Posted on: Friday, June 15, 2001

Movie Scene
Actress adjusted to fit into Lara Croft mold

By Bill Muller
Arizona Republic

HOLLYWOOD — Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft. Well, almost.

The Academy Award winner says she needed a little padding here and there to transform herself into the chesty heroine of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," the video game turned movie.

"I'll make it real simple for you," Jolie says. "I'm a 36C. In the game, she's a double D. In the movie, she's a D. So we split the difference and made her more athletic. My waist is much bigger than hers.

"Her hips are very curvaceous. Mine are more boyish. She's (her movie version of the character) much more athletic and she has smaller breasts, but she's still Lara Croft. So it's like the equivalent of having a proper padded bra on."

Jolie shakes her head over the obsession with breast size, though the poster for "Tomb Raider," which opens today, seems to cast Jolie's enhancements as the cornerstone of the movie's marketing campaign, perhaps because the film's target audience is teenage boys.

The daughter of Oscar winner Jon Voight (who also plays her father in "Tomb Raider"), Jolie made a breakthrough performance in "Hackers" (1995) but was relegated to mostly TV and cable movies before 1999, when she starred in "The Bone Collector," "Pushing Tin" and 1999's "Girl, Interrupted," for which she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Although Jolie, who became actor-director Billy Bob Thornton's fifth wife in 2000, has heard all the campy jokes about Croft's physique, she still likes the character.

"I saw what was great about having somebody who was a curvaceous woman," she says. "We didn't want to go to the extreme of the game, but we wanted to make her her — with her braid and her breasts and her boots.

"I loved that she was a character that was very strong but also very much a girl."

Of course, it's a little easier for a video-game character to leap over chasms and swing from bungee cords than it is for a real live actress. But Jolie says she enjoyed building up her body to play the character.

"I was sent to a nutritionist," she says, "had 10 different people doing different things, whether it be yoga or weapons training or canoeing or bungee ballet or street fighting ... everything from obstacle courses to taking the guns apart."

All that preparation made her feel as if she actually were Croft.

"It's different from any other character I've ever played because ... you just become this person," Jolie says. "There's not much acting or pretending to do it. You're actually physically there. And you're angry when you're fighting and you're feeling strong and exhausted."

As for the video game, Jolie occasionally played it with her first husband, actor Jonny Lee Miller, but never really got the hang of it. "I tried to play it and would just get frustrated," Jolie says. "I couldn't get her over a wall, so I would just throw the thing."

And the game's popularity escaped her. "I didn't know how big it was or how much of a following it had," she says. "I might not have taken the role. I might have been a little more hesitant."

Around Hollywood, Jolie is known as an odd duck, having many tattoos, an obsession with the macabre and a pendant around her neck containing drops of blood from Thornton.

Jolie says many friends warned her that making a summer popcorn flick could ruin her image.

"Everybody told me not to do this because they have this idea that you should take yourself very seriously, you're an Oscar winner ... and it's stupid," she says. "You should do what you feel like doing as an artist and an actor, and nobody should ever take themselves too seriously. Period."