Angelina Jolie first discussed adopting a Cambodian orphan in her 20s.
The 42-year-old actress-and-director teamed up with her best friend of 17 years, Loung Ung, to make the Netflix movie ‘First They Killed My Father’, which is based on Loung’s memoir of her family’s struggle to survive under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, a period which saw nearly two million people killed.
The ‘Maleficent’ star adopted her first child Maddox, now 16, when he was just seven-months-old from an orphanage in Battambang, Cambodia, and Loung has now revealed that when the pair first met on expedition in the small village in 2000, Angelina asked for her advice on adopting an orphan.
Loung told The Times newspaper: "We were in a torrential rainstorm in our hammocks, swinging away in the trees in the middle of the night with the rain pouring on us, and having long discussions about family and love and all kinds of things. I was about 29 and she was 25 or 26, and I already had women friends who spoke about wanting a child.
"I’d ask them, ‘How do you feel about this commitment?, because it’s for life?’ I was eight when my parents died, so for me it was important than a woman not just be a mother, but that she mothers – nurtures. You have to be there through the difficulties and the joys."
However, after seeing how caring Angelina was, she was fully "supportive" of her plans.
She added: "And having spent these days with her, and seeing Angie for who she is, I was completely supportive because I saw she did want to nurture a child … She said she wanted me to be an auntie, not just for the child, who turned out to be Maddox, but for other kids that she might have, and that was very honouring."
Angelina went to adopt son Pax, 13, and daughter Zahara, 12, and conceive three children, daughter Shiloh, 11, and nine-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne, with her estranged husband Brad Pitt – who she filed for divorce from a year ago.
Angelina Jolie wanted to adopt in her 20s
