Angelina Jolie's backup career plan? Funeral director

Angelina Jolie planned to be a funeral director before she started acting. Photo / Supplied

Not a lot of people know this, but Hollywood siren Angelina Jolie had a serious backup plan if her acting career failed to take off: Funeral directing.

"It sounds like this very strange, eccentric, dark thing to do but in fact I lost my grandfather and was very upset with his funeral," Jolie dished in a new interview with US TV show 60 Minutes.

"How somebody passes and how family deals with this passing and what death is should be addressed in a different way.

She also revealed that she'd studied the profession.

"I thought I could do better. So I got a home course when I was about 14. I did a mail-order degree," she said.

"If this whole acting thing didn't work out that was going to be my path."

And the rest is history.

But, as we well know, Jolie did end up taking up directing - albeit in a wildly contrasting context. Jolie took her first stab at directing (and writing) a feature film with Bosnian War love story In the Land of Blood and Honey, which is slated for release in December.

Jolie also said that she felt very much at home behind the camera.

"I prefer directing," Jolie told CBS correspondent Bob Simon. "I loved having the spotlight on someone else. I would much prefer it.

"It's nice for all of that [her appearance] not to matter."

She continued: "I had never felt so much part of a team. I don't know if it was the subject matter or just that we all came together in a very specific time and environment about something that meant something to us, but somehow it became probably the best experience I've ever had."

Jolie also touched on her days as a wild child who was very much in touch with her dark side.

"I went through heavy, darker times and I survived them. I didn't die young," she explained. "So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn't survive certain things."

She refused to elaborate on what those "certain things" could be.

"Nothing I want to go into a lot of detail about," she said, "but I think people can imagine that I did the most dangerous and I did the worst-and for many reasons I shouldn't be here.

"You just think (there's) too many times where you came close to too many dangerous things, too many chances taken too, too far," she said.

Jolie, once famous for wearing a vial of ex-hubby Billy Bob Thornton's blood around her neck, says she's since tamed her wild side, but admits that she still has the capacity to be a "bad girl".

"I'm still a bad girl," she said. "I still have that side of me ... it's just in its place now ... it belongs to Brad. Or ... our adventures." Ooh, lucky Brad Pitt!

The actress, who raises six children - Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne - with partner Pitt, also paid tribute to her late mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007.

"My mother was a full-time mother. She didn't have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences. Everything was for her children," Jolie said.

"I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving - she's better than me."

Check out Jolie's 60 Minutes interview below:

Watch the trailer for Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey:

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