‘OMG!’ screamed the internet as one. “Ha!” said Jennifer Aniston. “Why is nobody paying any attention to me?” bleated Tim Farron, British politician and current leader of the Liberal Democrats, as he attempted to address the fourth-largest party in the United Kingdom with plans to raid his Labour opponents. Nobody was listening to him because well, because he’s Tim Farron. But also because he managed to time his speech with the precise moment that the website TMZ breathlessly announced that Angelina Jolie had filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
Post 3:28pm GMT (7:28pm UAE time), United States President Barack Obama could have addressed the United Nations for all the attention he would have garnered. Of course, we probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the news that Hollywood’s most powerful couple are to divorce — not when told that the couple already had three marriages between them by the time they got together (his to Jennifer Aniston, hers to Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller). Especially not in the year that gave us Brexit and Bakexit. But Brex-Pitt — as the internet was calling the break-up of 52-year-old Pitt and 41-year-old Jolie within moments of the news being confirmed — has, like every other element of 2016, come as a complete shock.
What? When? How?
And to think we were only just starting to digest the departure of Mel and Sue from The Great British Bake Off. Oh, I know. No doubt Jolie, a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, would point out that there are wars going on (last month she was seen working “alone” in a Syrian refugee camp in northern Jordan; she worked closely with William Hague, one wag on Twitter joking yesterday that nobody could spend long in the former foreign secretary’s company “without having their head turned”). Political parties are falling apart.
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, could possibly be president of the United States, but amid the hurly burly of the past decade, there has always been one constant: Brad and Angelina. Brangelina. 2004-2016, RIP. They gave us the celebrity portmanteau — they were the King and Queen of Celebrityville; AAA list; a super couple who the likes of Kimye [Kim Kardashian and Kanye West] and Swiddleston [Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston] were barely fit to bow down to. Their relationship was not without its controversies, of course — Pitt was rumoured to have left Aniston having met Jolie on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith, causing a glut of people to declare themselves either “TEAM ANISTON” or “TEAM JOLIE”.
But the couple weathered the storm. Together they had six children (three biological children and three adopted), their “rainbow family” as they described it. They married two summers ago and seemed to settle into a reasonably normal existence — or whatever a normal existence is when you are worth several hundreds of millions of dollars between you. That was the odd thing about Brangelina. Despite their wealth and almost immeasurable beauty, they seemed kind of regular. They seemed to be doing what we’d all be doing with our loved ones if we, too, had wealth and almost immeasurable beauty.
What self-respecting couple wouldn’t make good use of their millions? Then Pitt was spotted shopping for DIY essentials at a branch of B&Q in Surrey during the Easter bank holiday week. A friend claims to have dined in an Indian restaurant in west London in their presence. They apparently stayed in the decidedly unglamorous Hilton in Malta while filming By The Sea. They seemed untouchable precisely because they seemed so ordinary — be it hanging out in DIY shops, visiting refugee camps or revealing a double mastectomy to try and beat the cancer gene that had cruelly killed Jolie’s mother (she later went on to have both her ovaries removed).
They weren’t the Beckhams. They didn’t seem to be trying too hard. It all looked very natural. And then the news that Jolie had filed for divorce, petitioning for custody of the couple’s six children, with visitation rights for Pitt. According to reports, those differences were anything from his “bad parenting” to his “substance abuse” to his “affair with Marion Cotillard” — all of which have been denied. Whatever the reason, there is to be no happy ending for Brangelina, with one of Jolie’s attorneys announcing that she had asked for the dissolution of her marriage “for the health of the family”.
Meanwhile, Pitt released a mournful statement to People magazine. “I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.” His estranged wife has taken on the so-called “disso queen” of divorce lawyers, Laura Wasser, who represented Johnny Depp during his acrimonious break-up from Amber Heard. And as Brangelina finally go their separate ways, becoming Brad and Angelina once more, the general public are left with the crushing realisation that, in the end, the couple were nothing like the rest of us after all.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2016
Bryony Gordon is a feature-writer and columnist.
