All in the family. Jon Voight has nothing but kind words for his daughter, Angelina Jolie, and his former son-in-law Brad Pitt.
The Ray Donovan star, 81, told Us Weekly and other reporters how “proud” he is of Jolie, 44, and how much he admires her as a mother at the Gold Meets Golden Pre-Golden Globes event in Beverly Hills on Saturday, December 4.
“She loves her kids, she’s always involved with them, always concerned for them,” Voight gushed. “She monitors everything. She’s great.”
Voight’s compliments didn’t stop there. The Academy Award winner went on to share his thoughts on Pitt, 55, and his Golden Globe nomination for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“I am proud of and excited for Brad, and that was a very unusual movie, and a very successful one, a very dynamic movie,” Voight dished. “I also liked — of course, it’s nice to see my friends Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. [Robert] De Niro wasn’t up this year, but he’ll probably get an Academy [award] or who knows, you never know. But, they’re all brilliant. … It’s always nice to see the good films of a year being discovered and celebrated, you know, it’s wonderful. It’s good for them.”
The Pearl Harbor actor and Jolie have had a rollercoaster relationship since the Maleficent actress was a child. The father-daughter duo did not speak for nearly seven years in the early 2000s but began repairing their relationship when Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died from ovarian cancer in 2007.
The Changeling actress told Vanity Fair in 2017 that Voight’s relationship with her children, Maddox, 18, Pax, 15, Zahara, 14, Shiloh, 13, and 11-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne, played a large part in their reconciliation.
“He’s been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time,” Jolie explained. “I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around. He knows kind of the rule — don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.”
Jolie and Pitt’s relationship, meanwhile, remains complicated. A source told Us in November 2019 that the former couple, who split in September 2016 due to irreconcilable differences, still don’t see eye to eye.
“Angelina still has a lot of resentment toward Brad,” the insider said. “She wants him to be held accountable because she feels he turned her and the children’s lives upside down.”
A second source revealed that some of Jolie and Pitt’s issues stem from her desire to live overseas. (The Mr. & Mrs. Smith actress told Harper’s Bazaar in November 2019 that she’d “love to live abroad,” but “right now, I’m having to base where their father chooses to live.”)
“Before the divorce, the entire family led a very nomadic existence, and that was because of Angie’s restlessness,” the insider told Us. “Brad wanted the kids to have stability, while Angie always said they were giving the children an idyllic childhood by exposing them to different countries, languages and experiences.”
