set up photo opportunities with photogenic orphans, Jolie chose to turn her considerable spotlight on the issue of sexual violence in war zones.

In 2012 she launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative with the British foreign secretary at the time, William Hague. She made speeches to the G8 foreign ministers and the UN security council. And it wasn’t just posturing — she got results: a 2014 global summit to end sexual violence in conflict zones resulted in 151 nations endorsing a UN resolution.

She became so senior in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that she had the authority to represent it at diplomatic level. In the past year she has met world leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Aung San Suu Kyi, Alexis Tsipras and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She has had talks with the Pope and been made an honorary dame by the Queen.

Earlier this month, she met Syrian refugees in Jordan and addressed a UN peacekeeping conference in London, where she urged delegates to support a pledge to eliminate all forms of sexual abuse of exploitation by peacekeepers.

And all the while she has been a mother to six children. Having adopted a son, Maddox, from Cambodia, she and Pitt went on to adopt a daughter, Zahara, from Ethiopia, and another son, Pax, from Vietnam. In 2006 Jolie gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh, and two years after that had twins, Vivienne and Knox. The family lived out of a suitcase, travelling with six nannies, one for each child, and a phalanx of bodyguards. Every week brought a new picture of them trailing through another airport. Every month there were new reports of where they had decamped to: New Orleans, London, Malta, Sydney ...

There is a poignancy now to what she wrote three years ago. “I am fortunate,” she wrote in her piece for The New York Times, “to have a partner who is so loving and supportive.” Alas, Pitt was the last link to the celebrity world she had grown beyond. She appears to have outgrown her own marriage. Any hope that this union might end with a Zen-style conscious uncoupling could prove wide of the mark. Jolie is reported to have hired as her lawyer Laura Wasser, the woman who most recently took on Johnny Depp’s toxic divorce. Wasser has acted for Ashton Kutcher and a hat-trick of divorcing Kardashians.

Jolie has apparently instructed her to get physical custody of all six children, although legal custody will be shared. It’s now more than a decade since those Team Jen T-shirts went viral. Aniston is now happily married to the actor Justin Theroux, and could be forgiven if she’s feeling just a little bit smug. The rest of us mainly just feel a little bit sad.

The Times