Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas in the new movie Maria.
Angelina Jolie plays the superstar soprano Maria Callas in the new movie Maria. The New York Times went to the Metropolitan Opera with her and the director Pablo Larraín.
The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.
Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.
Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. “Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!”
I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca before the release of Maria, a film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.
Jolie is one of the most recognisable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.
“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.”
Jolie, 49, an actor, director and humanitarian, is one of Hollywood’s most powerful and scrutinised figures. Her every move is tracked by the tabloids. Her divorce from Brad Pitt in 2016 is still playing out in court, and their six children have become fodder for the media.
Yet Jolie remains an enigma, a mystery even to those who work with her, carefully crafting her words and image.
“I worked with her for a very long time,” said Pablo Larraín, the director of Maria, who joined us for the performance of Tosca. “And I still have no idea who she is.”
In Callas, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, Jolie said she had found a kindred spirit. Called La Divina, Callas, too, was exalted and scorned by critics and fans. Her personal life was examined and written about. (She had a long relationship with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.) And she, too, was described as intense and elusive. Callas died in 1977, at 53, with only her housekeeper and butler nearby.
Jolie told me she identified with Callas’ isolation. “Loneliness is not a bad thing,” she said.
“We’re both seen as strong, but actually we’re very vulnerable and human,” she added. “I don’t think either one of us is necessarily comfortable being public.”
Maria, which opens in NZ cinemas on January 30, is Jolie’s return to the screen after a three-year hiatus. Her performance in the film has already prompted Oscar chatter, though she says her aim was to be true to Callas and to produce something that would please opera fans. (She won the supporting actor Academy Award in 2000 for her portrayal of a psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted.)
To play Callas, Jolie took voice lessons for seven months; learned arias by Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini; and studied clips of Callas on YouTube, mastering her smile, her posture, the way she moved her hands, her peculiar way of speaking. While Jolie’s singing voice is rarely audible in the film – it was blended to varying degrees with Callas’ – she grew confident enough to sing before large crowds of extras, at one point filming the mad scene from Donizetti’s Anna Bolena on the hallowed stage of Teatro alla Scala in Milan for four hours.
That evening at the Met, Jolie kept a distance from the crowd. She descended a grand staircase with the air of a goddess coming to Earth, finding her way to a seat in Box 19, next to Larrain.
“There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” she said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”
Larraín, 48, grew up in Santiago, Chile, immersed in opera. His mother worshipped Callas and played her cassettes in the car.
“I had this ghost of grandiose performance in my head,” he said. “She was a mythical figure.”
As Larraín considered options for the final instalment in his trilogy imagining the interior lives of prominent 20th-century women, Callas beckoned. Jackie (2016) starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy (who would go on to marry Onassis, leaving Callas bereft); and in Spencer (2021), Kristen Stewart played Princess Diana.
For Callas, Larraín wanted an actor who could create “our Maria,” he said – not simply imitate her. He called Jolie, who had reached out after seeing his earlier work.
“If there’s truth, beauty, emotion, vulnerability and fragility, then you have a character,” he said. “And if you have a character, then you have a movie.”
Working with screenwriter Steven Knight, Larrain turned the focus to the final days of the singer’s life. In Maria, Callas struggles to stage a comeback as she faces the reality of a damaged voice. The film portrays her strained romance with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer); her addiction to sedatives; and her difficult childhood (born in New York to Greek immigrants, she moved to Greece with her mother and sister in 1937, when she was 13).
Larrain picked music that he loved and felt would connect to the real-life drama of Callas’ life. “This movie is about someone who became the tragedies that she played onstage,” he said.
Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello provides a prayer at the film’s start. The melancholy Vissi d’arte from Tosca accompanies Callas’ final moments.
“Opera,” he said, “is a state of grace”.
When Jolie found out that learning to sing opera would be a requirement to play Callas, she panicked. (“You can’t cheat,” Larraín told her.) For years, she had carried the trauma of a boyfriend telling her she had a bad voice and that she should be grateful she had other talents.
“It was nasty, and it was more than once,” she said. “Then I stopped singing.”
She told Larraín that she had “a lot of emotion and pain that I did not feel like letting go”.
Larraín brought in vocal coach Eric Vetro, who started with breathing and posture exercises and helped Jolie stretch her range and resonance. Jolie thought she had a low voice. But it turned out that, like Callas, she was a soprano.
At her first lesson she cried, overwhelmed by the emotional and physical challenges.
“To find my voice and my breath,” she said, “I had to drop all the things that were protecting me and open up again.”
She gradually learned her first aria, Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, with Callas’ recordings as her lodestar. She listened to Callas’ master classes, gleaning tips on vocal technique. And she studied Italian.
After a few months, Vetro noticed something remarkable: Jolie’s mouth was beginning to move like Callas’ – and she had developed a captivating presence as a singer.
“I looked at her and said, ‘This is going to work,’” Vetro said. “The emotion was coming through her eyes, through her hands and through her voice.”
In the early days of production at a theatre in Greece, Jolie was asked to sing on camera for the first time. It was the opening scene of Maria, in which she looks directly into the camera and sings Ave Maria. She allowed only a few people in the theatre, including Larraín and her sons Maddox and Pax, who worked on the film.
Through an earpiece, Jolie listened to Callas; a vocal coach, soprano Lori Stinson, gestured and mouthed the libretto in the background. Larraín, behind the camera, heard a live mix of Callas and Jolie.
Jolie was dispirited after her first attempt. They did six more takes.
“Something extraordinarily human and truthful was happening,” Larraín said. “I saw someone who was transforming herself.”
When the final curtain came down on Tosca, around 10pm, Jolie smiled and stood up to applaud.
In a dressing room backstage, she and Larraín greeted the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Lise Davidsen, the renowned soprano who sang the title role in Tosca.
Nézet-Séguin gave his baton to Larraín. Davidsen, one of the few true opera stars today, praised Jolie. “You actually sing!” she said.
Jolie smiled and clasped her hands.
“You were just transcendent,” Jolie told Davidsen. “I don’t do what you do.”
On her way out, Jolie stopped to admire a portrait of Callas, who performed only 21 times at the Met, including a final run of Tosca with the company in 1965. She asked for a private moment.
“They really got her hands,” she said. “I love that.”
Then she made an impromptu visit to the stage. After a few minutes inspecting the sets and staring into the harsh lights of an empty auditorium, Jolie headed for the exit.
“Very moving,” she said.
Outside, a paparazzo waited near her black Chevrolet, preparing to pounce.
“Smile, Angelina!” he said. “Smile!”
Jolie obliged. Then she got into the car and headed into the Manhattan night.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Javier C. Hernández
Photographs by: Sasha Arutyunova
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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