Aspiring actress Angelina Jolie was 15 years old when she had a professional photo shoot with Harry Langdon in Los Angeles. She was relatively unknown at the time, even though her father was actor Jon Voight.
For decades, Langdon has been photographing people in the entertainment industry. He’s shot celebrities such as George Clooney, Halle Berry and Sophia Loren. “When we get a call to photograph a relative of a well-known actor — in this case, Jon Voight — we sort of figure: ‘Well, OK, here we go again. Let’s hope that she knows what she’s doing, and we’ll do our best.’ … It turned out to be a nice surprise,” Langdon said.
Langdon remembers being struck by Jolie’s confidence during the shoot. “Someway or another, she just sort of knew what to do,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a mental telepathy or what. I can usually see in my imagination a pose that would work, and — boom — she kept going into these poses.”
The shoot took place on January 11, 1991, and lasted about two hours, Langdon said. He didn’t charge anything. “We used to use the term a ‘test session,’ ” he said. “Kind of like a trial, and hopefully one day the pictures will be valuable.”
Langdon recalled there being little conversation on set, which he said isn’t uncommon for young actors. “Sometimes on photo sessions I get into in-depth conversations about their skiing or their horseback riding or something like that. With (Jolie), it was all business.”
Langdon said he didn’t find out Jolie’s age until after the shoot. “I knew nothing about her background,” he said. “I knew nothing about her living conditions or boyfriends. I knew nothing about her stage experience.”
Jolie’s many outfits included a swimsuit. “She started posing pretty sexy,” Langdon said. “But it wasn’t so much her poses. She emitted a real sensuality. I just kept shooting from different angles.”
Jolie’s film career would take off a couple years after the shoot. In 2000, she won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in “Girl, Interrupted.”
Langdon said the proofs were delivered to Voight and he never heard from them again.
“When it comes to acting, for a still camera, you have to kind of express a great deal of your body language and your sensuality the best you can,” Langdon said. “Because there’s not a moving camera and there’s no dialogue, you have to say it all with body language — which she did really, really well.”
Source: edition.cnn.com
