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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
On the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, the name stood out from those of charity workers, teachers and civil servants: Angelina Jolie – Honorary Dame1 Commander of the Most Distinguished2 Order of St Michael and St George, for her campaigning work “for services to UK foreign policy and the campaign to end war zone sexual violence”. This means that the Hollywood A-lister has become one of a tiny group of US citizens to be honoured by the British establishment (though they can’t use their titles).
It was an extraordinary accolade3 – doubly so when you consider that the demure4 Jolie, who last week hosted a London summit dedicated5 to ending war rape6 in her capacity as special envoy7 for the United Nations High Commissioner8 for Refugees, is the same Jolie who, not long ago, was making headlines for her tattoos9, hard-drug use and intimately kissing her brother in public.
Then she was a twice-divorced, self-confessed bisexual and self-harmer. But in just 14 years, Jolie, 39, has dramatically reinvented herself, from out-of-control starlet and apparent homewrecker (actor Brad Pitt left his wife Jennifer Aniston after meeting Jolie on the set of their film Mr & Mrs Smith) to devoted10 mother and humanitarian11 powerhouse, travelling to war zones such as Congo with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary.
安吉丽娜?朱莉的非凡转变
Her youthful recklessness has transmuted12 into selfless bravery. Her unauthorised biographer, Andrew Morton, whose most famous subject was Diana, Princess of Wales, became intrigued13 after learning that she’d been working in Peshawar, Pakistan – “hardly a place for charity workers, let alone bona fide Hollywood movie stars,” he says. “We now see her as a humanitarian and a substantial, solid and serious-minded citizen of the world, not the woman who broke up Jen and Brad.”
Then, last year she underwent a preventative double mastectomy after testing positive for a gene14 linked to breast and ovarian cancers, which killed her mother at the age of 56. This gave Angelina a powerful voice in women’s health.
Indeed, so drastic has been her rehabilitation15 that Jolie’s status is now among the tiny section of Hollywood stars deemed untouchable. According to US pollster Q Scores, which determines celebrities16’ likeability factor, Jolie’s score is 23 – meaning 23 per cent of US adults consider her “one of [their] favourite personalities”, while 85 per cent of adults know who she is. This compared with a 15 per cent likeability score and 46 per cent awareness17 for the average actress. Many of her films have performed poorly at the box office (though her latest,Maleficent, has earned $140 million in just three weeks), yet Jolie is considered one of the few female stars who can “carry” a film, and is estimated to be Hollywood’s highest-paid actress, earning $33 million last year.
“She’s hardly Meryl Streep, but the actual quality of her work is irrelevant18. She’s Hollywood royalty19, a megabrand,” says one film insider. Indeed, a recent poll named her, along with Pitt, as the celebrities most sought-after for endorsements20. “Jolie has formed a strong emotional bond with American consumers, which is on the rise,” confirms Henry Schafer, executive vice-president of Q Scores.
Perhaps her appeal comes from her chameleon-like qualities. She has a sex-bomb persona (she is regularly named the world’s most beautiful woman by magazines such as Vogue) but is simultaneously21 a “madonna”, the mother of six children, three of whom are adopted.
“What’s remarkable22 about Jolie is she’s the best at everything she touches,” says Christina Hopkinson, author of The A-List Family. “When she was in her bad-girl phase, she was the baddest imaginable. Now she’s a mother, she’s the ultimate earth-mother of three boys and three girls – even her twins were the perfect boy-girl combination.
“She projects a cool, independent persona but she also appears to have a blissful home life with the ultimate movie star, Brad Pitt. She’s skinny but with big breasts – and you can’t even hate her for those breasts, because she’s had a mastectomy.”
Born in Los Angeles, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon “Midnight Cowboy” Voight and the late Marcheline Bertrand, but her parents split when she was a baby as a result of Voight’s infidelities. Jolie and Voight’s relationship has been stormy ever since, with the pair not speaking for years at a time.
In contrast, she forged a possibly-too-close bond with her mother, who treated her like a friend, allowing Jolie to have a live-in lover from the age of 14.
Living in modest circumstances compared with her peers at Beverly Hills High School, Jolie was bullied23. She became anorexic and began to self-harm, cutting herself with her collection of knives. Wearing only black clothes, she aspired24 to become a funeral director, taking a course in embalming25. She decorated her body with 14 tattoos, including the Latin proverb quod me nutrit me destruit (“what nourishes me destroys me”). By the age of 20, she had tried “just about every drug possible”, including heroin26.
At her first wedding, to British actor Jonny Lee Miller27 when she was just 20, she wore black rubber trousers and a white T-shirt, upon which she had written the groom’s name in her blood. Before they separated, Jolie had a relationship with an actress and has since confirmed her bisexuality to interviewers.
Four years later, she married actor Billy Bob Thornton after a two-month courtship. The pair wore each other’s blood in phials around their necks and for their first anniversary, she bought him his-and-hers cemetery28 plots in a Louisiana graveyard29. Yet 18 months later they abruptly30 split.
By now Jolie was established, winning the best-supporting actress Oscar for her role in Girl, Interrupted. After the ceremony, she scandalised onlookers31 by passionately32 kissing her brother, actor James Haven33, and telling the world, “I’m so in love with him”. Haven, for his part, is an unmarried, born-again Christian34. He said: “Because I’m so close to Angie, it’s like I’ve already got the perfect woman in my life, and it’s hard for anyone else to live up to that.”
But just as tongue-wagging about her eccentricities35 was peaking, Jolie – then 26 – began visiting refugee camps. Her first trip to Sierra Leone was revelatory. “I realised how completely naive36 I was to think I had a difficult life,” she recalled. “It was as if someone slapped me across the face and said, 'Oh, my God, you silly young woman from California, do you have any idea how difficult the world really is for so many people?’?”
The turning point, says Morton, came when she made Tomb Raider in 2001. “It was her rehab role, the actress weaning herself off heroin in order to sustain the physical demands of the movie,” he says. “During the filming, she decided37 to adopt a Cambodian boy named Maddox. The infant changed her life, she began focusing on him and her growing role as an international advocate for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”
In 2005, she adopted Zahara from Ethiopia (Pax, from Vietnam, arrived in 2007), that same year making Mr & Mrs Smith. Within months, Jolie and Pitt were visiting Pakistan together to solicit38 aid donations after an earthquake, and within a year Jolie was pregnant.
Yet her new reputation as a husband-stealer had no effect on Jolie’s popularity. Polls showed her kudos39 continued to rise year on year, despite Aniston describing Jolie’s behaviour as “uncool”, and the couple announced their engagement in 2012. Pitt has downplayed any suggestions that there was a “dastardly affair” and insists that his break-up with Aniston was amicable40.
An executive on the Hollywood magazine Variety said: “She is perceived as somewhat saint-like – a woman who only wants to do good in the world. When you’re in her presence, she’s so serene41, you’d feel like an idiot asking a dumb question, such as: 'So, did you break up Jennifer Aniston’s home?’?”
Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, uses Jolie as a prime example of reinvention. “Because her negative brand attributes centred around too much predatory sexuality,” she says, “motherhood and her clear devotion to her children showed a different, gentler side and balanced out her reputation.”
The couple’s fame rose as they travelled the world with their huge “rainbow family”, alternatively making films or doing good – be it campaigning to help New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
Many suspect that Jolie has brilliantly manipulated her narrative42 so the husband-stealing/wild-child persona has been airbrushed by the human saint. Whatever the motives43, for more than a decade she’s travelled frequently to some of the most insalubrious corners of the world, bringing huge publicity44 to previously45 unfashionable causes.
“Frankly, if a celebrity46 isn’t genuinely interested in poverty and is simply trying to get good press, there are better ways to do it. Travelling to Darfur or Congo is dangerous, expensive and uncomfortable, and the outhouses have bats, scorpions47 and camel spiders,” says Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, who spoke48 with Jolie at a 2008 session at the Council on Foreign Relations about justice in Darfur.
While she plays the celebrity game, it always seems to serve a higher purpose than personal vanity or greed. Pictures of her newborn twins were sold for a $14 million donation to her Jolie-Pitt Foundation. Those who have worked with her say her behaviour is strikingly un-divalike and professional.
Still, a suspicion persists that her youthful eccentricity49 (her father once tearfully described her as having “serious mental problems”) has never gone away, but that her restlessness is now being channelled to positive ends.
Now Jolie is reinventing herself again, as a director. Her latest, second, film Unbroken, about a Second World War hero, is hotly tipped as a 2015 Oscar contender. But before picking up another golden statue, there is the matter of a visit to Buckingham Palace to collect her gong.
点击收听单词发音
1 dame | |
n.女士 | |
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2 distinguished | |
adj.卓越的,杰出的,著名的 | |
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3 accolade | |
n.推崇备至,赞扬 | |
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4 demure | |
adj.严肃的;端庄的 | |
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5 dedicated | |
adj.一心一意的;献身的;热诚的 | |
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6 rape | |
n.抢夺,掠夺,强奸;vt.掠夺,抢夺,强奸 | |
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7 envoy | |
n.使节,使者,代表,公使 | |
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8 commissioner | |
n.(政府厅、局、处等部门)专员,长官,委员 | |
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9 tattoos | |
n.文身( tattoo的名词复数 );归营鼓;军队夜间表演操;连续有节奏的敲击声v.刺青,文身( tattoo的第三人称单数 );连续有节奏地敲击;作连续有节奏的敲击 | |
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10 devoted | |
adj.忠诚的,忠实的,热心的,献身于...的 | |
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11 humanitarian | |
n.人道主义者,博爱者,基督凡人论者 | |
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12 transmuted | |
v.使变形,使变质,把…变成…( transmute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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13 intrigued | |
adj.好奇的,被迷住了的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的过去式);激起…的兴趣或好奇心;“intrigue”的过去式和过去分词 | |
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14 gene | |
n.遗传因子,基因 | |
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15 rehabilitation | |
n.康复,悔过自新,修复,复兴,复职,复位 | |
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16 celebrities | |
n.(尤指娱乐界的)名人( celebrity的名词复数 );名流;名声;名誉 | |
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17 awareness | |
n.意识,觉悟,懂事,明智 | |
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18 irrelevant | |
adj.不恰当的,无关系的,不相干的 | |
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19 royalty | |
n.皇家,皇族 | |
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20 endorsements | |
n.背书( endorsement的名词复数 );(驾驶执照上的)违章记录;(公开的)赞同;(通常为名人在广告中对某一产品的)宣传 | |
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21 simultaneously | |
adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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22 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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23 bullied | |
adj.被欺负了v.恐吓,威逼( bully的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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24 aspired | |
v.渴望,追求( aspire的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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25 embalming | |
v.保存(尸体)不腐( embalm的现在分词 );使不被遗忘;使充满香气 | |
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26 heroin | |
n.海洛因 | |
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27 miller | |
n.磨坊主 | |
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28 cemetery | |
n.坟墓,墓地,坟场 | |
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29 graveyard | |
n.坟场 | |
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30 abruptly | |
adv.突然地,出其不意地 | |
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31 onlookers | |
n.旁观者,观看者( onlooker的名词复数 ) | |
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32 passionately | |
ad.热烈地,激烈地 | |
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33 haven | |
n.安全的地方,避难所,庇护所 | |
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34 Christian | |
adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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35 eccentricities | |
n.古怪行为( eccentricity的名词复数 );反常;怪癖 | |
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36 naive | |
adj.幼稚的,轻信的;天真的 | |
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37 decided | |
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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38 solicit | |
vi.勾引;乞求;vt.请求,乞求;招揽(生意) | |
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39 kudos | |
n.荣誉,名声 | |
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40 amicable | |
adj.和平的,友好的;友善的 | |
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41 serene | |
adj. 安详的,宁静的,平静的 | |
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42 narrative | |
n.叙述,故事;adj.叙事的,故事体的 | |
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43 motives | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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44 publicity | |
n.众所周知,闻名;宣传,广告 | |
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45 previously | |
adv.以前,先前(地) | |
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46 celebrity | |
n.名人,名流;著名,名声,名望 | |
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47 scorpions | |
n.蝎子( scorpion的名词复数 ) | |
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48 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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49 eccentricity | |
n.古怪,反常,怪癖 | |
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