Magnificent arrival

On her first trip to the mainland, Angelina Jolie promotes her latest film Maleficent and says she is keen to collaborate with Chinese filmmakers. Matt Hodges reports from Shanghai.

Angelina Jolie has earlier played a "tomb-raiding" British explorer, a Russian spy and a kung fu tigress, but her latest role as a malevolent fairy with a soft spot and devilish sense of humor tops them all, she said during her first visit to the Chinese mainland last week.

In Maleficent, Disney's CGI-heavy revisionist revamp of its classic Sleeping Beauty (1959 ), Jolie gets to use her English headmistress accent and wear curved black horns while appearing on screen for the first time with one of her six children. The movie is told from the perspective of the once-bitten-twice-shy villain.

"I did love playing Maleficent. I think she was one of the most challenging (characters) because she's so broad," Jolie tells a media conference at the Peninsula Shanghai on the Bund. "I never get cast as normal.

"I had to not be so self-conscious. I had to play a lot more with her, to try to be more entertaining," she says, comparing the role favorably with her breakthrough Lara Croft in 2001.

"Lara was certainly, when I was young, the greatest - to be offered to do something where you get to train with the British military and travel the world - was just the greatest job ever. And of course I went to Cambodia for the first time, and doing Tomb Raider really changed my life and my family, in many ways.

"But Maleficent's a woman, and she's much more complicated than a Lara Croft character, and she has all those things I've learned as I've grown up. And there are nice heavy themes that would usually take place in a drama."

She credited her children with helping create the character. One of them, 5-year-old Vivienne, plays Aurora, a young princess, in the film.

"They kind of directed me," she says. "I would do things that would make them interested or smile. They picked the voice ... And the same with costumes. I would try on different things and they had their favorites. And there were certain ideas they didn't like that I didn't do."

Her latest live-action role brings the Mr and Mrs Smith star back to the silver screen for the first time in nearly four years. Maleficent earned over $70 million in the United States after its release on May 28, making it Jolie's highest-grossing opening weekend to date. It opens in China on June 20.

She was accompanied to Shanghai by her partner Brad Pitt and three of her children. They spent Monday at the Long Museum of Contemporary Art.

"I think they're in dim sum classes right now," she says of her children.

Disneyland Shanghai is scheduled to open in late 2015, but the actress would not be drawn on whether it will feature a Maleficent-themed attraction to pair with the highly anticipated Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride.

Kung Fu Panda 3, for which Jolie will voice the character of Master Tigress, is due out late next year, and Salt 2 is rumored to be in the pipeline. Jolie also hinted at possibly reprising her not-so-wicked witch role for Maleficent 2.

"It's pretty hard to top her," she says. "Maybe I'll get the chance to play her again."

But there may not be many more chances to see her in films, she adds.

The 39-year-old actress flew back to the US earlier last week and spent most of June 4, her birthday, in an editing studio. She is now putting the final touches on Unbroken, a war drama about former Olympic track athlete and American military hero Louis Zamperini.

It is the second time she has sat in the director's chair. Jolie also helmed In the Land of Blood and Honey in 2011 about the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

"I'd like to cross over properly to being a director," she says. "I hope the film I've directed, which is the first proper studio I've done, I hope to have a success with that so I can continue to do work behind the camera.

"But I'm quite happy. I've been in this business a long time. I feel very lucky to have had a long career, and very happy to focus on raising my kids as they become teenagers."

Despite rumors last year that she was considering adopting a Chinese baby, Jolie ruled this out but not the possibility of extending her family in the future.

She says she is interested in cross-cultural collaborations and working with Chinese stars or directors. She also describes Shanghai as elegant.

"One of the things I've been doing here is asking a lot about Chinese writers and directors and artists," she says. "I hope somebody in China might reach out to me and give me a chance."

Nowadays Jolie is more closely associated with her philanthropic work in Africa and for the UN than with her stormy past, which included drug experimentation and marriages to Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.

She says she feels much more settled as a mother on the cusp of 40.

"There's a fire inside all of us. We all have a fighter. And it's just about figuring out what to fight for ... and stop fighting against yourself," she says.

Contact the writer at matthewhodges@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 06/12/2014 page8)