Angelina Jolie’s voice soars in Callas biopic
VENICE—Angelina Jolie had to learn how to sing opera to prepare for playing Maria Callas, one of the greatest sopranos of all time, saying on Thursday that it was the most demanding role of her career.
“Maria,” directed by Pablo Larraín, chronicles Callas’ final days in Paris when she was addicted to antianxiety drugs. It recalls the high and low notes of her tumultuous past when she wowed audiences around the world with her astonishing voice. “This is the hardest, most challenging role,” Jolie told Reuters ahead of the movie’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival later in the day.
“I was like on another planet because it was so beyond what I was comfortable with as a person and as an artist,” she said.
Jolie has appeared in more than 60 films, including action-packed blockbusters and emotionally charged dramas, winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1999 movie “Girl Interrupted.”
She had told Larrain that she could sing, but then realized she needed to reach a whole different level, taking seven months out to train for the role.
“I thought I could sing like people sing in film, you pretend to sing or you sing a little. And it was very clear early on that I was going to really have to learn to sing because you can’t fake opera,” she said.
Larrain has said that when Callas is heard in the film in her prime, 95 percent is taken from the soprano’s original recordings, but when we hear her at the end of her life, it is mostly Jolie’s own voice we are listening to.
“She did a lot of singing lessons, incredibly, and sang from morning to night. We were really touched, we cried during the shoot,” said Alba Rohrwacher, who plays Callas’ adoring housekeeper.
Larrain said he had hoped his latest film would encourage people to explore an art form that has lost much of its public appeal since Callas’ death in 1977 age just 53.
Callas was one of the biggest stars of her day, but lived her last years in isolation, deserted by her great voice and her lover Aristotle Onassis.
“I share her vulnerability,” Jolie said, alluding to her own troubled personal life, locked in a bitter divorce from Brad Pitt.
Larrain said Callas had a tragic sense of life, with 90 percent of the opera she sang onstage ending in death. “She slowly became the sum of the main tragedies she sang,” he said.
