Angelina Jolie Recalls Emotional Story of Her Mom Watching from Home as Jon Voight Attended Oscars with ‘the Other Woman’

Angelina Jolie had a complicated memory of the Oscars years before winning one herself. 

The Maria star, 49, appeared at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Wednesday, Feb. 5, to accept the Maltin Modern Master Award and discuss her decades of screen work with its namesake, critic Leonard Maltin. 

“I am trying to think of how much I’m going to share right now,” began Jolie when asked about what it meant to win her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted. 

She then remembered tuning into the 1979 Academy Awards ceremony the year her father, Jon Voight, won Best Actor for Coming Home. Voight separated from Marcheline Bertrand, mother to Jolie and her brother James Haven, in 1976; their divorce was finalized in 1980. 

“My mom was home with two little kids,” Jolie explained to Maltin. “My mom’s dream was to be an actor. I believe my mother’s mother’s dream was to be an actor, which is probably why she took her to the theater in Chicago all the time.”

The Eternals star recalled of Bertrand, who died in 2007 at age 56, telling her the story of watching Voight attend the starry event on television. “She was in her twenties, because she had me when she was very young. She was divorced to a very famous man and she was home with her babies in an apartment watching him win an Oscar with the other woman.”

Voight’s date to the 1979 Oscars, the “other woman,” was actress Stacey Pickren.

“It was kind of just a part of our family history,” Jolie said. “I remember thinking that [Bertrand] was there for me and my brother and that was the choice she made. And how she must have felt on that night always really stuck with me.”

So when it was Jolie’s turn to attend and win at the 2000 Oscar ceremony, she thought of her mother, saying: “To have that moment, to get off that stage and call her and say, ‘It’s yours’ — and I gave it to her — one of the best moments of my life.”

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Jolie accepted the Maltin Modern Master Award from Ava DuVernay, who gave a glowing tribute to the actress onstage at the Arlington Theater.

In her speech, Jolie grew emotional mentioning her mother, who she said “had to give up her dreams of a creative life, but she embraced that side of mine. My mother would write letters to my characters — ‘Dear Gia,’ ‘Dear Lisa Rowe, ‘Dear Lara Croft’ … I try to imagine sometimes now what she would write.”

Maria, starring Jolie as legendary opera diva Maria Callas, is now streaming on Netflix.