Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton

(St. Martin’s, 336 pages, $26.99)

In Andrew Morton’s unauthorized new tell-all, Angelina Jolie’s very early childhood is portrayed like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, said Susannah Cahalan in the New York Post. Confined to a sterile white room with nothing but a white crib at its center, little Angelina had almost no contact for a year and a half with her mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, who lived downstairs. Her crime, a “breathless” Morton tells us, was looking too much like her philandering movie-star father, Jon Voight. Abandonment issues were evident early: As a toddler, Angelina didn’t even like to be hugged.

Morton’s emphasis on Jolie’s childhood actually provides a “plausible theory” for the star’s sometimes inscrutable behavior, said Adam Tschorn in the Los Angeles Times. In years past, the 35-year-old Jolie battled anorexia, dabbled in self-cutting, used heroin, and gained a reputation for stealing men. We’ve all read tabloid accounts of Jolie’s marriages to Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Pitt, or her flings with Timothy Hutton and model Jenny Shimizu. But “we have a craving for an explanation, for back story, and Morton’s book offers a satisfying dose of both.”

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Oddly, Morton doesn’t explain how this damaged person became the Jolie the world knows today, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. At 35, Jolie is Hollywood’s most powerful celebrity, the higher-earning half of the town’s hottest couple, a mother of six, and a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. Morton has been unable to penetrate Jolie’s inner circle; in fact, just about the only people he could convince to talk on the record were one of Jolie’s ex-babysitters and one former drug dealer. The author’s ability to spin weak sourcing into compelling reading have made him a “leading light in the tell-all community.” Here, though, he merely recycles a stale cliché, casting Jolie as a “sleek, treacherous” chameleon, compelled to lure one attached man after another into behaving “exactly as her father did.”