In her upcoming film, A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, the wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.
Pearl, who was pregnant with her son Adam at the time of her husband’s death, later channeled her heartache into a book of the same name, which inspired the film.
In the June issue of Glamour, the Oscar-winning actress and brave widow sit down with the magazine to talk about Jolie’s most challenging role yet and how she and her children ended up befriending Pearl and her family along the way.
Glamour: So Mariane, you started to tell me the story of how you guys initially met, which to my surprise had absolutely nothing to do with A Mighty Heart.
Mariane Pearl: “One day a few years ago, I was alone in New York with Adam, still having a rough time [after Danny’s death]. I read an interview with Angie in a magazine, about her and Maddox and her life as a single mom. And I thought, this woman could be my friend…. I’d never experienced anything like that before in my life. It was something in her tone, in the answers that she gave. I felt also that Maddox and Adam [then both about three] could be good friends. So I sent her a note saying, do you want to have a playdate?”
Angelina Jolie: “And I, on the other side of it, had been aware of you through the time that everything went down. I remember being amazed by your courage and your grace…And when I got the note, I was thrilled. Later I realized that Mariane and I are the two worst people to plan a playdate in the history of playdates.”
Glamour: Why?
Angelina: “Because she hates the phone as much as I do. So it almost didn’t happen! But when it finally did, I remember being really nervous, thinking, she’s such an intelligent European woman