By Dana C. Topping

SO NOW IS WHEN ANGELINA JOLIE'S LIFE STARTS TO GET INTERESTING.

     For us, we mean. It's been plenty interesting already for her -- this mesmerizing, wide-eyed, full-lipped, tattooed beauty who showed up at the Oscars on the arm of her own brother, silencing the buzz about her acknowledged bisexuality with what looked to many like an excess of sisterly love. Angelina, the anti-Gwyneth! The girl whose own father, actor Jon Voight, admits "she was never normal." The woman who married at 20, writing the name of her groom across the back of her wedding blouse in her own blood -- and who got divorced two years later.

     Not that such behavior mattered much for most of her career, when she was just another beautiful, talented up-and-comer. She passed triumphantly through the traditional rite of passage for young Hollywood madcaps, jumping into a hotel pool in a 5,000-crystal-bead dress in 1999 after winning a Golden Globe. But what would have been a defining moment in the public identity of someone like Courteney Cox Arquette wasn't even mentioned in most of the stories about Jolie. The writers were too busy drooling over her taste for black leather, her onetime ambition to be a funeral director ("I didn't like the way funerals were ... [they are] very cold, and I thought [they] could be different") and her hobbies, which run to things like collecting knives to use in sex play.

     But now, at 24, she's an Oscar winner for her role as Lisa, the scheming sociopath down the mental-hospital hall in Girl, Interrupted. This was a role that she seemed born to play from the moment she "blew the walls out of the room" during her audition, in the words of director James Mangold. She's already had her cop part (with Denzel Washington in last year's The Bone Collector), and she's starring with Antonio Banderas in Dancing in the Dark, a period romance now being shot in Mexico, so she's well on her way to being a full-blown, eight-cylinder movie star, vastly raising the level of public interest in her behavior.

     All movie stars know that they are the crash-test dummies for the rest of us, who take a slower, less dangerous route through life. From them we learn the effects of extreme wealth and beauty upon the human body, soul and psyche. Jolie certainly should understand this, given her background. She was still a toddler when Voight split from her mother, a ravishing French actress named Marcheline Bertrand. Angelina (Jolie is her middle name, intentionally chosen so she could use it professionally) seems to have taken the breakup harder than you would expect, given the shelf-life of Hollywood marriages. Asked about her uncommon attachment to her brother, James Haven, she told a reporter, "I don't know if it's being a part of a divorced family or what ... but he has always been my strongest support." She has described her relationship with Voight over the years as "stormy," although they are now apparently on good terms. But if she had a mind to avenge herself on her wayward father, she has done it with fabulous style just by growing up to be the woman she is. Pictures of Voight from his marriage show him looking 30 years younger, hugging a woman who looks startlingly like ... Angelina Jolie.

     Growing up in New York until age 11, and then in Hollywood, Jolie led a life of suggestively wild, if somewhat vaguely described, escapades. Tantalizing details that have come out in interviews over the years now are suddenly rendered momentous in light of her celebrity. Five years ago, when she was just the cute teenage nerdette in Hackers, that faint scar on the left side of her neck, just below the jaw where the arteries run close to the skin, wasn't such a big deal. It had something to do with a boyfriend; she was just fooling around with a knife; it happened when she was 14 -- so what? Same thing with the tattoos: the dragon, the cross, the letter h on the inside of her wrist that celebrates her brother.

     "She has a big thing with knives and tattoos," admits Haven. "But the great thing about her is that none of the tattoos are the kind where she woke up the next morning and looked at herself and said, 'God, what happened?' Every one is planned. It's always symbolic. And she doesn't carry knives around with her. It's not like you get into a fight with Angelina and she's going to pull a blade."

     That's very reassuring -- only now she's won an Oscar! Getting through a metal detector at the airport is just the beginning of the demands we make on our movie stars. God forbid she ever appear in public with a Band-Aid; it'll be Laura Schlessinger on the radio fielding non-stop questions about sadomasochism.

     It has been a long time since we've had a new star quite like Jolie, who brings a heady whiff of sexual decadence to a roster of young actresses dominated on the one hand by the chipper working-class sensuality of Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock, and on the other by the sophisticated, after-the-debutante-ball glamour of Gwyneth Paltrow. Jolie's public persona would be very different had she taken a more conventional route to stardom -- say, with a recurring role as Lisa Kudrow's slutty cousin on Friends.

     But she never spent any time in the soft-focus world of sitcoms; she mostly acted in music videos (for the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz and the Lemmonheads) before starring as the doomed junkie supermodel Gia Carangi in the much-admired 1998 HBO movie Gia. She inhabited the role with such authority that for a long time after, people she met would think they recognized her as a fashion model, even though, by her own admission, she was always "too scarred and short" to model "and ... was not gonna lose the weight." Instead of a size-2 body, says Gia's screenwriter, Jay McInerney, Jolie brought to the screen "a certain kind of energy, a kind of just barely contained animal passion," which she seems to recognize in herself. Her best-known tattoo -- because it's one of the few in a place that can be shown on Good Morning America, on her left arm -- is of a Tennessee Williams line: "A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages." Angelina Jolie has a quality far beyond beauty, a dangerous sexual edge that makes some people want to lock her up -- that is, if they cant' have her themselves.

     But maybe her disturbingly erotic side is all in the minds of the beholders. Just a year ago, Jolie told an interviewer that she could count on one hand the number of partners she has had. And her reaction to her nomination for Girl was anything but jaded. "I was in Mexico shooting Dancing in the Dark," she recalls. "I got a knock on my door when I was in hair and make-up. I'd forgotten the nominations were being announced; I think I blocked it out. They just opened the door, a bunch of people holding a phone, all very happy and emotional. It was really nice." As for the controversy she caused at the Oscars, when she spoke so affectionately of her brother -- the object of her affection pooh-poohs the idea of anything inappropriate. "We love each other," says Haven (see sidebar). "If that's unusual these days, that's sad." Of course, it was in the same interview that Jolie said it was "very, very flattering" that an informal poll of straight women chose her as the one actress they would like to sleep with. "And," she said brightly, "I'd probably be the one actress who would say yes." Stories from just a few months ago, leading up to the Oscars, described her with adjectives (pasty, gaunt) that amount to journalistic code for "strung out." But Haven, debunking the rumors about her drug use, insists Jolie is healthy, happier than ever, clean and about to bulk up for a coming role as cybervixen Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. the only flesh she's cutting these days is already cooked and on a plate. Her long-standing fascination with blood, it seems, has been tamed into a simple love of steak, which really wasn't anyone's business for years, except now that she's a movie star, it starts to take on a whole new dimension of public -- indeed, political -- significance.

     So let's see how she handles it the first time the animal-rights people pelt her with raw hamburger as she walks out of a Morton's of Chicago steakhouse. As we said, now is when Angelina Jolie's life starts to get interesting.

US