What’s Going On With Angelina Jolie’s Relationship With Dad Jon Voight? We’ve Got Answers

The relationship between Angelina Jolie and her dad, Jon Voight, has been a bit contentious over the years, but recently, tensions have begun to thaw between father and daughter. In fact, Jolie’s kids have even begun spending more time with their grandfather. After all the years of animosity, it seems like Jolie and Voight have finally put the past behind them.

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Angelina Jolie Refused To Deal With Her Father For Years

Jolie and her father have long been estranged. Starting from when her parents, Marcheline Bertrand and Voight, divorced, Jolie has been openly critical of how her father handled things and sympathetic to her mother’s plight. After a brief reconciliation during the filming of Tomb Raider, which Jolie starred in and Voight appeared as her onscreen father, Jolie once again stopped talking to her father.

Around the same time, Jolie filed for divorce from her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton shortly after adopting her first child, Maddox. The actress released a statement to Access Hollywood, via E! News, about her decision to cut off contact between herself and her father. “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father. I will only say that like every child, [her brother, Jamie] and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad.” Jolie continued,

After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.

Through the following years, as Jolie began dating — and eventually married Brad Pitt and added her other five children, Zahara, Pax, Shiloh, Vivienne, and Knox, to the family — she was true to her word and kept her father’s presence as far from her life as possible. In 2010, however, at the urging of her then-husband Brad Pitt, Jolie reconnected with her estranged father and the two began tentatively taking steps toward rebuilding.

After what he’d said about her in the past, some probably thought it’d be impossible for Voight and Jolie to reconcile, but the two actors proved they could overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers in their relationship.

Jon Voight Isn’t Exactly Shy About His Daughter

Following her divorce from Thornton, and her subsequent decision to cut contact with her father, Voight spoke with E! News about the status of his relationship with Jole and he didn’t hold anything back. The Deliverance actor revealed that the last time he saw Jolie in person was at the 90th anniversary party for Paramount in 2002.

I ran to give her a hug, and one of her representatives stepped in my way and said, ‘Get back,’

Voight recalled, adding, “I’ve had difficulty reaching her” since that night. He insisted that he’d been trying to get in contact so earnestly because he’d been worried about her, but his efforts were in vain. “She’s been staying away from me because she knows I’ve been trying to reach her to get help.” Though Voight didn’t say what sort of help he believed Jolie needed, he did say that she was suffering from “serious emotional problems that I have witnessed very closely.”

The star of Midnight Cowboy went on to insist that the “reason for my plea is not for myself,” but rather, for his daughter. “I want nothing more than to hold my baby in my arms,” adding, “I want to tell Angie that I love her and I want her to get the help she needs…And I want her to find true love.” It took a number of years, during which the number of his grandchildren expanded greatly, but Jon Voight was eventually able to rekindle his relationship with Angelina Jolie and officially begin his grandfatherly duties. There were some strict rules involved, of course.

Jolie spoke briefly about her father’s newfound relationship with his grandchildren in a 2017 Vanity Fair interview. The actress said, “He’s been very good at understanding they needed their grandfather at this time. I had to do a therapy meeting last night and he was just around. He knows kind of the rule — don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.”

In addition to being the “cool grandpa” who hangs out in the library, Voight has also joined Jolie and the kids at more public events, like the premiere of Jolie’s film Maleficent 2, where he sang his daughter’s praises. “She’s very strong. And that persona is very rare. So you have these great ones, as I say,” Voight bragged, adding, “When you see Angelina, you know what’s coming, you know who she is. She’s like one of those people like [Humphrey] Bogart or Katharine Hepburn. She’s one of those guys.” Obviously, that’s pretty high praise indeed coming from the legendary Jon Voight.

It’s not just Jolie’s professional and charitable achievements that Voight is vocally proud of. Perhaps what makes Voight the most proud of his daughter is her commitment to being a good mother to her six children. “She loves her kids, she’s always involved with them, always concerned for them,” Voight said during a pre-Golden Globes gala earlier this year.

“She monitors everything,” the 81-year-old actor added. “She’s great.” Though it took both Voight and Jolie going the long way around to accomplish, the two finally seem to have mended the fences between them. Of course, now that Jolie and Voight are on good terms again, the tabloids have been busily coming up with new and bizarre narratives involving them.

Rumors About Their Relationship Aren’t Good

In the fallout from Angelina Jolie’s divorce from Brad Pitt, many of the more disreputable outlets have claimed that Jolie has tried to involve her father in the proceedings to benefit herself. The National Enquirer reported that Jolie had only reconciled with Voight in an attempt to keep her father from siding with her ex in the divorce. “She’s totally outsmarted Brad by getting Jon on her side,” a supposed “source” told the magazine.

The divorce is getting uglier. By relaxing her stance on her dad, she’s added one more to Team Jolie.

The timeline simply didn’t make sense to Gossip Cop, since we knew for a fact that Jolie and Voight had begun making inroads with their relationship years before Pitt and Jolie divorced, actually before the two even got married. We also checked in with a source close to the situation who confirmed our hunch that the story was nothing but “nonsense.” Jolie’s reconciliation with her father had nothing to do with her divorce from Pitt.

This outlet is particularly shady, since it published another article almost exactly one year later that claimed Jolie was now afraid that Voight would testify against her in the divorce proceeding. A source informed the outlet that the actor knew some “ugly truths” about his daughter and would not hesitate to expose them in court.

Jon knows her darkest secrets firsthand — and he has no reason to hold back,

the source ominously revealed. Gossip Cop’s not in the habit of just believing every anonymous source we come across, so we reached out to Jon Voight himself for answers. When asked about the possibility of him providing testimony during his daughter’s divorce from Pitt, Voight said, “I know nothing about that.” Despite the Enquirer’s faulty claims, it would appear that Voight was not at all involved in the case, which means Jolie had no cause to worry in the first place.

The Globe, a publication that clearly lives in a reality of its own making, claimed in April that Voight was trying to convince Jolie to “back off” Jennifer Aniston. The article was based on the tabloid’s previous reporting, which gave the whole story a shaky foundation to begin with. Apparently, Jolie had been planning to drag Aniston into her custody battle with Brad Pitt. In this tabloid’s reality, Pitt and Aniston were supposedly dating. Gossip Cop can state for the record that they are not.

Voight, meanwhile, was allegedly tired of watching “Angie take out her revenge on people he cares about,” according to an insider. The dubious insider went on to say, “Jon told her Jen didn’t do anything wrong and doesn’t deserve to be dragged into this fight.” Obviously, if Pitt and Aniston aren’t dating, which they aren’t, there’s no need for the Friends actress to be dragged into Pitt and Jolie’s legal battles.

Likewise, there’s no need for Voight to beg his daughter to go easier on anyone. There are likely only two people who understand what, precisely, the dynamic is like between Jon Voight and Angelina Jolie, and that’s Jolie and Voight. Any publication that claims to know what’s really going on between the two, especially if it uses the words of anonymous sources as evidence, likely doesn’t have the whole story.