Angelina Jolie started to pursue acting professionally at the age of 16, but the feedback she often received after auditions was that her demeanor was “too dark.”
In fact, the Oscar-winning actress almost took a different path that was also on the darker side.
After studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, she dropped out and turned her interests toward embalming as she wanted to pursue becoming a funeral director.
“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,” she said in an interview with 60 Minutes‘ Bob Simon. “How somebody passes and how family deals with this passing and what death is should be addressed in a different way. If this whole acting thing didn’t work out, that was going to be my path.”
As she resumed her pursuit of acting, Jolie landed work as a model, and appeared in music videos for Meat Loaf, Lenny Kravitz and The Lemonheads before being cast in the straight-to-video movie Cyborg 2.
It would be six years before Jolie would win an Academy Award for the supporting role of a sociopathic mental patient in Girl, Interrupted.
Because Jolie was the daughter of Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, some would think that she would’ve been an acting shoo–in. That said, it’s clear that she dedicated herself to building her career gradually over time, all the while never knowing if she was going to “make it.” Her starring role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider established her as an A-list Hollywood actress.
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