How opera novice Angelina Jolie fought through tears to find her voice

Over the past couple of weeks, Angelina Jolie has been all over the news as one of the two warring parties in Hollywood’s most gilded divorce case: her eight-year battle with Brad Pitt over the custody of six children, all but two of whom grew to maturity while the battle raged, with several side skirmishes about a French winery. It seems somehow fated that the settlement should coincide with the release of the film that should be the most triumphant moment of Jolie’s zigzag career: her portrayal, in a new movie by Chilean maestro Pablo Larrain, of Maria Callas.

Callas, who died at 53 in 1977, was the greatest opera singer of her age, probably of any age. Striking, angular, forthright and demanding, she was the romantic heroine of her own tempestuous life as well as the operas that Larrain samples generously in his film. In the popular press, Callas was a towering diva who turned up on stage only when she felt like it. She was glamorous, but scandalous; for nine years, she lived an unmarried, indulgently luxurious life with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Jolie’s own scandalous youthful history of drug-taking, self-harm, public feuding with her father, psychiatric illness and morbid obsession with death – at 16, she decided to study embalming, a story much enjoyed in the celebrity press – is long behind her, but she brings it with her like a sense memory; in Maria, the women’s identities seem to merge before our eyes. Perhaps it is Jolie’s complicated past that allows her to see Callas, even in her weakest hour, as essentially a survivor, resilient and resistant. She looked fragile, says Jolie, but she would not be pushed around.

Did she see herself in Callas? “You know, when somebody’s close to you, you don’t see the same things,” she says. “You probably all see similarities between myself and Maria Callas that I don’t. But yes, certain things felt very natural to me. That she was trying to make space for her work, that she would fight for her ability to do her work … and find it absurd that she had to fight so hard. Certainly as an artist – and as a female artist – I think there are certain things we have in common.”

“She was with us all the time; her voice filled our days,” says Angelina Jolie of playing Maria Callas.Credit: AP

Jolie first appeared on-screen when she was seven in a film starring her father, Jon Voight. There followed a succession of films almost as erratic as her life off-screen, marked by bad choices and wildly disparate reviews, until she won the Oscar as best supporting actress for Girl Interrupted in 2000. As Lara Croft, she became an action star; she voiced animations while building her large family with Pitt, veered back into drama and directed her own films about lives in conflict zones, reflecting her second career as a humanitarian activist. It was her wild side, however, that captured the headlines: her three marriages, her numerous children, the feud with her father, her reputation for volatility.

She came to Maria Callas as an admirer of Pablo Larrain, whose films made in his native Chile included inventive explorations of the dictatorship (Tony Manero, No) and the church (The Club) before he began his exploration of prominent but complicated women with Jackie (starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy) and Spencer (with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana). Larrain is a lifelong opera fan, but Jolie knew next to nothing about it. Asked if she could sing, she said she could. Because, she laughs, that’s part of what actors do.

“I was very scared, more than I told Pablo,” she says. In the film, her voice is melded with Callas’ own, so the arias rise from her speaking voice. It took seven months of training to get her voice to a point where that process worked. “I didn’t realise at first what it really meant to sing opera,” she adds. “Truly, I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous in my life than my first day singing on set. I was a mess. But also, isn’t it wonderful to be frightened of something? To get to this stage of life and find something that scares us again?”

Angelina Jolie in Maria: “Certain things felt very natural to me. That she was trying to make space for her work, that she would fight for her ability to do her work.”Credit: AP

Singing itself proved a profound catharsis, as well as a pathway to her character. “It’s a deeply, deeply emotional experience. I think I can say that for everybody. Because we’ve all felt this: when something happens – you go through a trauma, a pain, a loss, whatever it may be – you hold it in your body, you say your stomach is in knots or your heart flutters, whatever, but so very rarely are we supported to be able to let it out, to let out the whole sound of the pain, the full sound of the love, whatever it may be: the human sound that is in all of us.

‘Isn’t it wonderful to be frightened of something? To get to this stage of life and find something that scares us again?’

Angelina Jolie

“My first week was very emotional. I was crying because I had real trouble accessing sound; I was quite locked. Different things have happened in my life. So it was a breakthrough when I found my own voice. And then, to connect that emotion and do a performance, was such a gift.”

It is strange, says Larrain, that there aren’t more films about opera, given how much the two forms have in common: both draw on all the other arts to create a spectacle. He hopes to make opera converts, of course, but was particularly drawn to Callas as a subject because, for all her fame, he felt she was underestimated as a committed artist.

Maria Callas as photographed by Christian Steiner in the 1960s.Credit: Christian Steiner/AP

“The biggest misconception for me is that she was someone who was highly affected by others, especially men – or directors, conductors, composers or managers,” he says. “The more we got to know her, the more we saw a woman who knew where she was going, who was in control, who was not a victim except of the press, who were cruel to her. But I think the one who really understood that better than anyone was Angelina, who brought a sense of stoicism to the character that I didn’t entirely see before.”

Stephen Knight’s script follows Callas’ imaginary footsteps in what turns out to be the last week of her life. She is unwell in many ways: regal but rake-thin and wreathed in delusions. Despite not having performed for years, she believes she can recover her faded voice and goes to secret rehearsals with a loyal accompanist to try.

Or perhaps she is just telling herself a story, to persuade herself she is still working? She certainly conjures up the orchestras and choruses who pop up wherever she goes in Paris; she also invents her companion on these jaunts, a filmmaker named Mandrax (Cody Smit-McPhee) to whom she relates episodes of her life story as if for some future biopic. The real Mandrax, as she knows very well, are the sedatives to which she is addicted, hidden all over her apartment where the servants won’t find them.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous in my life than my first day singing on set,” says Angelina Jolie.Credit: AP

What Jolie herself conjures is the sense that Callas is always on show, meaning she is performing a performance. We only have glimpses of the woman behind La Callas, in moments when Jolie digs beneath that polished surface. “I did think about that process,” Jolie says. “I think it came from a place that was very moving to me.

“When she was a child, it was central to her survival. Her mother sent the message to her that she didn’t love her as she was. She was kind of raised to believe she must be great and do all these things in order to be enough, so I think it was drilled into her that to survive she had to make that performance part of her art. But I think she felt like what we all feel when we’re alone and nobody’s looking at us: a real and fragile person.”

That person was her ostensible focus. When Kristen Stewart played Diana Spencer, she said she sometimes felt Diana was visiting her. Jolie didn’t feel that kind of ghostly presence, but she did feel responsibility to take care of the real Maria Callas. “If you’re playing a real person, I think you have to actually like them in some way,” she says. “There has to be a connection. There were moments when I was wearing a dress she had worn or standing in a place where she once stood, and it is hard not to feel the essence of that person is there somehow.

“And, unlike Diana, she was an artist, so I could hear her music. She was with us all the time; her voice filled our days. It’s funny, you think you’ve done a movie about Maria Callas, but Maria Callas is opera. It was her great love, it was who she was, it was her voice, it defined her. So the film and the artform and the woman are one and the same.” In the end, she says, she thinks they made a film about art. And now, as Angelina Jolie, she listens to opera all the time. It has become her great love too.

Maria opens on January 30.