Angelina Jolie reveals how Maria role helped her ‘come alive again’ after ‘very dark’ time
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‘I needed a lot of kind people around me to hold my hand,’ the actor said. Angelina Jolie has opened up about how her role in Pablo Larraíns forthcoming biopic Maria helped her through one of the darkest periods of her life. The Oscar winner, 49, stars as the famed opera singer, Maria Callas, in the Spencer director’s latest project, which follows the American-born Greek musician in the final days before her fatal 1977 heart attack.
![[Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in ‘Maria’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/19/14/0af1c7e35dd740569392eb6dc9bfe801.jpg)
Maria is Jolie’s first film role since she starred alongside Gemma Chan and Richard Madden as Thena in the 2021 Marvel film Eternals and Taylor Sheridan’s thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead the same year. She added: “I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn’t have a lot of light and life within me.”.
![[Jolie and ex-husband Brad Pitt in 2015]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/04/05/09/GettyImages-495707898.jpg)
Jolie explained she also “needed to be home more” so, “couldn’t commit large periods of time” to projects, meaning the choice of what she worked on became more “practical” than “creative”. A year after the Eternals was released, Jolie’s ex-husband Brad Pitt, with whom she shares six children and separated from in 2016, sued her for “secretly” selling her shares of their French winery Château Miraval.
Jolie then countersued Pitt, claiming he was abusive to her and their children during a 2016 plane ride. In court documents, it stated that Jolie told FBI officials that Pitt yelled at her, “grabbed her by her head”, shook her, “pushed her into the bathroom wall”, and repeatedly punched the ceiling of the plane.
