Breaking Down Angelina Jolie’s ‘Dark and Dangerous’ Past: ‘She Didn’t Want to Die’

Nearly a year ago, Angelina Jolie confessed she was at a crossroads. “I’m still understanding who I am,” the movie star, who turns 50 next year, told Vogue last September. “I guess I’m in transition as a person.” Amid her contemplations, she further admitted, “I don’t feel like I’ve been myself for a decade, in a way,” clearly referring to the toll taken by her tumultuous divorce and custody battle with third husband Brad Pitt. She wants, she added, to make a shift: “I’m hoping to change many aspects of my life.”

As Angelina figures out her path forward, it’s instructive to revisit where she’s been. “I was not a very stable youth,” the Academy Award winner has admitted. From drug use and a mental breakdown to suicidal ideations that led her to plan her own demise in a murder-for-hire plot, she’s been on a troubling and twisted journey. “I went through heavier, darker times and I survived them. I didn’t die young, so I’m very lucky,” the actress-director later acknowledged, confessing, “I did the most dangerous and I did the worst. For many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.”

WILD CHILD

Angelina’s teens and 20s were “dark and dangerous times,” a source exclusively tells In Touch. Her parents, Oscar winner Jon Voight, 77, and late actress and artist Marcheline Bertrand, separated when Angelina and brother James Haven, 51, were toddlers. Marcheline, who died at 56 in 2007 after a lengthy battle with ovarian and breast cancer, was permissive and tolerant. “She let her daughter be what she wanted to be and do what she wanted to do,” says the source — including allowing 14-year-old Angie’s boyfriend to sleep over. “They were more like friends than the traditional mother-daughter.” Obsessed with death since childhood, Angelina began collecting knives and would sometimes draw blood from her boyfriend or self-harm, once explaining, “whenever I felt trapped, I’d cut myself. I have a lot of scars.”

At the same time, she delved into drug use, later saying she’d “done just about every drug possible.” (A source confirms cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and LSD). In a disturbing 1999 video that surfaced a decade ago, convicted drug dealer Franklin Meyer claimed he taped the strung-out star when he was delivering $100 heroin and cocaine packets to her NYC apartment three times a week. “But she didn’t want to die a drug-addled death,” says the source, and cleaned up her act. Her wild ways were so well-known in Hollywood, however, that to win the lead role in 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the source says “she was forced to undergo drug tests every day.”

DEATH WISH

The same year the hit movie came out, Angelina detailed other even more turbulent periods no one knew about. Not long before her 2000 wedding to second husband Billy Bob Thornton, 69 (she separated from her first husband, Hackers costar Jonny Lee Miller, 51, in 1997 after less than two years of marriage), Angelina told late interview show host Larry King she’d suffered from depression. One terrifying incident involved her “going crazy” when she couldn’t locate Billy Bob. She said she was told “you’re having a nervous breakdown,” and was admitted to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and placed on a three-day hold.

The Girl, Interrupted Oscar winner also confessed her plans to die by suicide — or at the hands of another person. In 2001, she told Rolling Stone she’d wanted to use a knife and sleeping pills to end her life, but began to question whether she could pull it off. “This is going to sound so insane, but there was a time when I realized I was going to have to hire somebody to kill me,” she said, explaining that she convinced herself making it look like a robbery-murder would somehow be better. “With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something.”

She met with a man she was told could do the job, who asked her to take some time to think over what she was doing. “And [after] a month,” she said, “other things changed in my life and I was surviving again.”

NEW RESPONSIBILITIES

Everything shifted when she welcomed her kids. “I was 26 when I became a mother,” she told Vogue — first to Maddox, 23, then Pax, 20, Zahara, 19, Shiloh, 18, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 16. “My entire life changed. Having children saved me — and taught me to be in this world differently.” Says the source: “She would do anything for those kids, to keep them safe.”

That’s been difficult in recent days. On July 29, Pax was hospitalized after crashing his electric bike into a car in L.A. — witnesses told a news outlet they feared he was dead. “It left Angelina badly shaken. She stayed by his side at the hospital,” says the source. “She knows he could have been killed.” Shiloh, meanwhile, has been facing scrutiny after she filed to legally drop Pitt from her last name on her 18th birthday in May, reportedly blindsiding her father, Brad. In July, an L.A. court delayed her hearing due to an incomplete background check, further dragging out his heartbreak.

Volatility, meanwhile, continues to haunt Angelina. Nearly eight years after their split, she and Brad, 60, are still battling in court over ownership rights to their French estate and winery, Château Miraval, as well as custody of their minor children. While the older kids have largely sided with their mother, who’s alleged Brad was abusive — which he’s long denied — he’s still “holding out hope,” says the source, that he can repair their relationship. Some friends are concerned it’s too much for Angelina. “This fight has turned completely toxic, and the strain is wearing her thin —she still has a lot of anger,” says the source. “The feeling is her resilience would have been awe-inspiring if it wasn’t so self-destructive.”

The former special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees also recently took a hit from her estranged father. In July, the conservative — who reconciled with Angelina in the 2010s after being estranged from her for years — criticized his liberal daughter’s political views on the Israel-Hamas war, making things “challenging, to say the least,” says the source. “They have never seen eye to eye when it comes to global politics. Now he’s very publicly criticizing her stance on Palestine. For Angelina, it’s impossible to have a good relationship with him.”

She’s determined to do better for her own children — and protect them from the darkness she’s experienced. “It was a miracle that she survived her youth, and talking about it has been cathartic for her,” says the source. “She’s glad she went through what she did because it helped her to find out who she was.”