Angelina Jolie's ex discouraged her from singing: 'It had an effect on me'

Angelina Jolie is opening up about her singing skills following her challenging experience playing the iconic Opera singer Maria Callas. The Hollywood star, who previously revealed she had been nervous to perform, revealed that she had a negative experience in a past relationship that made her believe she couldn't sing. 

“I don’t sing,” she said during her recent interview with The Hollywood Reported. “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. I’d been to theatre school, so it was weird that it even had an effect on me."

© Jacopo Raule

She continued to explain; "I just kind of adapted to this person’s opinion. So it took me getting past a lot of things to start singing.” Despite the negative comment that took a toll on her confidence, Angelina “grew and grew and grew" until she was able to sing in front of the film crew.

© Jacopo Raule

Angelina said that she started by singing in front of her kids and ultimately at La Scala. "La Scala was the one everything was building toward. That was going to require the whole crew, the entire audience. It was so beyond my comfort zone that I was giddy. There was nothing else to do except to jump, to just fully jump," she said.

© Kevin Mazur

“It took many months of singing classes. 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," she said to the publication, adding that Opera requires “your full body as loud as you could possibly sing.”