Angelina Jolie Says She Didn't Sing for Years After an Ex Told Her She Couldn't, Talks Learning to Use Her Voice for 'Maria'

Angelina Jolie sings while channeling iconic opera singer Maria Callas in her new biopic Maria. Now, she’s opening up about the challenging and revealing process of finding her voice.

In a new interview, the 49-year-old actress explained that she had not sang for quite some time after an ex criticized her voice.

Learning how to sing was an emotional process that entailed letting go of some of her deeply held emotions. It also taught her some things about her voice.

Keep reading to find out more…

“It was an out-of-body experience because I don’t sing,” Angelina told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about singing in Milan’s opera house La Scala. “I had somebody in my life who was not kind to me about singing. It was a relationship I was in. And so I just assumed I couldn’t really sing.”

She continued, saying, “I’d been to theater school, so it was weird that it even had an effect on me. I just kind of adapted to this person’s opinion. So it took me getting past a lot of things to start singing. And discovering also that I was a soprano. I thought I had a low voice my whole life. I was explaining [to the singing instructor] that my voice is deeper, and he said, ‘No, you’re actually a soprano.’ And probably something happened. Your voice changes when you go through different things in your life. So that was a shock. That was very strange.”

Angelina said that she took “many months of singing classes” for the part.

“Months of just getting the singing down and then the Italian classes and then the voice and doing all these things like her. You try to be precise. I would recommend almost every human being take an opera class,” she said. “To exist and never have sung with your full body as loud as you could possibly sing — it’s something I think we should all feel. It’s scary, and it is rarely asked of us. It’s rarely asked of us in life to be all that we can be or feel all that we feel.”

The actress said that she cried during her first class. “I was sad, I was scared. It was a strange physical body reaction. I stood there, and [the instructor] said, ‘OK, just be in your body. Take a deep breath, let it all out and just open your mouth and just let that sound come from the inside.’ And that’s when I became really emotional,” she recalled.

“You discover how much we lock our pain in our bodies. Our voice gets tight, our shoulders go high, we get stomach aches, we do all these things, and it’s a protection for us. The hardest thing was feeling again and breathing again and opening again in the way that this film required that I had really not done for quite a while,” she explained.

Elsewhere in the interview, Angelina was asked about her divorce from Brad Pitt. See what she had to say.